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Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

I've recommended this before, but if you want a thrilling, literary take on the battle, read Victor Hugo's account from Les Miserables:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm#link2H_4_...

That's the anonymous translation, which I liked just fine (there are modern ones), and can be bought for a buck or two just about anywhere. I'm guessing that Waterloo gets cut in a lot of abridgments, though.

My favorite extract - "the finest word, perhaps, that a Frenchman ever uttered":

http://coldewey.cc/post/19163335604/the-victor-of-waterloo-a...

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Story time, I just learned this last Weekend:

Victor Hugo was a member of the imperial senate (la chambre des Pairs) and tried to have a law passed to curb child labor from 16 to 10 hours per day.

That law was defeated, and Louis Jacques Thénard one of its most ferocious opponents became Thénardier in the book.

Ha! That's great to know. Thenardier was a real jerk, I kind of wondered whether he had a real-life analog (well, most of the characters, really).

Victor Hugo had the 19th-Century habit of putting too much into a book. He had plenty to say about the Battle of Waterloo, some I dare say correct, but he had small excuse for putting it all into Les Miserables. (And then there's the long excursion on convents, which the Penguin edition displaces to an appendix, but that's an argument for another day.)

John Keegan gives it a very readable treatment in The Day of Battle.

If you ask me, modern authors have a habit of putting too little into a book! But of course your criticism has merit. Les Miserables is indeed very long, though I don't think any of it is waste.

19th century long form fiction is TV show for the time. Weekly episodes in mainstream newspapers. Hugo, Flaubert, Dumas, Zola used the format for decades. People will find Game of Thrones "too little into a show" soon enough, too.

10 episodes per season is indeed too little for a show. Especially when you have like 20 main characters.

Dickens too across the channel.

There is a very good french serie about him (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253839/). I like the board game ambience a la Risk.

"An Infamous Army" by Georgette Heyer has a very good account also.

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