Quote Originally Posted by Shorty View Post
For honesty's sake, I am going to skip the very long war and Napolean parts. Don't even care.

Gonna dust off my tattered old copy tonight, yay!
I think those are the main things cropped from the abridged version, so you should be alright by skipping those. If you can't find a free version of the abridged Les Mis, I would just get the version Miriel posted and skip those parts (it's pretty obvious when Hugo goes into a discourse on that war, and he talks about it forever). It's almost like Grapes of Wrath where there are sections that have nothing to do with the plot and are mainly there to set tone.

I thought Fantine's section was the best part of the whole story, to be honest. I think the dialogue is a mixture of how they talked back then and the fact that it's a translation so dialogue won't always translate the way it was intended in the original language.