#abridgements

It unsurprisingly cuts all the digressions, as well as the initial sixty pages on the Bishop of Digne (it begins with Valjean showing up in Digne), “The Year 1817”, and, uh,  everything between Fantine getting work at the factory (“the problem was solved; she was earning her living”) and Javert asking Madeleine to fire him. I’m pretty sure this Fantine never becomes a prostitute or gets arrested. On one page Fantine is happy and getting work and on literally the next page Madeleine “could not but think of poor Fantine”. But with no explanation offered for why. We only even find out that Fantine is sick after Valjean returns from Champmathieu’s trial.

We get “The Ship Orion”, but all of Valjean finding Cosette is cut down to half a page from “Number 9430 Comes Up Again, and Cosette Draws It”.

“Cemetaries Take What Is Given To Them” becomes a nonsense title, as it consists of Fauchelevent and Valjean wondering briefly how Valjean can stay at the convent, and then Fauchelevent just taking Valjean and Cosette to the prioress the next day, with no troubles about explaining how they got in there or any graveyard shenanigans.

Everything about the revolutionaries prior to the barricades is cut. Marius leaves home, wondering what he will do; next page, Marius is figuring out poverty, and Courfeyrac has appeared with no explanation to give him an old coat in exchange for some previous favours. Courfeyrac continues to be there where you would expect him to be as Marius falls in love, except whenever it would require any of the rest of the Amis to show up, in which case those parts are cut completely. Just for example, we cut directly from “he was desperately in love” to “it was serious, indeed”, without the scene where Jean Prouvaire says that it’s serious, which that line of the narrator’s is responding to.

They also cut Marius going to ask Gillenormand for permission to marry, but still leave in the lines “Marius left M. Gillenormand’s desolate. He had entered with a very small hope; he came out with an immense despair”. There is no mention made of what his hopes were or how they have been crushed.

The first scene at (or relating to) the barricades is “The Man Recruited in the Rue des Billettes”, which is not only the first time we see Enjolras, but may well be Gavroche’s first scene as well. “The Flag: the First Act” happens, but not “The Flag: the Second Act” (Mabeuf is entirely absent from this abridgement after he tells Marius his father loved him). Jean Prouvaire does not die (or, indeed, exist). Where “The End of the Verses of Jean Prouvaire” ought to go is an extremely brief chapter titled “You Are The Chief”, which consists entirely of Courfeyrac hugging Marius, Enjolras telling Marius he’s the chief, and everything appearing to Marius “a monstrous nightmare” (Combeferre and Bossuet's lines are naturally cut, because it wouldn't do to acknowledge the existence of too many characters). (Does the Wilbour translation actually describe Eponine’s pants as “velvet pantaloons”?)

Enjolras doesn’t die in this abridgment either. We get: “When there were none of the chiefs alive save Enjolras and Marius, who were at the extremities of the barricade, the center, which Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly, and Combeferre had so long sustained, gave way.” And then the last we see of Enjolras is: “The whirlwind of the attack at that instant concentrated so fiercely upon Enjolras and the door of the wine-shop, that nobody saw Jean Valjean cross the unpaved field of the barricade, holding the senseless Marius in his arms, and disappear behind the corner of the house of Corinth.” (It will surprise no one that Grantaire also does not exist in this abridgement.)

(We do however get several chapters of the journey through the sewers.)

“Javert off the Track” is compressed into two pages, but at least it happens. The formatting gets really weird, like they were leaving spaces between paragraphs to indicate missing material, despite doing that nowhere else in the book.