Les Misérables

Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.

Bishop's candlesticks through barricade and sewer braid private conscience to public history across decades, so plot scores 93.

He was called Father Madeleine. He was a man about fifty years of age, who had a preoccupied air, and who was good. That was all that could be said about him.

Valjean, Javert, Fantine, Cosette, Enjolras, and Thénardier form an ensemble where even walk-ons carry moral weight, so cast scores 96.

Good! some one will exclaim; and Tholomyès? Solomon would reply that love forms a part of wisdom. We will confine ourselves to saying that the love of Fantine was a first love, a sole love, a faithful love.

Hugo's digressions halt the narrative for fifty-page essays; the barricade is brief amid vast exposition, so pace scores 70.

He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.

Hugo's omniscient thunder fuses lyric, rhetoric, and social indictment; the final 'He sleeps' closes without melodrama, so prose scores 91.

At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one had noticed him, all eyes being fixed on the five chosen men and the four uniforms.

Paris under restoration and revolution, Montreuil-sur-Mer, the Gorbeau hovel, and the sewers form France as moral geology with layers of poverty and grace, so world scores 94.

In 1815, M. Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.

Book First opens on Bishop Myriel's goodness rather than Valjean's drama—a slow fuse that rewards patience but lacks immediate action, so hook scores 85.

Monseigneur Bienvenu took one of the two silver candlesticks from the table, handed the other to his guest, and said to him,— "Monsieur, I will conduct you to your room."

The social novel at cathedral scale with interpolated history and the ex-convict as Christ-figure—architecturally unmatched in 19th-century fiction, so innov scores 88.

He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.

Quiet death after cosmic struggle; Cosette's loss frames transcendence without melodrama, so ending scores 93.