A nineteenth-century novel is meant to be savored slowly, not rushed through to find out "what happens next" and Chapter 1 of Book IV is a good example of the pleasures it can offer a reader willing to linger. Not only does Hugo give us a fascinating historical portrait of a section of Paris in 1823 and again in the 1860s, and a perceptive and witty comment on the magical swiftness with which faster transportation changes the look and feel of our environment, but a poetic evocation of a particular type of city area—a "hell of monotony."
Hugo's city, however, is never truly urban, never the dense center of commercial and social relationships we find portrayed in Balzac or Zola. If Hugo's nature sometimes—as with Cosette at the spring—seems to take on the attributes of a person, his city equally often takes on the aspect of the countryside. When Jean Valjean needs a banker, he relies on a tree, but conversely, the maze of Paris streets is for him a jungle whose trees are lampposts and whose clearings are squares. There are times when Hugo sees Paris still with the eyes of the boy who grew up across from the Feuillantines Park in the middle of the city—as a wonderful place in which to play hide and seek.
