Les Misérables: From Digne to the Barricades

In October 1815 a stranger on foot walks into the little town Hugo calls D——, and the great story begins. The bishop's palace there adjoins the hospital, and its old master owns two large silver candlesticks inherited from a great-aunt. It is to Jean Valjean that he says: "you no longer belong to evil, but to good." Hugo veiled the town, but it is Digne, and the kind bishop was inspired by Bienvenu de Miollis, who held the see from 1805 to 1838. Digne's former cathedral, Notre-Dame-du-Bourg, now stands as a museum.

Location precision: Hugo never names the town or says where the palace stands; the pin marks Digne's cathedral, seat of its bishops.

Visitor guidance: Digne Cathedral has been a protected monument since 1906; the former cathedral, Notre-Dame-du-Bourg, is a museum in the old town.

Late in 1815 a stranger settles in the town Hugo calls M. sur M. and transforms its old trade, imitation English jet and black glass trinkets. In under three years the inventor "had become rich, which is good, and had made every one about him rich, which is better." He is M. Madeleine, the mayor, and Jean Valjean himself. When the old bishop's death is announced in 1820, Madeleine appears in black and the drawing-rooms murmur: "He has gone into mourning for the Bishop of D——." The real town is Montreuil-sur-Mer, behind brick ramparts built after Charles V's troops destroyed it in 1537.

Location precision: Hugo never names the town; the pin marks the citadel of Montreuil-sur-Mer, the real town behind it.

Visitor guidance: See the brick ramparts that surround the old town and the 16th-century citadel inside them.

Cosette's misery has an address: the Thénardiers' cook-shop at Montfermeil, "At the Sign of Sergeant of Waterloo". In 1823 the place is only a village in the forest, and Cosette is the family's servant, sent to fetch water from a little spring a quarter of an hour away. At Christmas a toy stall opposite the inn shows an immense doll, nearly two feet high, in a pink crepe robe. Then a stranger lays three bank-bills on the table for Thénardier's fifteen hundred francs and says: "Go and fetch Cosette." The cook-shop is gone, but Montfermeil is still known as its home.

Location precision: The inn no longer exists; the pin marks the centre of Montfermeil.

This is where the love story begins, in silence. For more than a year Marius has noticed, on a walk skirting the parapet of the Pépinière, a man and a very young girl on the same bench. A full month goes by in which he comes to the Luxembourg every day, no longer to stroll but to sit in the same spot, without knowing why. He circles the fountain basin and stares at the swans. Then M. Leblanc and the girl stop coming, and the garden is empty of them.

Visitor guidance: The garden's opening hours depend on the month: from between 7:30 and 8:15 am until dusk.

In June 1832 General Lamarque's death is the spark, and Courfeyrac asks Marius: "Are you coming to General Lamarque's funeral?" Corinthe, the wine-shop where Courfeyrac and his friends meet, stands on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and their barricade rises there. Gavroche slips outside it to gather cartridges and is killed; at the end only Enjolras is still on his feet. History's last rebels fell at the Cloître Saint-Merry. Hugo wrote that the street and Corinthe "have disappeared beneath the pavement of the Rue Rambuteau."

Location precision: Hugo says the street and Corinthe vanished under the Rue Rambuteau; the pin marks the Rue Mondétour end of it.

Visitor guidance: The Rue Rambuteau, laid out from 1838, absorbed the old Rue de la Chanvrerie; the Rue Mondétour crosses it by Les Halles.

Carrying a young man who seems dead, Jean Valjean ends up in the sewers of Paris and works out that "to follow to the slope is to arrive at the river." Hugo gives the outlet a real address: the Grand Sewer meets the Seine "between the Pont des Invalides and the Pont de Jéna", where a man emerges bearing another on his shoulders. The grating opens for him, Hugo adds, thanks to a bit of cleverness on Thénardier's part. The Paris Sewer Museum, with raised walkways above the sewage, has its entrance near the Pont de l'Alma.

Location precision: Hugo gives no exact point; the pin marks the Pont des Invalides, the upstream bridge of the stretch he names.

Visitor guidance: The Paris Sewer Museum, entered near the Pont de l'Alma, has raised walkways above the sewage.

Inspector Javert cannot reconcile his duty to surrender Jean Valjean with the fact that Valjean saved his life. He halts near the Place du Châtelet, at the angle of the Pont Notre-Dame, where the Seine forms a sort of square lake, a point "dreaded by mariners". There he leans on the parapet, chin in both hands, to think. Soon after, Javert is found drowned under a laundresses' boat between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf. The bridge standing today dates from 1858–1860 and links the Île de la Cité to the Place du Châtelet.

Location precision: Hugo sets Javert at the angle of the Pont Notre-Dame and has him found between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf; the pin marks the Pont au Change, which Wikipedia names as his bridge.

Visitor guidance: Cross the bridge from the Palais de Justice and the Conciergerie on the Île de la Cité to the Place du Châtelet.