Reflections on Les Miserables (cont.)

(This time from the English version.)

My reading of Les Miserables as a teenager led me soon after to the works of Dumas (they too forbidden), and from the works of Dumas to those of the Russian novelists, especially those of Dostoyevsky, and from those to Dickens, to Manzoni, and so forth. From Dostoyevsky what stands out the most is The Brothers Karamazov, which I read multiple times; and a lead character of this novel is the young Aliosha, forever stamped in my mind for his defining characteristic—his compassion, or caritas—regarded by the Church (which frowned on Dostoyevsky) as the greatest of virtues. Of Dickens what comes immediately to mind is his Tale of Two Cities, which tells, in part, of Sydney Carton, whose unrequited love for Lucy Manette leads him to sacrifice his life for that of the man she loves. And of Manzoni’s greatest work, The Betrothed, what can one say? One can say this, that the Church authorities would not have been without understandable reasons for consigning it to the list of banned books, something which indeed they had been tempted to do but refrained from doing so once they discovered that the book was already in high demand, so that there was no longer any need to ban it in order to tempt people to read it. And The Betrothed, which does not shy away from depicting some shadowy aspects of the Church—as in the portrayal of the nun Gertrude and of convent life generally,—does offer us in the main examples of virtue that the Church can only applaude: the modesty and chastity of Lucia, for example, or the devotion and loyalty of Renso, and most of all, perhaps, the moral strength of Fra Cristoforo, who struggles against and ultimately overcomes his baser instincts. And even for Don Abbondio, a parish priest without a trace of the virtues of Hugo’s bishop, for which we feel the urge to strangle him—even for him, or for his simple humanity, we do have some sympathy.