troisoiseaux

In which the people of Paris do not rise up, and the barricade falls :(

I've read Les Mis at least four times since 2010 and Enjolras' speech in 5.1.5 makes me cry every time. "Citizens, can you imagine the future?" he asks, from 1832 by way of 1862, and reading his speech 160+ years later, it's just... oof. "The nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy" might be the single most haunting quote in this book. That's usually the line that gets me, but this time I choked up at "We have tamed the hydra, and he is called the steamship; we have tamed the dragon, and he is called the locomotive; we are on the point of taking the griffin, we already have him, and he is called the balloon." The balloon!! There's a heartbreaking pathos to a vision of the future at once so quaintly antique— to see a character marveling over hot-air balloons, when since then, we've invented planes, we've gone to space— and at once still so far beyond our reach, as a utopia without war or poverty or inequality.

The character who really stands out to me in 5.1 is Combeferre, who is basically the conscience of the barricade— imploring the men who have families to support to take the opportunity for four of them to leave before the barricade inevitably falls (in a bittersweet hypocrisy, "he remembered the mothers of others, but forgot his own"); his plea with Enjolras not to kill the young artillery sergeant about to fire on them first ("What a hideous thing these bloodbaths are! ... he might be your brother ... and mine, too. Well, don't let's kill him.") When Hugo kills the rest of Les Amis de l'ABC (sans Enjolras) in one run-on sentence, he's the only one who gets more than a "[name] was killed," and the description invokes the Pietà: "Combeferre, peirced by three bayonet thrust to the chest, just as he was lifting a wounded soldier, had only time to look to heaven, and expired."

One thing that struck me as actually kind of funny, this time, was Hugo-through-Enjolras' repeated insistence that Marius was a leader of the rebellion— "Marius inquired, 'Where's the leader?' ' You're the leader,' said Enjolras" (4.14.5); "[Enjolras] said to Marius, 'We're the two leaders; I'll give the last orders inside" (5.1.18)— when the poor guy is clearly just dissociating the entire time ("[Marius] witnessed it all as from outside; as we have said, the things that were occurring before him appeared remote ..."). Okay, that's not entirely fair: Marius backs up Enjolras and Combeferre when they order four men with families to take the stolen National Guard uniforms and save themselves; he's the one who retrieves Gavroche's body, when he's killed sneaking out to collect unused cartridges. But also, come on.

Halfway through 5.1— after Gavroche's death— Hugo cuts away from the action at the barricade to check in on the two littlest Thenardiers, who we learned in 4.11 got lost again, the day after Gavroche took them in: THEY'RE FINE! I mean, they're street kids in 19th century Paris, so they're not doing great, but they're alive and together and the older brother (who's only seven; the younger brother is five) has stepped into Gavroche's (metaphorical) shoes.

Read through 4.9 in Les Mis— I know, I'm posting updates in ever-shorter intervals, but I wanted to write these thoughts down before I get to the barricade chapters:

EPONINE. This is taking things out of order, but the scene where Eponine confronts her father and his cronies when they plan to rob Valjean's house is one of the Most scenes in this book, so I'm writing about it first. Like, not to be flippant, but Hugo was really like "who would win, six adult men who just escaped from prison or one 16-year-old girl who has stared into the abyss and thinks it can't be worse than her actual life?" and the answer is the teenage girl. I had remembered the "I'm not the daughter of a dog, I'm the daughter of a wolf" quote, and "You're six, but I'm everybody," but I had somehow forgotten the line that hit me the hardest this time: "What is it to me whether somebody picks me up tomorrow on the pavement of the Rue Plumet, beaten to death with a club by my own father, or whether they find me in a year in the ditches ... with the rotting garbage and the dead dogs?" :( The thing about Eponine that does not translate to the musical is that in the book, she's described more like a wraith than a waif; she seems to flicker at the edges of other characters' stories— in these past few chapters, she literally mostly shows up as a half-glimpsed figure delivering some message, warning Valjean to move out or telling Marius about the barricades, before slipping away unseen or unrecognized— and I can't shake the impression she's half a ghost already.

