Hugo's Les Misérables, read aloud one chapter at a time.
This is Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, read aloud as a LibriVox recording of Isabelle F. Hapgood's translation, one numbered chapter per episode. Its Book One chapters stay close to the Bishop of Digne: his itemized charities, his unguarded house, his sayings on sin and his argument with a former member of the Convention.
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Victor Hugo's Les Misérables comes here as a LibriVox recording of Isabelle F. Hapgood's translation, with one numbered chapter in each episode. Some chapters open with the LibriVox credit line, which names the translator and the reader and notes that the recording is in the public domain. After that, the episode is Hugo's text. Its Book One chapters, grouped under the heading 'A Just Man', stay with one man: the bishop who comes to be called Monseigneur Bienvenu, or Welcome. He likes the name, remarking that 'Bienvenu makes up for the Monseigneur.' Hugo draws him through inventory. An itemized budget in livres sends money to prisoners, to fathers jailed for debt, to the free instruction of poor girls and to the poor at large, with a smaller line kept for his own expenses. A chapter on his house goes room by room, from dining room to bedroom to oratory. It notes two portraits he left on the wall, since the men in them were priests and probably donors. That house goes unguarded. Asked whether he fears some misfortune, he answers 'Nisi Dominus' and moves on to another subject. There is lightness too: a bishop too short to reach his own library shelf, joking that his greatness does not stretch that far. His moral outlook comes in short, quotable lines. 'To be a saint is the exception. To be an upright man is the rule.' He lays the faults of the poor and the ignorant at the door of the strong, the rich and the wise, and holds society responsible for the night it produces. The sharpest exchange comes in 'The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light', where a former member of the Convention defends the French Revolution as incomplete but sublime. The bishop answers that he distrusts a demolition complicated with wrath, and the revolutionary replies that right has its wrath. In 'A Restriction' the narrator warns against taking him for a philosophical bishop or a patriotic curé, while admitting that he was harsh toward a brother, a general who pursued the emperor. 'What He Believed' declines to test his orthodoxy at all and closes on a garden to walk in and the stars overhead. Throughout, the narrator speaks as 'we', weighing and qualifying where he could simply admire. Credited readers change between chapters, among them Kalinda, Peter Eastman and Melissa, so the voice and delivery vary while the translation stays the same. Titles carry their book and chapter number, which makes it easy to follow the novel in order.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants Les Misérables as a plain reading of the Hapgood translation, and who enjoys Hugo's patience with a single character, down to his budget, his furniture and his arguments.
What sets it apart: Instead of an adaptation or a summary, it presents Hugo's own text chapter by chapter in Isabelle F. Hapgood's translation. The credited readers change from chapter to chapter, so the voice shifts while the translation stays the same.
Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is a novel which tells the story of ex-convict Jean Valjean, his struggles and eventual redemption. It's hailed by many critics as not just Victor Hugo's finest work but also one of the best French novels of all time. Like most epic novels written in the 19th century, the storyline of Les Misérables spans through several decades beginning in the early 1800s and culminating in the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris. The events related to the lives of the central characters in the novel are also tied to the great historical events of the time from the French Revolution to the June Rebellion. In the novel, Jean Valjean a man from a poor family was convicted of stealing a…
A bishop meets a dying revolutionary, and your easy moral verdict needs a second draft.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A bishop's library joke opens into a searching reflection on sin, responsibility, and consolation.
Chapter IV uses a library chair as a small, revealing test of the bishop's character. Unable to reach a book, he asks Madame Magliori for help and turns the moment into a joke about greatness not extending to the shelf.
A dying revolutionary and a bishop turn political history into a grave test of justice, pity, and conscience.
Episode 10 turns a pastoral visit near Dina into a searching encounter between priestly pity and revolutionary justice. The Bishop comes to the bedside of G., a former member of the Convention, and meets a dying man still prepared to defend the French Revolution as unfinished…
The bishop says, "Place your hopes in the man from whom you do not inherit."
Book 1, Chapter 10 of Les Misérables follows Bishop Bienvenu Muriel's visit to the isolated former Convention member G.
This episode begins the audiobook of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, describing the arrival of a wretched traveler in the town of Digne.
Victor Hugo traces Jean Valjean’s nineteen years in the galleys from an acknowledged theft of bread to a life shaped by disproportionate punishment.
A reading of Chapter XIII of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, following Jean Valjean's emotional turmoil after leaving the town.
Fantine reaches the Thénardier inn at Montfermeil after leaving Paris with her daughter Cosette and about eighty francs.
This episode narrates Fantine's desperate act of selling her hair to provide for her daughter Cosette.