All 24 Uses of

chimera
in
Les Miserables

Legends, chimeras, the soul, immortality, paradise, the stars, are provided for them to swallow.†
Chpt 1.1 *

chimeras = imagined things that are not possible in the real world

O Fantine, know this: I, Tholomyes, I am all illusion; but she does not even hear me, that blond maid of Chimeras!†
Chpt 1.3

Conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophisms; it is the battlefield of the passions.†
Chpt 1.7

M. le Duc d'Angouleme, surnamed by the liberal sheets the hero of Andujar, compressing in a triumphal attitude that was somewhat contradicted by his peaceable air, the ancient and very powerful terrorism of the Holy Office at variance with the chimerical terrorism of the liberals;†
Chpt 2.2

It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, which appeared in a sort of chimerical halo to that unhappy little being so profoundly engulfed in gloomy and chilly misery.†
Chpt 2.3

Fauchelevent did not recoil in the face of this almost chimerical undertaking; this poor peasant of Picardy without any other ladder than his self-devotion, his good will, and a little of that old rustic cunning, on this occasion enlisted in the service of a generous enterprise, undertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and the steep escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoit.†
Chpt 2.8

He was learned, a purist, exact, a graduate of the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time, thoughtful "even to chimaeras," so his friends said.†
Chpt 3.4

chimaeras = imagined things that are not possible in the real world

For if they had had another neighbor who was less chimerical and more attentive, any ordinary and charitable man, evidently their indigence would have been noticed, their signals of distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken hold of and rescued!†
Chpt 3.8

singing the Marseillaise with conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimeras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear;†
Chpt 4.1

chimeras = imagined things that are not possible in the real world

Passion had supervened and had finished the work of precipitating him into chimaeras without object or bottom.†
Chpt 4.2

It was the apparition of youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet remaining a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at last, but having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered in the ideal, a chimaera with a form.†
Chpt 4.3

Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own.†
Chpt 4.5

It seemed to her, at intervals, that she was entering the land of chimaeras; she said to herself: "Is this reality?"†
Chpt 4.5

chimaeras = imagined things that are not possible in the real world

These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimaeras, their weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each other.†
Chpt 4.5

On the day when this Promethean task shall be accomplished, and when man shall have definitely harnessed to his will the triple Chimaera of antiquity, the hydra, the dragon and the griffin, he will be the master of water, fire, and of air, and he will be for the rest of animated creation that which the ancient gods formerly were to him.†
Chpt 5.1

Cosette, with her hair in the sunlight, her soul absorbed in chimeras, illuminated by love within and by the dawn without, bent over mechanically, and almost without daring to avow to herself that she was thinking at the same time of Marius, began to gaze at these birds, at this family, at that male and female, that mother and her little ones, with the profound trouble which a nest produces on a virgin.†
Chpt 5.1

chimeras = imagined things that are not possible in the real world

A marriage should be royal and chimerical; it should promenade its ceremony from the cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup.†
Chpt 5.5

He admitted,—it is thus, by a series of successive admissions of ourselves in regard to ourselves, that life amends us, little by little,—he admitted the chimerical and visionary side of his nature, a sort of internal cloud peculiar to many organizations, and which, in paroxysms of passion and sorrow, dilates as the temperature of the soul changes, and invades the entire man, to such a degree as to render him nothing more than a conscience bathed in a mist.†
Chpt 5.7

They are chimeras.†
Chpt 5.9

chimeras = imagined things that are not possible in the real world

The elder had also her chimera; she espied in the azure some very wealthy purveyor, a contractor, a splendidly stupid husband, a million made man, or even a prefect; the receptions of the Prefecture, an usher in the antechamber with a chain on his neck, official balls, the harangues of the town-hall, to be "Madame la Prefete,"—all this had created a whirlwind in her imagination.†
Chpt 3.2

Definitions:

(1) (chimera)
a wild, unrealistic idea or hope; or a mythical creature made from parts of different animals
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus:

As a proper noun Chimera refers to a fire-breathing monster in Greek mythology. It is a female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.

More rarely, in biology, a chimera is an organism that contains cells or tissues with a different genotype.

Chimaera is also an acceptable spelling and the name of a type of fish.