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map resources for les misérables

The Gorbeau tenement forms the central location of the first half of the novel. This rundown, cathedral-like space on the southern boundary of the old city is is where Valjean first finds refuge after his escape from the ship Orion, and it is where he brings the infant Cosette. Nine years later, Marius lodges here in his years scrimping a living as a translator; and it is where he spies on the villainous Thénardier family as they plot to extort money from Valjean.

The tenement is near the Porte d’Italie, one of the old city gates of Paris, just south of the old Gobelins tapestry factory.

p.389 -

Forty years ago the solitary wayfarer who ventured. into the Godforsaken wastes of La Salpêtrière and followed the boulevard to the Italie toll-gate came to places where Paris might be said to peter out. It was not solitary, there were passers-by. It was not countryside, there were houses and streets. It was not a town, the streets were rutted like the open roads and grass grew over them. It was not a village, the houses were too tall. What was it, then? It was an inhabited place where there was nobody, it was a deserted place where there was somebody. This was one of the city's boulevards, one of the streets of Paris, a greater wilderness at night than any forest, bleaker by day than any cemetery.

It was the old Marché-aux-Chevaux neighbourhood.

If he were bold enough to step outside the four decrepit walls of this Marché-aux-Chevaux, if he actually agreed to venture beyond Rue du Petit-Banquier, having left behind on his right a cottage garden protected by high walls, then a wasteground where tanning mills rose like gigantic beavers' lodges, then an enclosure full of timber with piles of logs, sawdust and shavings, with a big dog barking on top of them; then a long, low wall in total ruin, overgrown with moss that became dense with flowers in spring, and in it a small black door in mourning; then, where most desolate, a hideous and decrepit building on which could be read in large letters 'POST NO BILLS', this audacious wayfarer would come to the corner of Rue des Vignes-St-Marcel, latitudes that are little known. There, close to an industrial building and between two garden walls, you would have seen in those days a run-down tenement that at first glance seemed as small as a thatched cottage and was actually as large as a cathedral.

p.392 -

Now according to local tradition this Maitre Gorbeau had once owned the building numbered 50-52 Boulevard de l’Hôpital. […] Which was how this giant tenement came to by the name of ‘Gorbeau’s house’.

In front of number 50-52, among more recent plantings on the boulevard, stood a giant elm, more than half dead. Almost directly opposite was the beginning of Rue de la Barriere des Gobelins, a street at that time without any houses on it, unpaved, lined with trees of stunted growth, and grassy or muddy according to the season. It actually led right up to Paris's perimeter wall. Blasts of a sulphuric-acid smell emanated from the roofs of a neighbouring factory. The toll-gate was very close by. In 1823 the perimeter wall was still in existence.

Valjean believes he is safe in the Gorbeau tenement. But one day outside the church at St-Médard he gives a coin to a beggar and thinks he sees a face he recognizes: Javert (p.401).

St-Médard is due north from the Gobelins, up the Rue Mouffetard.

Also note on this map - west of the Gobelins factory is a reference to the ‘Champ de l’Alouette’ where Marius likes to wander (p776). And north east of the Gorbeau Tenement, up the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, lie ‘the flats of the Saltpêtrière’, where the villainous quartet known as the Patron-Minette assemble at nightfall to plan their nocturnal activities (p.655).

Valjean takes the infant Cosette on a nocturnal adventure, evading Javert by zig-zagging through the Mouffetard district, heading north and east to the river. They cross the Pont d’Austerlitz - which on the 1823 map of Paris is called the Pont du Jardin du Roi - to a district Hugo calls the Petit Picpus, where they find refuge in the convent.

Hugo declares that “The Petit Picpus of which no present map retains a trace is shown clearly enough on the map of 1727, published in Paris by Denis Thierry”. In reality no such map exists, and the mapmaker Thierry died in 1712. The real Picpus distict is considerably further east, south of the Place du Trône.

For Hugo’s account of the nocturnal journey, listing a host of specific locations, see pp.405-411, with the whole sequence played out again from Javert’s perspective, pp.424-431.

