Les Mis: Waterloo, Chapters I-X

“Waterloo is no battle. It is a change of front in the universe.”

Hello readers,

In the last ten days, we’ve started on our first real detour of the book. Hugo pauses the story entirely and gives us a long meditation on the Battle of Waterloo. It’s a surprising shift, but also a revealing one.

He tells us up front what he’s doing:

“we have no intention of writing the history of Waterloo in these pages”

And yet, of course,…