Anyway, Marius and Cosette are dating now, which for them means having innocent, secret late-night whisperfests in Cosette's garden and generally being so wrapped up in each other that they fail to notice a cholera epidemic is happening. Alas, after six weeks of this, Cosette has to break the news that Valjean wants to move to England, and Marius— in what is truly a Top Five Marius Moment— spends two hours faceplanted against a tree, to cope.* He finally goes back to his grandfather after five years' estrangement,** to ask his permission to marry Cosette, and is instead mortally offended when Gillenormand is like "permission DENIED, just make her your mistress."*** And THEN Valjean and Cosette leave Rue Plumet before he can see her again! Whatever shall Marius do???

I rescind my previous statement: M. Mabeuf is and will always be my favorite minor character in Les Mis, because for all the deeply unjust and tragic things that have already happened in this novel, Hugo still lands the emotional punch of a lonely old man's descent into poverty, having to sell off his beloved books one by one. A few chapters back, Gavroche left him the purse he stole from Montparnasse (who had tried to steal it from Valjean) but Mabeuf assumed someone had lost it and took it to the police :(

( footnotes )

Read Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, an "eco-thriller" set in contemporary (late 2010s/pre-pandemic) New Zealand: a collective of "guerrilla gardeners" appears to find an unlikely ally in a doomsday-prepping American tech billionaire, but ends up entangled in a spider's web of half-truths and hidden motivations and straight-up conspiracies, with devastating consequences. I liked that the plot was driven by how, to the characters, it was basically a puzzle that no one had all of the same pieces to— characters would make decisions based on patchy information, which fed into another character's assumptions about their motives/plans, and so on, in - to wildly mix metaphors - a narrative Rube Goldberg machine with a roller coaster of a final act.

In Les Mis, I've read through 4.2; Marius and Cosette still have not actually met, and the winds of revolution are stirring.

I found the historical interlude of 4.1— about the Restoration, and Louis-Philippe, and the July Revolution of 1830, and the lead-up to the June Rebellion of 1832— very interesting. I was particularly struck by the visual of "the barbarians of civilization and the civil advocates of barbarism," especially the latter: "... men, smiling, embroidered, gilded ... who, leaning on a velvet table beside a marble mantel, softly insist on the maintenance and preservation of the past, ... fanaticism, ignorance, slavery ... glorifying politely and in mild tones the saber, the stake, and the scaffold." Thank goodness people aren't still distracted by this same dynamic 160 years later. That would be wild. (And, oh, chapter 4.1.6: the scene that launched a thousand "I'll black your boots"-as-euphemism E/R fics. Although that was more of a pre-2012 trope, I think?)

Per my previous musings on Les Mis as a book that echoes, had a sense of deja vu reading "...for a long time now, [Marius] had stopped his work, and nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost" (4.2.1) and, digging back, found the quote I was thinking of: "...still somewhat working girls, since they had not wholly given up the seamstress' needle, agitated by love affairs yet preserving on their countenances a remnant of labor's serenity..." (1.3.2). Interestingly underlines class and gender distinctions; even given the whole chapter (3.5, I think?) on Marius' "noble poverty" (:/) and how he ekes out a just-sufficient living on freelance translation work, the fact that he's a man, and educated, and from wealth means that he risks less by becoming so distracted by love he just checks out of everything else than a working-class woman (e.g., Fantine) would.

While I'm comparing Marius to other characters, welcome to my TED Talk about Marius and Montparnasse as foils/the inverse of each other: see 1. their strikingly similar physical descriptions— Marius' "heavy jet black hair" and "lips the reddest ... imaginable"; Montparnasse's "lips like cherries, charming black hair"— and 2., Marius grew up rich and was driven to asceticism by his sense of honor, vs. Montparnasse grew up poor and was driven to crime by his vanity; 3., the Éponine connection— she has a crush on Marius, which he's completely oblivious to, while Montparnasse clearly has some interest (flirtation or a fling? reciprocated or not? unclear) in Éponine, "preferring to be Némorin with the daughter than Schinderhannes with the father" (4.2.2). And, okay, this one feels like grasping at straws a little, but 4., their names are Pontmercy and Montparnasse. Like, c'mon!

