There was only one way to find out. The book, unlike the musical, begins with the bishop Myriel in a portrait of moral goodness so powerful it had me in tears within pages. In the musical, Bishop Myriel is the man who offers refuge to the paroled Jean Valjean when no one else will shelter him, then covers up his crime when Valjean steals the bishop’s silver. It is the bishop who sets Valjean on the path to redemption when he tells him that he must consecrate his life to God. In the musical, Myriel has a single scene. In the book, he has an entire life. I read on.
Nothing could diminish the novel’s drive. Though I knew nearly everything that would happen, I didn’t know how it would play out. Each fateful decision filled me with trepidation and urgency. “No, Fantine!” I wanted to cry out as I read. “Stay away from that seductive young man!” As Alfred Hitchcock once said of suspense: You can have two men sitting at a table when a bomb suddenly goes off, momentarily frightening the audience. Or, far more effective, you can have two men sitting at the table and show the audience there’s a bomb ticking under the table. The men continue to talk about baseball. The audience, complicit, is aware of what’s going to happen. “Don’t talk about baseball!” you want to shout. “There’s a bomb under the table!”
Knowing everything ahead in Les Misérables only prolonged the anticipation and heightened the emotion. The attenuated suspense was at times almost unbearable, like helplessly watching trains collide in slow motion.
For me, in that moment in time, this book had everything. There was refuge to be found in Myriel’s goodness, solace in Jean Valjean’s earned redemption, comfort in Cosette’s happy ending. I was transported to another world in a way that enriched the quality of my own. At the end of each day (it was too heavy to lug on the train), I could remove myself from the details of quotidian existence—the health care forms, the Valentine’s Day cupcakes, the work meeting—for altogether different challenges: How to ensure a child’s well-being when you cannot provide for her. How to forgive a father you never knew and how to forgive a father you knew well. How to pursue love without hurting other loved ones in the process. There was even a chapter featuring my thoroughly recognizable rue Rambuteau.
In place of childcare arrangements and deadline decisions, I could occupy my mind with larger questions: Can man change the course of his own life and the lives of others? How can religion both repress and uplift? How do revolutions succeed?
There were startling parallels between the post-Revolution tumult of France of nearly two hundred years earlier and the political and religious divides seizing Paris and the world today. In an extended aside about the dangers of monasteries, Hugo decried the effects of religious fanaticism. Hugo was “for religion and against religions,” referring to monastic life as “the scourge of Europe.” He denounced “the violence so often done to the conscience, coerced vocations, feudalism relying on the cloister … the sealed lips, the immured minds, so many ill-fated intellects confined in a dungeon of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, souls buried alive.” Centuries collapsed in his words.
The proper response, Hugo wrote, was to resist the tide of superstition and fight back against fanaticism and militarism. He was writing about Paris then, and he was also writing about Paris now, even elucidating aspects of the political and socioeconomic divides that trouble America today. Everything in this book resonated for me.
Victor Hugo, the great romantic historian of a novelist, French counterpart to Charles Dickens, understood the effects of inevitable change on a place you know and love, even as your memory clings to the familiar contours of its past. Writing about himself in the third person, he explains:
Since he left it, Paris has been transformed. A new city has grown up that is, as it were, unknown to him. Needless to say, he loves Paris. Paris is his spiritual home.… All those places you do not see any more, that you may never see again and that you have kept a picture of in your mind, take on a melancholy charm; they come back to you with the mournfulness of an apparition, make the holy land visible to you, and are, so to speak, the very embodiment of France. And you love them and you conjure them up as they are, as they were, and you persist in this.
You can call up maps of Victor Hugo’s Paris online and compare them to those of the city today; the outlines are all still visible, many of the streets are the same. You can trace Jean Valjean’s path across the city in 1832 and follow the same route today with few detours. His Paris is still recognizable. I promised myself I wouldn’t let another eight years go by without returning to my Mathieus and to my Paris. If reading Les Misérables couldn’t make me feel like the world was a safer place, it could at least ground the current moment in a continuum.
The Internet also led me directly to Jean Valjean, or rather to the American actor playing him in the London production. When my family and I traveled to London the following year, that actor invited Beatrice and me backstage after a performance. He had listened to me discuss Les Misérables on my Times books podcast and reached out via Twitter. The three of us toured the dressing rooms and costume area and walked the stage of the Queen’s Theatre, Beatrice wearing Javert’s immense black police hat. She was ecstatic and overwhelmed seeing a character from a story come alive and walking in his footsteps. I knew exactly how she felt.
CHAPTER 22
A Spy Among Friends
Other Writers
Encounters with various characters and authors now occur with some regularity, but they are no less affecting. When someone magically crosses the divide between page and life it still summons a sense of awe, like the Tooth Fairy suddenly made real.
And it happens when I least expect it. On one of our regular family trips to Los Angeles, where my husband grew up, I brought Ben Macintyre’s true-life espionage tale, A Spy Among Friends, so I could give it to my in-laws when I was done. I’d inherited an obsession with spies from my father—John le Carré and Alan Furst and various historical accounts weave their way in and out of Bob’s pages, continuing to connect the two of us through stories. Now that my father was gone, I felt lucky to share this interest with my in-laws, also Macintyre fans.
On a recent flight to LA, I came across a curious passage. Macintyre was describing the social scene in Beirut where Kim Philby, one of the infamous Cambridge Five ring of spies, was posted for a time. Philby was closest there with two other spy families, the British Elliotts and the American Copelands, neither of whom suspected he was a double agent working for Moscow.