Marius’ grandfather (‘The Consummate Bourgeois’) is called Monsieur Gillenormand. He is an elderly gentleman living in the Marais - 6, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire (p.539). He has moved to the Marais, he declares, because he has ‘retired from society’ (p.546).

The Rue du Filles-du-Calvaire runs south west from the old city wall, at the junction of the Boulevard du Temple and the Boulevard Saint Antoine. The street is named after the convent of the Daughters of Calvary, which occupied a triangular plot of land to the south of the street - clearly visible on the 1778 Lattré map of Paris.

The young Marius attends church at St-Sulpice, in the Faubourg St-Gervais. His father Colonel Pontmercy spies on him here from behind a pillar. Père Mabeuf works here as a churchwarden, and later he tells the teenage Marius of his father’s devotion.

St-Sulpice makes a fleeting appearance earlier in the novel. On page 81 we have a reference to Valjean’s sister, last heard of working for a printer at 3, Rue de Sabot. She lives in a backstreet, Rue du Gindre, just west of St-Sulpice. Victor Hugo knew this area well; aged 19, he rented a garret at 30, Rue du Dragon.

Marius takes ‘long walks by himself’ in the Luxembourg Gardens. Here, on ‘an unfrequented path’, he notices an elderly man with a young woman - Valjean and his ward Cosette. Marius spies Cosette, and he becomes increasingly infatuated.

On p.640, Marius notices them leaving the gardens by the gate on the Rue de l’Ouest.

At this point in the story, Valjean is living under a variety of pseudonyms, and he keeps three properties, moving between them to avoid evasion. One of these properties is just west of the gardens -

She lived in the Rue de l’Ouest, in the quietest part of the street, in a new unpretentious-looking three storey house. (p.646)

We return to the Luxembourg Gardens later in the novel, after the death of Gavroche. This is where the two starving gamins watch the bourgeois gentleman and his young grandson feeding the swans.

Marius befriends a group of students and radicals who meet at the Café Musain, in the Latin Quarter. The Café has a side entrance ‘leading on to the little Rue des Grès’ (p.584).

This is the same district in which Fantine and her friends meet their seducers in Book One of the novel (p112) -

A conquest for him, for her the love of her life. The streets of the Latin quarter, thronged with students and grisettes, saw the beginning of this liaison[;] in that maze of streets on the Panthéon hill, the scene of the making and unmaking of so many intrigues…

Aware of Marius’ attentions, Valjean moves his household to the second of his two properties - a house on the Rue Plumet in the Faubourg St-Germain. It used to be called the Rue Blomet, Hugo says (see the detail from the Lattré map of 1778). There is an enclosed walkway at the rear of the house allowing for a secret access five hundred yards away onto the ‘lonely end’ of the Rue de Babylone (p.789).

Marius is led to the house by Éponine, and this is where he courts Cosette (pp.912-924).

Gavroche leads two gamins up the Rue St-Antoine (pp.848-856).

We find him ‘as though entranced in front of a wig makers shop near Orme-St-Gervais’; this Church was named after an elm tree (an ‘orme’) which is actually visible on the 1553 map of Paris. From there, Gavroche heads east, ‘up Rue St-Antoine in the direction of the Bastille’. They pass ‘the corner of that dismal Rue des Ballets, at the end of which you can see the low, hostile gate of La Force prison’. And Gavroche brings them at last to the Elephant - the plaster model of an Elephant, forty foot high, which once stood in the southwest corner of the Place de La Bastille (p.856).

Hugo provides a vibrant description of the ‘febrile’ atmosphere in the Faubourg St-Antoine in the weeks leading up to the insurrection of 1832; he mentions the ‘wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne’ as a place of radical agitation (p.758).

Later in the novel he describes the ‘monstrous’ barricade erected in the Faubourg St-Antoine in June 1848 - ‘It was three storeys high and seven hundred feet wide’ (p.1052).

Hugo describes in detail the funeral procession of General Lamarque, used by the radicals as a rallying point in their opposition to the regime of Louis-Philippe.