Another for the gardening = goodness tally, too: Éponine helping Mabeuf water his garden.

Re-read Nona the Ninth alongside a friend who was reading it for the first time; I can say that my feeling of "first third was a slog" on read #2 was 100% a matter of not being in the right mood for it, because I was back to vibing with it this time.

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In Les Mis, I've read through 3.4, in which Hugo makes the mistake of introducing nine guys in their 20s with just enough characterization to accidentally spawn one of the most insufferable fandoms of the 21st century. I'd braced myself for embarrassed-to-defensive nostalgia, so I was rather surprised to instead feel genuinely delighted to re-encounter Les Amis de l'ABC.

In Les Mis, Valjean has rescued Cosette from the Thénardiers, and they're on the lam in Paris.

I have to make a confession: I got stuck for a while on the Waterloo Digression, and ended up mostly skimming through it. I KNOW, I KNOW. The digressions are important! I actually do enjoy most of them*! It's just that a. I am easily bored by descriptions of military action and b. I've stalled out completely on almost all of the Long Classic Novels I've tried to read in the past 1-2 years; I really didn't want to add this one to that list. So, yes, I skimmed. What did stick out to me is how Hugo - humanizes, I guess? - the soldiers who fought at Waterloo and the people who were effected: the names scrawled on the wall of the chapel; the Huogomont peasant Guillaume Van Kylsom; the "obscure officer named Cambronne" whose shout of "MERDE!" at an English demand to surrender gets two whole chapters.

Valjean's rescue of Cosette from the Thénardiers and their early days in the Gorbeau House (2.3-2.4) are just— *clutches heart*. She's this poor little kid who has been abused for most of her life, and suddenly she finds herself showered in kindness and dolls and gold coins in her shoes on Christmas?? By rescuing her, Valjean - a man who turned his life around only to have been sent back to prison for doing the right thing, which would understandably turn even a saint into a nihilist - gives himself a reason to keep living for others?? The quote that really got me was:

Jean Valjean had begun to teach [Cosette] to read. Sometimes, while teaching the child to spell, he would remember that it was with the intention of doing evil that he had learned to read in prison. That intention had now changed into teaching a child to read.

A not-so-fun fact: in 1843, Hugo found out his 19-year-old daughter Léopoldine had drowned by reading about it in a newspaper. It can't be a coincidence that Javert learns about Valjean's apparent drowning (his escape from the prison hulks) through the paper— and, as this post reminded me, Valjean later learns of Javert's (actual) death by drowning in the same way. (That post makes some interesting points about the extent, and significance, of drowning imagery in Les Mis.)

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Read Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore 1994-2007 by Dan Ozzi, which was a fun read, since many of the bands profiled - each chapter is about a different band's first album with a major label - were the soundtrack of my teenage years: Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Against Me!, Blink-182, Jimmy Eat World. (..."teenage years," I say, as if I don't still listen to all of these bands.)

In Les Mis, I've read Vol. I, Books 3-6, which is to say: through the introductions to Fantine, the Thénardiers, and the people and events of Montreuil-sur-mer circa 1821-23.

It always throws me to remember that Tholomyès left Fantine after Cosette was already born— it wasn't just that she either hadn't realized or hadn't told anyone that she was pregnant; if Cosette is "almost three" when they meet the Thénardiers, ten months after the "surprise" break-up, she would have been two when he left. I mean, no, I'm not surprised that Tholomyès would have no compunction abandoning his two-year-old child and her mother— frankly, I'm more surprised that he actually stuck around until Cosette was two— but I'm surprised that no one else (e.g., Fantine's so-called friends) seems to think of it? Like, the Doylist explanation is that Hugo wanted "and she had his child" as a surprise gutpunch at the end of 1.3, sure, but... is the Watsonian explanation that everyone knows about Cosette and they're just like "whatever, Fantine will figure it out"? Do they not know about Cosette? (If so, how?) Who is babysitting her during the pre-break-up outing? The fact that Fantine had Cosette out of wedlock is clearly seen as a strike against them outside of Paris— was it not a problem in Paris, as long as they had financial support?

