Everything is relevant - since the subject of this book, quite literally, is everything: 'This book is a tragedy in which infinity plays the lead,' writes Hugo. But in this novel there is no such thing as a digression. That is why its tempo is so explicit with slowness, syncopated with digression. The subject of one of the longest novels in European literature is - what else? - the infinite.

Destiny and in particular life, time and in particular this century, man and in particular the people, God and in particular the world, this is what I have tried to include in this book it is a sort of essay on the infinite.' By having the ideal, that is God, as the generator instead of the idea, we can see that it fulfils the same function as nature. The idea engenders the characters, the characters produce the drama, and this is, in effect, the law of art. The preface would have begun like this: 'This book has been composed from the inside out. When the book was finished, Hugo tried - and failed - to write a preface.

'There is something we might mention that has no bearing whatsoever on the tale we have to tell - not even on the background.' Les Misérables begins with a digression from a digression (thus resembling Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which a few years earlier had begun with a digression, too.) Here, at the start, Hugo was trying to set up a narrative convention, derived from the novel's deep theory. The beginning, it turns out, is not a beginning at all. And this is visible immediately: it's visible, to the perturbed reader, in the second of this novel's many sentences. The size was the centre of Hugo's discovery in the art of the novel. To describe his work in progress, he jotted down a list of hyperbolic adjectives: 'Astounding, extraordinary, surprising, superhuman, supernatural, unheard of, savage, sinister, formidable, gigantic, savage, colossal, monstrous, deformed, disturbed, electrifying, lugubrious, funereal, hideous, terrifying, shadowy, mysterious, fantastic, nocturnal, crepuscular.' This megalomania was a conscious choice on Hugo's part. And the most obvious transformation Victor Hugo effects in the novel's form is sheer gargantuan size.

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