All 50 Uses of
epoch
in
Les Miserables
- About the epoch of the coronation, some petty affair connected with his curacy—just what, is not precisely known—took him to Paris.†
Chpt 1.1epoch = a significant period of time
- Counterfeiting was still punishable with death at that epoch.†
Chpt 1.1
- At an epoch a little later than the date of the letter cited in the preceding pages, he did a thing which, if the whole town was to be believed, was even more hazardous than his trip across the mountains infested with bandits.†
Chpt 1.1
- The Revolution had many of these men, proportioned to the epoch.†
Chpt 1.1
- Although Monseigneur Bienvenu was far from being a politician, this is, perhaps, the place to indicate very briefly what his attitude was in the events of that epoch, supposing that Monseigneur Bienvenu ever dreamed of having an attitude.†
Chpt 1.1
- He was harsh for a time towards the former, because, holding a command in Provence at the epoch of the disembarkation at Cannes, the general had put himself at the head of twelve hundred men and had pursued the Emperor as though the latter had been a person whom one is desirous of allowing to escape.†
Chpt 1.1
- Let a notary transfigure himself into a deputy: let a false Corneille compose Tiridate; let a eunuch come to possess a harem; let a military Prudhomme accidentally win the decisive battle of an epoch; let an apothecary invent cardboard shoe-soles for the army of the Sambre-and-Meuse, and construct for himself, out of this cardboard, sold as leather, four hundred thousand francs of income; let a pork-packer espouse usury, and cause it to bring forth seven or eight millions, of which he is the father and of which it is the mother; let a preache†
Chpt 1.1
- The only thing which seems to be authenticated is that that same night the carrier who served Grenoble at that epoch, and who arrived at D— about three o'clock in the morning, saw, as he traversed the street in which the Bishop's residence was situated, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling on the pavement in the shadow, in front of the door of Monseigneur Welcome.†
Chpt 1.2
- Claire d'Albe and Malek-Adel were masterpieces; Madame Cottin was proclaimed the chief writer of the epoch.†
Chpt 1.3
- They were four Oscars; for, at that epoch, Arthurs did not yet exist.†
Chpt 1.3
- At the epoch of her birth the Directory still existed.†
Chpt 1.3
- After breakfast the four couples went to what was then called the King's Square to see a newly arrived plant from India, whose name escapes our memory at this moment, and which, at that epoch, was attracting all Paris to Saint-Cloud.†
Chpt 1.3
- It was a time of undisputed peace and profound royalist security; it was the epoch when a special and private report of Chief of Police Angeles to the King, on the subject of the suburbs of Paris, terminated with these lines:— "Taking all things into consideration, Sire, there is nothing to be feared from these people.†
Chpt 1.3
- Have some confidence in me, for I have succeeded to some extent in my study of the law, according to the verdict of my examinations, for I know the difference between the question put and the question pending, for I have sustained a thesis in Latin upon the manner in which torture was administered at Rome at the epoch when Munatius Demens was quaestor of the Parricide; because I am going to be a doctor, apparently it does not follow that it is absolutely necessary that I should be an imbecile.†
Chpt 1.3
- Although she lived at an epoch when women had, as yet, no soul, she was a soul; a soul of a rosy and purple hue, more ardent hued than fire, fresher than the dawn.†
Chpt 1.3
- It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after having been Clelie, was no longer anything but Lodoiska, still noble, but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle de Scuderi to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to Madame Barthelemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the portresses of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some extent.†
Chpt 1.4
- However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous and superficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which may be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names.†
Chpt 1.4
- This seemed all the more probable since the man was religious, and even practised his religion to a certain degree, a thing which was very favorably viewed at that epoch.†
Chpt 1.5
- The mystical school of Joseph de Maistre, which at that epoch seasoned with lofty cosmogony those things which were called the ultra newspapers, would not have failed to declare that Javert was a symbol.†
Chpt 1.5
- At this epoch she said to a neighbor, "Bah!†
Chpt 1.5
- At that epoch mustaches indicated the bourgeois, and spurs the pedestrian.†
Chpt 1.5
- Those who had seen Jean Valjean at the epoch when he passed through D— in October, 1815, could easily have recognized all the pieces of this miserable outfit.†
Chpt 1.7
- Let us turn back,—that is one of the story-teller's rights,— and put ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of this book took place.†
Chpt 2.1
- Was it the evident physical decline of Napoleon that complicated this epoch by an inward diminution of force?†
Chpt 2.1
- At this epoch when Waterloo is only a clashing of swords, above Blucher, Germany has Schiller; above Wellington, England has Byron.†
Chpt 2.1
- It must be remembered, that at that epoch the Gazette des Tribunaux was not yet in existence.
