There is a beautiful book in which the story is told of a very poor man, who had invented a counterfeit coin to support a woman and her son.
The police had arrested her, and now they needed the woman to denounce her partner. But that woman, to protect the father of her son, emphatically denied any statement against her lover; then a shrewd lawyer in the service of the king, decided to forge letters to show the woman that the man she was defending had another lover.
So that woman deceived and exasperated by jealousy, denounced the father of her son and confessed everything, and the man was lost.
When they told this story, the people marveled at the cunning of the lawyer defending the interests of the king, and a priest who listened to the story asked: When and where will judge the slanderous and extortionist lawyer ?, When will judge that immoral king to that he does not hurt the hunger of others, and has under his protection immoral lawyers like that?
That is just a fragment of Les Misérables, a monumental work by Victor Hugo, a French poet and writer, who has his own pedestal in the literary memory of his people. In the middle of a sea of human vicissitudes, Victor Hugo was raised as the great poet and novelist loved by his people.
It reached so much the love of its people, that when the writer turned 80, the crowds celebrated in the streets with a joy rarely seen. When he died, his body was veiled under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and buried as a national hero, and more than 2 million people accompanied his coffin.
That happened on a day like today, May 22, 1885. And although Victor Hugo is beyond silence and mystery, his work continues to accompany us.
