All 50 Uses of
formidable
in
Les Miserables
- …of existences which the tomb contains, the incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the persistent I, the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature, liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable abysses, which Lucretius, Manou, Saint Paul, Dante, contemplate with eyes flashing lightning, which seems by its steady gaze on the infinite to cause stars to blaze forth there.†
Chpt 1.1
- He was himself vigorous and formidable; he armed himself with his staff, made a shield of his knapsack, and made his way out of the kennel in the best way he could, not without enlarging the rents in his rags.†
Chpt 1.2
- There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when the penal laws decree a shipwreck.†
Chpt 1.2
- Souls which have fallen to the bottom of all possible misfortune, unhappy men lost in the lowest of those limbos at which no one any longer looks, the reproved of the law, feel the whole weight of this human society, so formidable for him who is without, so frightful for him who is beneath, resting upon their heads.†
Chpt 1.2
- …that which can be summed up and translated into positive results in all that we have just pointed out, we will confine ourselves to the statement that, in the course of nineteen years, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner of Faverolles, the formidable convict of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the manner in which the galleys had moulded him, of two sorts of evil action: firstly, of evil action which was rapid, unpremeditated, dashing, entirely instinctive, in the nature of…†
Chpt 1.2
- Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, has vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, he stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the monstrous billows of the invisible; he shouts.†
Chpt 1.2
- The noise of the hinge rang in his ears with something of the piercing and formidable sound of the trump of the Day of Judgment.†
Chpt 1.2
- He set out on his march again, then he began to run; and from time to time he halted and shouted into that solitude, with a voice which was the most formidable and the most disconsolate that it was possible to hear, "Little Gervais!†
Chpt 1.2
- He was indistinctly conscious that the pardon of this priest was the greatest assault and the most formidable attack which had moved him yet; that his obduracy was finally settled if he resisted this clemency; that if he yielded, he should be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the actions of other men had filled his soul through so many years, and which pleased him; that this time it was necessary to conquer or to be conquered; and that a struggle, a colossal and final…†
Chpt 1.2
- Such was this formidable man.†
Chpt 1.5
- The eye of the spirit can nowhere find more dazzling brilliance and more shadow than in man; it can fix itself on no other thing which is more formidable, more complicated, more mysterious, and more infinite.†
Chpt 1.7
- Assuredly, if any one had said to him at such moments that the hour would come when that name would ring in his ears, when the hideous words, Jean Valjean, would suddenly emerge from the darkness and rise in front of him, when that formidable light, capable of dissipating the mystery in which he had enveloped himself, would suddenly blaze forth above his head, and that that name would not menace him, that that light would but produce an obscurity more dense, that this rent veil would…†
Chpt 1.7
- This voice, feeble at first, and which had proceeded from the most obscure depths of his conscience, had gradually become startling and formidable, and he now heard it in his very ear.†
Chpt 1.7
- …heads, all these he had already beheld once, in days gone by, twenty-seven years before; he had encountered those fatal things once more; there they were; they moved; they existed; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage of his thought; they were real gendarmes and real judges, a real crowd, and real men of flesh and blood: it was all over; he beheld the monstrous aspects of his past reappear and live once more around him, with all that there is formidable in reality.†
Chpt 1.7
- Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who triumphs.†
Chpt 1.8
- The third station, the one adopted at seven o'clock in the evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable; it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind which the guard was massed on a slope of the plain.†
Chpt 2.1
- Then a formidable spectacle was seen.†
Chpt 2.1
- Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,— these are formidable pleaders.†
Chpt 2.1
- The cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry; or, to put it more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each other without releasing the other.†
Chpt 2.1
- There, abandoned, vanquished, terrible, those gloomy squares endured their death-throes in formidable fashion.†
Chpt 2.1
- That formidable remnant had been annihilated; the Guard was dead.†
Chpt 2.1
