Emily’s Reviews > Les Miserables > Status Update

"Those who had conquered Europe have fallen prone on the earth, with nothing left to say nor to do, feeling the present shadow of a terrible presence...Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century...In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by."

"Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer No. Why? Because of Wellington? ... No. Because of God. Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in which there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events had declared itself long before.
It was time that this vast man should fall."

"What a solemn thing is this infinity which every man bears within him, and which he measures with despair against the caprices of his brain and the actions of his life"

how am i already so emotional about this book doesn't bode well for the next 90%

It is, thanks to the suburban man of Paris, that the Revolution, mixed with arms, conquers Europe. He sings; it is his delight. Proportion his song to his nature, and you will see! As long as he has for refrain nothing but la Carmagnole, he only overthrows Louis XVI.; make him sing the Marseillaise, and he will free the world.

Jean Valjean wept for a long time...daylight penetrated more and more clearly into his soul; an extraordinary light; a light at once ravishing and terrible. He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his soul, and it seemed frightful to him. In the meantime a gentle light rested over this life and this soul. It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light of Paradise.

Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip! Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death!
The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.
The soul, going downstream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall resuscitate it?