Victor Hugo's Les Miserables,
First Edition
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"While through the working of laws and customs there continues to exist a condition of social condemnation which artificially creates a human hell within civilization, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; while the three great problems of this century, the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child through darkness, continue unresolved; while in some regions social asphyxia remains possible; in other words, and in still wider terms, while ignorance and poverty persist on the earth, books such as this cannot fail to be of value." --Victor Hugo, Introduction to Les Miserables
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"It
is glorious for Rational Man that these pages should have been written.
One would have to look a great deal and a long time, a very long time,
to find elsewhere pages equal to those which expose in so tragic a
manner all the appalling casuistry inscribed from the beginning in the
heart of Universal Man." --Charles Baudelaire |
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HUGO, Victor. Les Miserables. Bruxelles: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Ce., 1862. Octavo, later dark blue three-quarter morocco gilt, raised bands, marbled endpapers, top edges gilt. Ten volumes. Text in French. First edition of Hugo's masterpiece,
handsomely bound by Burrows Brothers. Fine condition. |