Tholomyès spends a remarkably brief time as The Worst Person In This Book, since he's immediately usurped by the Thénardiers, coming in with a steel chair extortion and child abuse. I found myself thinking of Fantine's story as the flip side of the "you have killed 2.338 people" calculation in Terry Pratchett's Going Postal— who bears culpability for her (approaching) death? Tholomyès and Thénardier, obviously, but then a. how to apportion that blame - is it more on Tholomyès, for abandoning Fantine and Cosette in the first place, or on Thénardier for greedily exploiting her precarious situation? - and b., what about everyone else? The nosy woman who got her fired, the man in the street who got her arrested, the prison labor contractor who undercut the wages she could earn through freelance sewing? This is the whole point of Fantine's story, of course: a slow murder by Society, but Society is People.

There are so many callbacks to Bishop Myriel in the introduction to "Monsieur Madeleine"; I particularly like the echo between "He had only one name for these two kinds of work: gardening. 'The spirit is a garden,' he said." (1.1.5) and "There are no bad herbs, and no bad men; there are only bad cultivators" (1.5.3). (Again: theme of gardening = goodness!) The one big difference seems to be that Myriel was savvier about using his social influence among the wealthy to the benefit of the poor ("When he had money, his visits were to the poor; when he had none, he visited the rich"), while Valjean-as-Madeleine just tries to politely avoid "those who constituted 'society'" and uses only his own resources for charity.

Javert is kind of psychologically fascinating, as a character. He has such a black-and-white view of the world that his brain basically shuts down when he's faced with something that contradicts his expectations (see, e.g., 1.5.7) but also it's constructed on the extremely flimsy grounds of Everyone In Power Is Correct, Everyone Who Is Powerless Deserves It. I like the irony and layered meaning in the line about how "[c]learly he had seen a crime committed"— the crime, in his mind, being "society, represented by a property-holding voter, insulted and attacked by a creature who was an outlaw and an outcast"— vs. the crime in Hugo's eyes (and, one hopes, the reader's) being that society had made Fantine "an outlaw and an outcast" in the first place.

Read The King Must Die by Mary Renault, the first book in a duology retelling the myth of the Greek hero Theseus; this one covers the story up through his return to Athens after slaying the Minotaur. I enjoyed it! It had the feel of a fantasy adventure novel, although it was less fantastic than the original myth— ( basically, the Minotaur is a metaphor? ) There was a certain amount of *waves at Mary Renault*-ness, but for long stretches of the book, I honestly forgot that she was the author; the climax features one of the best action scenes I can remember reading.

Read Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O'Reilly, a heartfelt and laugh-out-loud funny memoir about growing up in Northern Ireland as the ninth of eleven (!) children, raised by a single father after his mother's death when he was five. Best family memoir I've read since Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy.

I've decided that my reading goal for 2023 is to re-read Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, which is probably my all-time favorite book and certainly the most influential; I genuinely don't know who I'd be if I hadn't read this book when I was 13. Having started on January 1st, I'm still on the introduction to Bishop Myriel. Three sentences into Les Mis, Hugo warns that the subsequent multiple chapters dedicated to Myriel "in no way concerns our story," and I feel like people tend to believe him, so I find myself newly struck by the significance of starting his book about the myriad cruelties of society with a portrait of one man living a life of almost ineffable kindness. It also occurs to me that Hugo uses gardening as a shorthand for goodness— off the top of my head, I can think of Myriel, Valjean as a gardener at the convent, and Mabeuf?