Les Misérables

by Victor Hugo
translated by Norman Denny

Warning:This page can give away minor plot points.

On the unimportance of names

It is a conviction of mine that names are not crucial, in that one can know somebody without knowing his or her name.  (This is a conviction of mine because I am terrible at remembering names, and faces for that matter, though I remember people and actions and conversations.)  Here is the first support I’ve found in literature.  These two fell in love from afar a while ago, lost sight of each other, and are now together for the very first time:

And gradually they began to speak.  Outpouring followed the silence which is fulfilment.  The night was calm and splendid above their heads.  Pure as disembodied spirits, they told each other about themselves, their dreams and their follies, their delights, their fantasies, their failings; how they had come to love each other at a distance, to long for each other, and their despair when they no longer saw each other.  In an intimacy which nothing could ever make more perfect they told each other of al that wos most secret and hidden in themselves, recounting, with an innocent trust in their illusions, everything that love and youth, and the vestiges of childhood that still clung to them, put into their heads.  Two hearts were exchanged, so that when an hour had passed they were a youth enriched with the soul of a girl and a girl enriched with a young man’s soul.  Each pervaded, enchanted, and enraptured the other.

When they had finished, when everything had been said, she laid her head on his shoulder and asked:

‘What is your name?’

‘My name is Marius.  And yours?’

‘Cosette.’

Pages 810 to 811 (Part Four, Book Five, Section VI).