All 23 Uses of
expedient
in
Les Miserables
- She had recourse to the expedient of children who live in a constant state of fear.†
Chpt 2.3
- Etc. [13] Lawyer Corbeau, perched on a docket, held in his beak a writ of execution; Lawyer Renard, attracted by the smell, addressed him nearly as follows, etc. The two honest practitioners, embarrassed by the jests, and finding the bearing of their heads interfered with by the shouts of laughter which followed them, resolved to get rid of their names, and hit upon the expedient of applying to the king.†
Chpt 2.4
- A few paces more, and you arrive at the abominable pollarded elms of the Barriere Saint-Jacques, that expedient of the philanthropist to conceal the scaffold, that miserable and shameful Place de Grove of a shop-keeping and bourgeois society, which recoiled before the death penalty, neither daring to abolish it with grandeur, nor to uphold it with authority.†
Chpt 2.4
- These gloomy inventors of expedients work rapidly when they are fighting against fatality.†
Chpt 2.5
- To-day the upholders of the past, unable to deny these things, have adopted the expedient of smiling at them.†
Chpt 2.7
- He made haste to improvise an expedient to make her forget the oath.†
Chpt 2.8
- Moreover, a coffin containing a living being,—that convict's expedient,— is also an imperial expedient.†
Chpt 2.8
- Moreover, a coffin containing a living being,—that convict's expedient,— is also an imperial expedient.†
Chpt 2.8
- In the second place, and no offence to Combeferre, a charter granted is but a poor expedient of civilization.†
Chpt 3.4
- At all events and in case the grandfather should feel the vague need of a young face in the house,—these rays of dawn are sometimes sweet to ruin,—it was expedient to find another Marius.†
Chpt 3.5
- An idea, a flash, crossed Marius' mind; this was the expedient of which he was in search, the solution of that frightful problem which was torturing him, of sparing the assassin and saving the victim.†
Chpt 3.8
- …retrench the harshness of enthusiasm, to cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right, to envelop the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed very speedily, to impose a diet on that excess of health, to put Hercules on the treatment of a convalescent, to dilute the event with the expedient, to offer to spirits thirsting for the ideal that nectar thinned out with a potion, to take one's precautions against too much success, to garnish the revolution with a shade.†
Chpt 4.1
- …dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude, making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under thrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients, in countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France!†
Chpt 4.1
- From this secret conflict, always muzzled, but always growling, was born armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization which in the harness of the European cabinets is suspicious in itself.†
Chpt 4.1
- The Magnon sought an expedient.†
Chpt 4.6
- In the third place, the expedient.†
Chpt 4.7
- My friends, Providence has come down to expedients.†
Chpt 4.12
- It complicates its heroism with a violence for which it is just that it should be held to answer; a violence of occasion and expedient, contrary to principle, and for which it is fatally punished.†
Chpt 5.1
- And it was necessary to decide on the instant, to devise some expedient, to come to some decision.†
Chpt 5.1
- Instead of the ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture, haughty and royal even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses of granite and mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom, he would have felt under his hand contemporary cheapness, economical expedients, porous stone filled with mortar on a concrete foundation, which costs two hundred francs the metre, and the bourgeoise masonry known as a petits materiaux—small stuff; but of all this he knew nothing.†
Chpt 5.3
- The expedient would have been puerile.†
Chpt 5.3
- The mournful life of expedients to which he had been condemned imposed this as a law upon him.†
Chpt 5.3
- They are temporary expedients.
Chpt 5.5 *expedients = actions that are speedy or practical -- especially actions that accept negative tradeoffs due to circumstances
Definition:
-
(expedient) a practical action -- especially one that accepts negative tradeoffs due to circumstances
or:
convenient, speedy, or practical