Smaller moments within bigger historic periods, like the French Revolution and Empire, get swallowed up by time. So much detail and importance assigned to a little remembered, little known footnote in history.Īll our lives are filled with moments significant and important to us, but of little consequence to future historians. The student uprising, with their youthful idealism, the creation of the barricades, the endless pontificating, the senseless waste of life that just kept going on, and on, and on, chapter after chapter. I powered through the Waterloo diversion and enjoyed Valjean and Cosette’s sojourn in the convent, but the soppy love story between Marius and Cosette and then the barricades nearly did me in! Which is a shame, because some basic editing would have made an easier journey of it, for this new-to-the-story reader in particular. He had to say everything and more than everything he was incapable of leaving anything out. He was wholly unrestrained and unsparing of his reader. He was masterly in the construction of his novel, (Hugo) had little or no regard for the discipline of novel-writing. In his Introduction to my Penguin edition of the book, Norman Denny, explains that although
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