In French nineteenth-century fiction, as one might expect, the division of labor between authors and characters was on the whole stricter. To the author speaking in his own voice was reserved the right of comment and general statement. Among the great luminaries jealous of place and prerogative, each a roi soleil outshining his dramatis personae, pre-eminence in this respect as in others goes to Victor Hugo. That god-like seer, mage, and prophet could not delegate authority to any of his mortals. The self-educated Jean Valjean, the poor babes Marius and Cosette, le petit Gavroche—street urchin playing Mercury—all those misérables who make up the wronged part of humanity must be spoken for by an advocate, standing protectively between them and us. You have something very similar in Manzoni, though with less pomp and circumstance: a kind of tender paternalism toward the humble—Lucia and Renzo but also the wretched parish priest, Don Abbondio.
It is surprising to notice how rarely Hugo allows us to enter the mind of Jean Valjean, even for the sake of glimpsing his state of feeling at a given moment. The emotions there are inferred for us by Victor Hugo and reported in summary form. This applies to the whole cast of characters. For instance, rather early in the book there is an examination of capital punishment and the feelings it produces in the spectator. Bishop Myriel, we are told, has been obliged in his younger days to witness an execution, and it has brought about a great change in his outlook. Another author would have shown us that reaction and those reflections through the old Bishop’s consciousness as it remembers, but Hugo describes the whole experience in his own terms, reconstructing it like an archaeologist’s sketch from fragments he feels must be buried in Myriel’s memory. He summarizes on behalf of the Bishop. In fact he almost never claims to enter the consciousness of any of his creatures. He speculates on what may be there and has recourse to metaphor and analogy to convey it, as in the entire short chapter in which Jean Valjean’s state of mind is evoked by the image of a drowning man abandoned by the ship of civilization. Similarly with the Bishop’s faith, an important force in the book; we see it at work, like the effect of wind on grass, but we do not penetrate into its inner make-up or constitution, any more than one would try to get inside a wind. It is no different with the bad people in the book. He guesses what must be passing through the mind of Javert in the scene with Fantine in the police-station, just as he guesses at the reasons for Jean Valjean’s growing love for the little orphaned Cosette: wasn’t it, perhaps, that the convict’s soul was in need of revictualing in order to persevere in the good?
Some of this, of course, is simply a device—an old novelist’s trick—to make us accept the pretense that the story is real, that it has an existence independent of its author, who is as much in the dark as the rest of us as to what is going on inside these people. But something more than make-believe is involved here for Victor Hugo. There is a delicacy of feeling in the decision to stay outside. It is as though the mind of another—even a fictional other—were a private room, whose threshold ought not to be crossed by anyone but the occupant. A mind, no matter whose, is a hortus conclusus, like the immaculate maiden’s chamber with potted lily and prayer books which only the Angel Gabriel is allowed to invade. Hugo is a chaste novelist, respecting the chastity of his characters. The inside of the dread Javert, as much as that of the saintly Bishop, remained virgo intacta.
The exceptions to the rule are significant. Twice in Les Misérables he lets us see a process of reasoning that is going on in Jean Valjean’s head. On the first occasion he is struggling within himself as to whether he shall give up his new respectable identity—which shelters a new self—to save a man falsely accused of being the escaped convict Jean Valjean. It is a struggle between two kinds of duty: duty to his new, actively virtuous and altruistic self, which he fears he will lose by avowing who he is, and duty to a single other person. The inner argument is long; there are equally convincing, equally high-minded arguments in favor of either course. In the end, as you know, he appears dramatically in the courtroom and declares who he is.
The second time, hundreds of pages later, that we are allowed access to his soul or brain, he is once more locked in a struggle. It is after Cosette’s marriage, and the question facing him in his long-maintained third identity as Monsieur Fauchelevent is whether he shall share the happiness of the young couple, as they wish him to do, “bring his dark destiny into their bright foyer” or quietly go away. As he says, sharing their happiness will require his perpetual silence about the grim facts of his history, his continuing to live a lie, which has been justified by the necessity of being a father to Cosette but is so no longer. Again the inner argument is long, many valid points are to be made on both sides, and again it ends in a decision to avow who he is, this time to Marius, Cosette’s husband. It is clear, I think, why in these two, special cases, Victor Hugo lets us hear what is going on in Jean Valjean’s for intérieur, that is, his conscience, or inner tribunal. What we are overhearing in both cases is a dialogue. There are always two voices in a conscience, both usually claiming to be the voice of duty, and Jean Valjean is reasoning with himself, almost as if he were speaking aloud.