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patriotic for humanity.
This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law
of radiance of the French Revolution; books must cease to
be exclusively French, Italian, German, Spanish, or English,
and become European, I say more, human, if they are to
correspond to the enlargement of civilization.
Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements
of composition which modify everything, even the condi-
tions, formerly narrow, of taste and language, which must
grow broader like all the rest.
In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my
great delight, with having transgressed the bounds of what
they call ‘French taste”; I should be glad if this eulogium
were merited.
In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same
universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the
puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: ‘Help me!’
This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for
you and for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is
because of one phrase in your letter. 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. Ever since history has
been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery
has been the garment of the human race; the moment has
at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing,
upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister frag-

2452 Les Miserables