. . . Claudel, being a decent person, was happy to applaud Hugo’s protests against poverty, tyranny, superstition, and illness. “But positively what do you propose to us?” On this point Claudel was puzzled. “Victor Hugo appears to have strongly worked up only a single detail of the garden to come, which is the better use of sewer drains for agriculture.” And Claudel waxed indignant. He saw in Hugo’s abased imagination a pitiable example of what happens when religion degenerates into a wispy spirituality—the foggy religion of nature so beloved by the Romantic writers: a wine without alcohol. The sewer passages offered the proof, in Claudel’s estimation, that writers stand in need of something stronger, more vigorous—stand in need, to wit, of the Catholic Church. Wine with alcohol!

My own response many years ago was pretty much the same, except for the part about Catholicism. My favorite characters in Hugo’s book were young Marius and his comrades, the “Friends of ABC,” who hang out at the tavern and run into the streets to build their revolutionary barricades and cry “Long live death!”—the Jacobin slogan—which, a hundred years later, became a fascist slogan and was maybe never the best of slogans. Still, I loved the Friends of ABC. I wanted Hugo to bang the table on their behalf. But, no, after the tavern scenes and the barricades come the sewer scenes, and downward we go, and my left-wing heart, as if in tandem with Claudel’s non-left-wing Catholic heart, sagged.

Then again, on second reading, I discover that, through a miracle of aging, my sympathies have switched. The sewer passages, examined anew, seem to me a feat of genius. Hugo in those portions of Les Misérables—they constitute Books XII and XIII—has chosen to be the enemy of dreamland fantasizing. He is the anti–Jules Verne, even if he is gazing underground. He wants his readers to recognize that social progress, in contrast to fist-waving, has no alternative but to veer downward into practical matters, unto sewage disposal, than which nothing is lower. And he chooses to make this point aggressively, as if poking you in the chest. You bookish young barflies who pine for Jacobin uprisings, you Occupiers with your sleeping bags: you suppose, do you, that a passion for social justice requires shocking gestures? Outrages against public civility? Kindly incline your nose toward the page, says Victor Hugo. He not only agrees, he has outdone you.

And still he isn’t finished. The sewer passages descend yet again, into substrata lower than politics itself. . . .