Elham’s Reviews > Les Misérables > Status Update

When we speak of convents, those seats of error, but also of innocence; of befuddlement, but also of good intentions; of ignorance, but also of devotion; of torture, but also of martyrdom, you almost always have to say “yes and no.” A convent is a contradiction. As a goal, salvation; as a means, sacrifice. The convent is supreme selfishness resulting in supreme self-abnegation.

At that moment, she suddenly felt that the bucket no longer weighed a thing. A hand, which seemed to her enormous, had just seized the handle and lifted it vigorously. She raised her head. A big black shape, straight and tall, was walking beside her in the darkness. It was a man, who had come up behind her without her hearing him coming.

...three thousand men, in this godforsaken hole of Hougoumont alone, run through with swords, torn to pieces, butchered, their throats cut, shot, burned to death; and all that just so some peasant today can say to a traveller: “Monsieur, give me three francs and, if you like, I’ll tell you all about Waterloo!”

They say slavery has vanished from European civilization. That is wrong. It still exists, but it now preys only on women, and it goes by the name of prostitution. It preys on women, meaning on grace, on weakness, on beauty, on the maternal. It is not the least of man’s shameful secrets.

He went easy on women and the poor, feeling that the weight of human society fell on them. He would say, “The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated.”

Victor Hugo Painting: Le phare d’Eddystone (1866) [from the introduction)