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Victor Hugo is best known as a novelist, but he was also a master illustrator. 70 years before the surrealists, he painted these with ink, soot, coffee, and blood
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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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Pretty good.
I love me some Hugo, but the man could go on and on. My favorite was while reading Les Mis (1500 pages of microscopic text) and he spent 60 pages describing the Battle of Waterloo just so one of the main characters could walk onto the battlefield after it was all over and rob the corpses. Then 30 pages describing the history of the sewers of Paris just so a character could escape through them.
What drove me nuts about the sewer part was that he described a bunch of things that changed after the time period of the novel. And then once he's back to the story and people are running through the sewers, he adds bits like "if it had been 30 years later, they could have gone this way, but it hadn't been built yet". Like, why do we need to know how the sewers will be? At least the description of Waterloo was interesting and gave context to the corpse robbing.
Someone on Lemmy told me that Dumas, because his work was published in serials, was paid by the word. I wonder if Hugo was the same.
Yup. And the sewer part was closer to the end of the novel so it really kind of grated on my nerves. But obviously at that point I was committed to finishing. Great novel, all said and done.
Or the 60 pages describing how the some nun never ever lied under any circumstances just so you'd know it was a big deal when she lies to Javert.
Ahhh I don't know, that was one part I didn't mind - the little character backstories in which you can see the depths a character would go to, despite living their whole life to the contrary. It just goes to show the love they had for Valjean. The build up makes it all the more poignant.
Sewer and Waterloo chapters can fuck off though lol