On Thursday, our class went to the Marais to walk along the same path that Jean Valjean habitually takes in Les Miserables. In his old age his beloved daughter Cosette now lives with her newly wedded husband Marius in her father-in-law’s house. Jean is in exile: forbidden by himself and her husband to see her because of his status as an ex-convict. He takes a solitary walk through his neighborhood every day towards her house and stops each time he gets too close.

Jean Valjean would have passed through here on his walk.

“There he would walk slowly, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, his head straining forward, his eyes fixed undeviatingly on a point, always the same, that semed for him starry and was none other than the corner of Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.” It’s a devastating passage to read.

It’s also a highly specific one. Hugo left very direct instructions for how to follow the route. “From Rue de l’Homme-Armé, on the Rue Ste-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie side, walked past Blancs-Manteaux up to Rue Culture-Ste-Catherine, as at Rue de l’Echarpe turned left into Rue St. Louis.” Without being familiar with Paris it’s a dizzying puzzle to put together. It was a laundry list of words and a vague image of my idea of generic Parisian streets.

But to actually be there made the dull list of words come alive. I’ve never felt so connected to the specific experience of a character. It’s not just that you’re seeing the streets. It’s different from watching a movie and seeing what the character is seeing, or reading an illustrated book, or even being familiar with the area that a character is written in.

You’re immersed in the character’s experience with all your senses. As I walked over the cobblestone by Rue Pavee I would think for a second that Jean Valjean once stepped on the same stones. And then remember that he never existed.

I would notice something interesting, like a stone accent on an old building, and wonder what caught his eye on the street. I smelled cigarette smoke and wondered if he did too. I zipped up my jacket and wondered if it was chilly or if he got some calm sun. We passed by an old stone church that he would have certainly seen. I wondered what he thought of the rough cream stone, or if there were people coming out from mass that he knew, or if he was so absentminded that he looked right through it.

Place de Vosges. And a pretty neat Apple advertisement.

Aside from feeling connected to the novel, the same-ness of everything made me feel connected to the past. Jean Valjean may not have been a real person, but Victor Hugo was. After our walk, we visited Hugo’s former home in the Place de Vosges. It’s one of the quaint uniformly red-bricked townhomes surrounding a trimmed grass courtyard and walking path.

There was a lot to see in the museum from artistic interpretations of Hugo’s stories, to information on Hugo’s life and personality, such as his affinity for extravagant and colorful home decor. Next, we visited the Musée de Carnavalet, a museum about Paris. There was a painting I stopped at for a long time. It wasn’t a particularly interesting painting. I didn’t think it was all that beautiful.

It was just the Place de Vosges square. Place de Vosges almost exactly as I saw it. But, it was painted sometime in the 1800’s. And yet, it was all the same: the fountain in the center of the square, the houses, the green wrought iron gates. There weren’t bistros, or stores, or tourists, or cars, the garden had been fixed up with benches and trees since. But the baseline of the view, little details aside, was mostly unchanged.

That’s exactly what was so fascinating about it to me. That Victor Hugo and I, around 200 years later, saw the same thing. That people in the past, Victor Hugo or otherwise, saw the same view that I did feels really special. The past and the present feel much closer. The people of the past feel less like an idea and more like they’re part of my story.

I’m from San Francisco, which famously crumbled and then then burnt to the ground in an earthquake-fire combo in 1906. I’ve seen old maps of my city, and the layout has changed who knows how many times. Buildings are constantly being torn down and built up. The oldness of the city streets and buildings in Paris is still hard for me to fully comprehend.

This “bookpacking” experience at this level of specificity would simply not have been possible. Now the Marais is filled with modern chain stores, and tourists, and neon lights, of course. But the facades of the buildings and old structures like churches seem unchanged. And most importantly, the layout of the streets is near identical.

Marais side street. Seems straight out of 1830.

Valjean’s path was, for the most part, the same as how someone from that time would have seen it. As I say “someone from that time,” it’s hard not to include Jean Valjean. Walking along his path made him feel so real because the place is so specific, and the place is real. Every corner is accounted for. There’s not an once of fantasy in the passage. So it’s hard to confront that he is one. But in a sense he is real, because his perspective that I was so immersed in on the walk is representative of Hugo’s, and of many others who walked on the same street in the 1830’s and on.

It feels like a gift from Hugo to leave all these clues. Their specificity makes me wonder if he hoped people would try this out. Likely not bookpacking in the way our class is doing but taking that walk. Or maybe it was something like an inside joke, a detail made for him and Parisians who would already have an image of those streets in their minds. The area in the Marais was blocks from Place de Vosges. He’s walked all these streets countless times. Why did he choose these specific streets for this scene? It’s a question we’ll never know the answer to, but it was fun to imagine the answer as I followed Jean’s footsteps.