Bab Bab 1 · THE GRASS COVERS AND THE RAIN EFFACES

LETTER TO M. DAELLI

FOOTNOTES:

List of Illustrations

Bookshelf

Bookcover

Frontpapers

Frontispiece Volume One

Titlepage Volume One

Titlepage Verso

The Comforter

The Fall

Awakened

Cossette Sweeping

Candlesticks Into the Fire

Father Champmathieu on Trial

Frontispiece Volume Two

Titlepage Volume Two

The Ship Orion, an Accident

The Gorbeau Hovel

The Black Hunt

Javert on the Hunt

The Resurrection

Royalist Bank-note

Frontispiece Volume Three

Titlepage Volume Three

Little Gavroche

Friends of the A B C

Excellence of Misfortune

Rose in Misery

Red Hot Chisel

Snatched up a Paving Stone

Frontispiece Volume Four

Titlepage Volume Four

A Street Orator

Code Table

Succor from Below

Cosette With Letter

Slang

The Grandeurs of Despair

Frontispiece Volume Five

Titlepage Volume Five

Last Drop from the Cup

The Twilight Decline

Darkness

LES MISÉRABLES

PREFACE

So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of

damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the

civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine

destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the

degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through

hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved;

so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in

other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance

and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables

cannot fail to be of use.

HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862.

VOLUME I

FANTINE

BOOK FIRST—A JUST MAN