Victor Hugo

“ Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms, blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone. The social question is the same for you as for us here are a few less deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in England, are Catholic in Italy ”

“ In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: "Open to me, I come for you." ”

“ Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the child t is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured s prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in Paris? ”

“ You write:--
"There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: `This book, Les Miserables, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French read it as a history, we read it as a romance.'"--Alas! I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all ver since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race ”

“ It is not near any path, and people are not fond of walking in that direction, because the grass is high and their feet are immediately wet when there is a little sunshine, the lizards come thither. All around there is a quivering of weeds. ”