In an epic description that perhaps may owe something to Dante's Inferno, Hugo now introduces us to the world that lies even below that of Les Misérables—the lowest depths of the criminal poor. The study of criminal life fascinated many nineteenth-century authors. Balzac has several novels in which the master criminal Vautrin appears; Dickens has his Fagin; and a number of popular French authors like Eugene Sué made adventures in the underworld their stock in trade.
Like most nineteenth-century reformers, Hugo is an environmentalist—that is, he believes that man is, on balance, naturally inclined to good, and that the evil in him is a product of his treatment by society. Crime, he says at the end of Chapter 2, will vanish with enlightenment. However, Hugo the writer is wiser than Hugo the theoretician, and in Book VIII he will invalidate everything he has said in Book VII by showing us a man whose criminality is not the result of his environment, and who is villainous as naturally as he breathes.
