Les Miserables: the sequel

For my eleventh or twelfth birthday, my parents gave me a cassette tape recording of the musical Les Miserables.  This had three major consequences.

One, the fires of my love affair with musical theatre were stoked, sending me on a direct path to the conservatory at Syracuse University, where (predictably) I was miserable, and, thanks to the intervention of my best friend, packed up and left for Barnard. Thank goodness.

Two, I began to model my understanding of heterosexual relationships on the doomed love of Eponine for Marius, and got down to business cultivating doomed loves for boys at school.  Decidedly, Les Mis knocked the good sense out of me. What can I say? Eponine had better songs.  I sincerely hope I'm over this now-- but it wasn't easy.

Three, I checked out Hugo's novel in English from the local library, and when I finished reading it, set about writing a sequel in which Gavroche didn't really die, nor did Eponine, and instead these thwarted Thenardier children started an orphanage there in the slums of St Michel, where they lived not off the crumbs of high society but on the inheritance left them by Jean Valjean. Marius ditched Cosette for Eponine and they all lived happily ever after.

Lucky for all of us, that manuscript languished on a floppy disk somewhere that has probably, by this point, been thrown away.  But I am happy to find that a grown man has been similarly inspired: recently, the Hugo family tried to sue another author, François Ceresa, who "dared" to write his own sequel to Les Mis called Cosette, ou, le temps des illusions.  They lost.  Ceresa's lawyer won by appealing to Hugo himself, who, in a speech given on June 21st, 1878, said: "The blood heir is the heir by blood.  The writer, as writer, has only one heir: that of the spirit.  The human spirit is in the public domain.  That is the absolute truth."

The best part is that in his sequel, Ceresa also decided to resuscitate one of the main (doomed) characters: Javert. Come to think of it, maybe I should go looking for that floppy disk after all...

Comments

[amy, la petite americaine]

I love everything about this post.

[Sean]

Thank you for that quote!

[malmo58]

As a brand new Marius/Eponine shipper, certainly the only one to have discovered Les Mis through the wonderful Oddsocks theatre company's panto version, I'm delighted with your novel's concept. How would you have saved the young Thenardiers' lives? Best wishes *x*