The Ways and Means of Description: Or, Why Fantine's Hands Make Me Swoon

For the first actual-content post of this little blog, I’m going straight into one of my favorite sentences in all of literature, courtesy of the great Victor Hugo. 

“Her long, slender fingers were those of a vestal stirring the ash beneath the sacred flame with a rod of gold.”

(Les Misérables, Part One, Book Three: “Four and Four”.  Translation by Norman Denny.)

For the completionists, here is the original French:

Fantine avait les longs doigts blancs et fins de la vestale qui remue les cendres du feu sacré avec une épingle d’or.

I was nearly moved to tears the first time I read that sentence. 

Perhaps you think this description of Fantine’s hands isn’t the most world-breaking, face-meltingly staggering sentence I could have found in literature.  Perhaps it isn’t even the most staggering sentence in Les Misérables.  You may be right; but I value this sentence so highly for a reason.  It changed the way I understand the craft and art of description. 

My favorite book, to this day, is Catch-22.  I’ve read plenty of books in the years since that are probably, by whatever plausible standard one could conceive, “better” books.  I’ve encountered “better” writers.  Yet nothing has ever struck me the way Catch-22 did; it was the first book to challenge me, to make me think very long and hard after I’d stopped reading; not only about the content of the book itself, but the rest of the world.  Thousands of books will confront you, but that first one to do so will change how you read. 

This passage from Misérables had a similar effect on me; it changed the way I approach description.  Descriptive, or expository, passages have two goals.  First, they illustrate; when I work, I tend to take this quite literally, to indicate that the reader should fully visualize (or in some cases, feel), the object of the exposition.  The second goal is, as a corollary, to achieve the first in the most representative manner as possible. 

The first objective is more easily accomplished; to express to the reader an image of Fantine’s hand, Hugo might have stated that her fingers were long and light, delicate, and unblemished.  In this, I can now picture her hands.  But a list of adjectives—however accurate—lacks all the power of the above passage.  Hugo, rather, describes Fantine’s hands in a manner consistent with Fantine herself. 

Herein lies the artistry of Victor Hugo’s work.  Like other Romanticist writers, dramatists, and poets, Hugo treats Antiquity like a sexual fetish.  He loads his passages on Fantine with Classical allusions, referencing Galatea, Psyche, Venus, and Erigone.  This entire bucolic chapter on the four couples is all but set to Beethoven’s Sixth.  To maintain this semblance of Fantine as the Classical, pastoral girl, Hugo uses the Vestal: beautiful, virginal priestesses of Ancient Rome. 

Yet it is still not enough to say that “Fantine possessed the fine, slender fingers of the virginal vestal.”  He makes those fingers move, “stirring” ashes.  Even the ashes aren’t ordinary; they fall from the sacred flame, and only a gold hook is good enough for her.  Hugo’s original French places “gold” at the end of the sentence out of grammatical necessity, and translator Norman Denny has made the effective decision of leaving it there in the English version; at the end of the sentence, “gold” allows the sense of majesty to linger. 

The technique—allowing the nature of the subject to inform the mode of description—is basic, but key nonetheless.  Hugo displays his mastery in this sentence; not surprising, considering his extensive work in poetry.  He shows us his subject, and its nature, on an intellectual level, but in doing so moves his reader to feel it.