It’s something that a lot of french writers did, and I love it. Such a dissonance between the miserable life of the characters and how it’s described. Since i’m french, we talked a lot about french litterature, and it’s good to note that Victor Hugo was very critical of all the french society, and how the upper-class treated everyone under them. If the book tell it this way, it’s because the upper-class didn’t give a fuck about the poorer, and it would be how a rich guy of this time would have describe the story. A lot of messages still work today with our modern society