The procession passes the Bastille, heading south, reaching ‘the esplanade at the Pont d’Austerlitz (p.953). Here it halts, and Lafayette speaks. Suddenly, a man on horseback dressed in black appears with a red flag, the sight of which raises a storm.

There are troop movements at this point - ‘Moving off the left bank, the municipal cavalry proceeded to bar the bridge, and emerging from the Célestins barracks on the right bank the dragoons deployed along Quai Morland’. Two hundred paces from the bridge, the dragoons and the crowd meet. Three shots are fired - one kills the leader of the squadron, the second killed a deaf old woman. Another squadron of dragoons emerges with drawn swords from Rue Bassompierre and down the Boulevard Bourdon, ‘sweeping all before them’ (p.954). ‘The inevitable follows, the storm breaks, stones fall down, riffles are fired…’.

Hugo gives a precise description of the grid of streets in Les Halles where the epic climax of the novel unfolds. Enjolras and his colleagues barricade the streets facing the Corinth tavern, an old inn facing the Rue de la Chanvrerie.

The geography of these streets is complex. Hugo describes the Rue Mondétour cutting through two parallel streets, the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, with the Rue de la Grande-Truanderie above and the Rue des Prêcheurs below, creating seven blocks of buildings (p.975).

Two barricades are built, one blocking the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and one blocking the northern access in the Rue Mondétour. This leaves just a narrow escape route from the Corinth Inn, south onto the Rue Mondétour, down to the Rue des Prêcheurs.

Marius walks from the Rue Plumet to the barricade on the Rue de la Chanverie (p.1005). Believing that Cosette has left for England, he is ‘mad with grief’, and wants to die. He passes a sequence of famous locations that barely appear otherwise in the novel - the Champs-Élysées, the Rue de Rivoli, the Palais Royal, the Rue St-Honoré. The streets of Paris are erupting in revolt all around him, but Marius is oblivious.

Valjean carries the unconscious Marius through the sewers, from the Corinth barricade to an outflow on the banks of the Seine. On p.1162, Hugo provides a description of the location of this outflow -

To the right downstream could be seen the Pont d'Iena, to the left, upstream, the Pont des Invalides. It would have been a good place to wait till night to slip away. This was one of the loneliest spots in Paris: the riverbank opposite Gros-Caillou.

Mapping this location is tricky, not least because the names of the bridges have changed. On the 1823 map of Paris, what is now the Pont d’Iena is marked as the Pont des Invalides, and the present Pont des Invalides has not yet been built.

Wracked with remorse at the collapse of his absolute principles, Javert walks by the river, reaching a point between the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change, where ‘the Seine forms a kind of square lake, with rapids running through it’.

After a moment’s contemplation, he heads diagonally across the Place du Châtelet to a police station, where he asks for pen and paper, and he sits writing a memo about some things he has learnt in his time as a police officer. He then returns to his place on the parapet. ‘What lay below was not water, it was an abyss….’ (p.1189).

Throughout this latter part of the novel, Valjean and Cosette are living in the third of Valjean’s properties, an apartment in the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, in the Marais.

Cosette writes Marius a letter with the address ‘7 Rue de l’Homme-Armé’ - but Éponine fails to deliver it until too late. Marius writes to Cosette believing he will die at the barricade, and he sends Gavroche to the Rue de l’Homme-Armé to deliver the letter. Gavroche hands the letter to Valjean, who resolves to rescue Marius, and he makes his way from the Rue de l’Homme-Armé to the barricade in Les Halles.

(Ironically, the apartment in the Rue de l’Homme-Armé is only a short walk from Marius’ lodgings at this latter point in the novel. On p.923, he tells Cosette his address is ‘Rue de la Verrerie, number sixteen’. He is lodging with his friend Courfeyrac, who has moved here from the Latin Quarter ‘for political reasons’.)

In the final pages of the novel, Cosette and Marius are living in the house in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, and the elderly Valjean makes a daily perambulation from the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, north east through the triangle of the Marais to visit his adopted daughter. The path of his increasingly faltering and erratic perambulations is plotted on pp.1273-4.