Chpt 2.2 *epoch = period of time
- Before proceeding further, it will be to the purpose to narrate in some detail, a singular occurrence which took place at about the same epoch, in Montfermeil, and which is not lacking in coincidence with certain conjectures of the indictment.†
Chpt 2.2epoch = a significant period of time
- Now, a very short time after the epoch when it seemed to the prosecuting attorney that the liberated convict Jean Valjean during his flight of several days had been prowling around Montfermeil, it was remarked in that village that a certain old road-laborer, named Boulatruelle, had "peculiar ways" in the forest.†
Chpt 2.2
- The year 1823 was what the Restoration called "the epoch of the Spanish war."†
Chpt 2.2
- Ebb and flow, wandering, adventure, was the leven of his existence; a tattered conscience entails a fragmentary life, and, apparently at the stormy epoch of June 18, 1815, Thenardier belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers of which we have spoken, beating about the country, selling to some, stealing from others, and travelling like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with an instinct for always attaching himself to the victorious army.†
Chpt 2.3
- He wore a very old and very well brushed round hat; a coarse coat, worn perfectly threadbare, of an ochre yellow, a color that was not in the least eccentric at that epoch; a large waistcoat with pockets of a venerable cut; black breeches, worn gray at the knee, stockings of black worsted; and thick shoes with copper buckles.†
Chpt 2.3
- At that epoch, King Louis XVIII.†
Chpt 2.3
- There, near a factory, and between two garden walls, there could be seen, at that epoch, a mean building, which, at the first glance, seemed as small as a thatched hovel, and which was, in reality, as large as a cathedral.†
Chpt 2.4
- Tolls were still collected there at that epoch.†
Chpt 2.5
- At that epoch there were no gas-jets in the streets of Paris.†
Chpt 2.5
- It must be remembered that at that epoch the police was not precisely at its ease; the free press embarrassed it; several arbitrary arrests denounced by the newspapers, had echoed even as far as the Chambers, and had rendered the Prefecture timid.†
Chpt 2.5
- At the epoch when this story takes place, a boarding-school was attached to the convent—a boarding-school for young girls of noble and mostly wealthy families, among whom could be remarked Mademoiselle de Saint-Aulaire and de Belissen, and an English girl bearing the illustrious Catholic name of Talbot.†
Chpt 2.6
- Once—it was at the epoch of the visit from the archbishop to the convent— one of the young girls, Mademoiselle Bouchard, who was connected with the Montmorency family, laid a wager that she would ask for a day's leave of absence—an enormity in so austere a community.†
Chpt 2.6
- At that epoch he had just been made, while waiting for the episcopate, vicar-general of the Archbishop of Paris.†
Chpt 2.6
- The gates of the Paris cemeteries closed, at that epoch, at sundown, and this being a municipal regulation, the Vaugirard cemetery was bound by it like the rest.†
Chpt 2.8
- At the epoch, nearly contemporary by the way, when the action of this book takes place, there was not, as there is to-day, a policeman at the corner of every street (a benefit which there is no time to discuss here); stray children abounded in Paris.†
Chpt 3.1
- At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally decorated with the placard: "Chambers to let," chanced to be, a rare thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the case in Paris, had no connection with each other.†
Chpt 3.1
- He did not give to this last word the grand acceptation which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter, after his own fashion, into his little chimney-corner satires: "Nature," he said, "in order that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even specimens of its amusing barbarism.†
Chpt 3.2
- Thus the two sisters strayed, each in her own dream, at the epoch when they were young girls.†
Chpt 3.2
- In the Fualdes affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they took part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdes was "a Buonapartist."†
Chpt 3.3
- ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH.†
Chpt 3.3
- Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of Vernon at this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine monumental bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron cable bridge, might have observed, had he dropped his eyes over the parapet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap, and trousers and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something yellow which ha†
Chpt 3.3
- The Cardinal of Cl T was a merry little man, who displayed his red stockings beneath his tucked-up cassock; his specialty was a hatred of the Encyclopaedia, and his desperate play at billiards, and persons who, at that epoch, passed through the Rue M on summer evenings, where the hotel de Cl T then stood, halted to listen to the shock of the balls and the piercing voice of the Cardinal shouting to his conclavist, Monseigneur Cotiret, Bishop in partibus of Caryste: "Mark, Abbe, I make a cannon."†
Chpt 3.3
- The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism, congregation characterized the second.†
Chpt 3.3
- At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain revolutionary quiver was vaguely current.†
Chpt 3.4
Definition:
a significant period of time
The exact meaning of epoch depends upon its context. For example:
- "an epoch of scientific discovery" -- an historical period
- "during the Late Jurassic epoch" -- a unit of geological time smaller than a period and larger than an age
- "the epoch moment of the photo" -- the time of an astronomical measurement