This is an Abridged Edition Victor Hugo began writing Les Misérables twenty years before its eventual publication in 1862. In this epic, set in the Parisian underworld and plotted like a detective story, an honest peasant is dogged by an implacable "justice" in the person of a fanatical police inspector who pursues him for most of his lifetime, even in flight through the se This is an Abridged Edition Victor Hugo began writing Les Misérables twenty years before its eventual publication in 1862. In this epic, set in the Parisian underworld and plotted like a detective story, an honest peasant is dogged by an implacable "justice" in the person of a fanatical police inspector who pursues him for most of his lifetime, even in flight through the sewers of Paris.