- Bat-like creatures, half brigands and lackeys; all the sorts of vespertillos that that twilight called war engenders; wearers of uniforms, who take no part in the fighting; pretended invalids; formidable limpers; interloping sutlers, trotting along in little carts, sometimes accompanied by their wives, and stealing things which they sell again; beggars offering themselves as guides to officers; soldiers' servants; marauders; armies on the march in days gone by,— we are not speaking of…†
Chpt 2.1
- Soldiers of the war of 1808, on whom Saragossa had fallen in formidable ruin, frowned in 1823 at the easy surrender of citadels, and began to regret Palafox.†
Chpt 2.2
- This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her children, and who did not fear any one except her husband.†
Chpt 2.3
- Shadows and trees—two formidable densities.†
Chpt 2.3
- This formidable gesture restored to Cosette sufficient strength to shriek:— "Mercy, Madame, Madame!†
Chpt 2.3
- The formidable neck and shoulders belonged to Javert.†
Chpt 2.4
- As soon as he had positively recognized Jean Valjean, the formidable convict, he perceived that there were only three of them, and he asked for reinforcements at the police station of the Rue de Pontoise.†
Chpt 2.5
- Above all, he was wrong in that after he had picked up the scent again on the bridge of Austerlitz, he played that formidable and puerile game of keeping such a man at the end of a thread.†
Chpt 2.5
- Another was never known in the convent except by the formidable noise which she made when she blew her nose.†
Chpt 2.6
- This question has certain mysterious, almost formidable sides; may we be permitted to look at it fixedly.†
Chpt 2.7
- Fauchelevent, who was illiterate but very sharp, understood that he had to deal with a formidable species of man, with a fine talker.†
Chpt 2.8
- The search for these "deaf things" among the stones is a joy of formidable nature.†
Chpt 3.1
- The same formidable lightning proceeds from the torch of Prometheus to Cambronne's short pipe.†
Chpt 3.1
- One hears dull sounds, without knowing whence they proceed; one beholds Jupiter, which is twelve hundred times larger than the earth, glowing like a firebrand, the azure is black, the stars shine; it is formidable.†
Chpt 3.3
- The glance of women resembles certain combinations of wheels, which are tranquil in appearance yet formidable.†
Chpt 3.6
- A formidable spot.†
Chpt 3.7
- Cities, like forests, have their caverns in which all the most wicked and formidable creatures which they contain conceal themselves.†
Chpt 3.8
- Jondrette darted an annihilating look at his daughter, accompanied by a formidable shrug of the shoulders.†
Chpt 3.8
- He had improvised an intrenchment out of the table; and the man, who but an instant previously, had borne merely the appearance of a kindly old man, had suddenly become a sort of athlete, and placed his robust fist on the back of his chair, with a formidable and surprising gesture.†
Chpt 3.8
- …one blow full in the chest, M. Leblanc had sent the old man tumbling, rolling in the middle of the room, then with two backward sweeps of his hand he had overthrown two more assailants, and he held one under each of his knees; the wretches were rattling in the throat beneath this pressure as under a granite millstone; but the other four had seized the formidable old man by both arms and the back of his neck, and were holding him doubled up over the two "chimney-builders" on the floor.†
Chpt 3.8
- Before the seven men had time to collect their senses and dash forward, he had bent down into the fireplace, had stretched out his hand to the brazier, and had then straightened himself up again, and now Thenardier, the female Thenardier, and the ruffians, huddled in amazement at the extremity of the hovel, stared at him in stupefaction, as almost free and in a formidable attitude, he brandished above his head the red-hot chisel, which emitted a threatening glow.†
Chpt 3.8
- In the eyes of despotic governments, who are always interested in having liberty calumniate itself, the Revolution of July committed the fault of being formidable and of remaining gentle.†
Chpt 4.1
- Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these formidable collisions.†
Chpt 4.1
- He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not, nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.†
Chpt 4.1
- Whenever certain sparks float on the horizon chased by the wind of events, it is impossible not to think of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and of the formidable chance which has placed at the very gates of Paris that powder-house of suffering and ideas.†
Chpt 4.1
- He gazed with terror on this beauty, which was blossoming out ever more triumphant and superb beside him, beneath his very eyes, on the innocent and formidable brow of that child, from the depths of her homeliness, of his old age, of his misery, of his reprobation.†
Chpt 4.3
- The march of the damned to their tortures, performed in sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot of the Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet cart.†
Chpt 4.3
- There is a certain formidable machine, have you seen it?†
Chpt 4.4
- As soon as twilight descended, the old elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows.†
Chpt 4.6
Definition:
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(formidable) intimidating or impressive -- arousing fear or admiration due to impressiveness or challenge