Les Misérables Tome I: Fantine
1862
The first movement of Victor Hugo's epic begins with grace and ends with tragedy. In a France still healing from revolution, Jean Valjean emerges from nineteen years of hard labor with nothing but rage, until a bishop shows him a mercy that should be impossible. But Hugo's true heart belongs to Fantine: a working woman whose virtue is destroyed not by vice, but by the machinery of poverty and social cruelty. She loses her job, her dignity, her body, one piece at a time, to feed a child she cannot keep. Hugo's furious indictment of a society that manufactures victims then punishes them for existing builds toward an act of sacrifice that will echo through the entire novel. This is a book that argues compassion is irrational, and that this irrationality might be the only thing worth believing in.
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“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.””
— Victor Hugo
“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.””
— Victor Hugo
“What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul””
— Victor Hugo
“To love another person is to see the face of God.””
— Victor Hugo
“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.””
— Victor Hugo
“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.””
— Victor Hugo
“Not being heard is no reason for silence.””
— Victor Hugo
“Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face.””
— Victor Hugo
“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.””
— Victor Hugo
