Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Listening on random:
“How Could I Ever Know?”
“Castle on a Cloud”
“Someone Else’s Story”
“I Know Him So Well”
“I’m Not That Girl”
“You Must Love Me”
“Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again”
Good grief, is there anything HAPPY on this playlist?
“Brand New Day” from Dr. Horrible.
Eh, close enough.
After the wedding, Cosette starts spending time with “new acquaintances brought to her by marriage.” Who? All of Marius’ friends are dead.
Note: this is in the middle of a much longer blog entry. Need to decide whether to link just the picture, or u-syndication the whole thing, or what.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)Cosette keeps her feelings hidden, and Marius makes an ass of himself over and over. Hugo says it’s a rule that in these sort of courtships, “the girl never falls into any trap and the young man falls into all of them.” Valjean is convinced that Cosette has no clue who Marius is, so he starts looking daggers at Marius while Marius is making goo-goo eyes at Cosette. At one point, Valjean glares at Marius in a way that “even he could not fail to notice.”
It’s like an eye conversation.
Marius’ eyes (shouting): I LOVE YOU!
Cosette’s eyes (whispering): I love you too.
Valjean’s eyes (whispering coldly): Stay the hell away from my daughter.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)After seeing the courtship from Marius’ point of view, we get to see it again from Cosette’s and Valjean’s. This chapter covers a lot of familiar ground, but it’s critical to make it absolutely clear that Cosette has feelings for Marius as well, and he’s not just stalking some random woman in the Luxembourg gardens and imagining that she’s subtly flirting back.
Hugo makes the interesting point that this courtship at a distance is all that Cosette was ready for at this point. And even though she’s still trying to figure out what this “love” thing is, she instinctively knows she needs to hide it from her father.
She’s right: there is no way Valjean is going to let some punk take away his daughter, the only good thing in his life, leading to an amusing game of cat and mouse as he tries to confirm his suspicions and deflect Marius.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)When Eponine finally finds Marius again, she mentions that Mabeuf called him a baron.
“You can’t be a baron. Barons are old. They go and sit in the Luxembourg, on the sunny side of the château, and read the Quotidienne at a sou a copy.”
I guess this trope is older than I thought.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)After reading Catching Fire, I was amused to see that the criminals in Les Miserables pass messages in and out of prison, and across prison yards, encoded (or sometimes simply hidden) in bread. Eponine checks out the Rue Plumet house while everyone else is in jail, and reports back with a biscuit, indicating that it’s not worth the effort.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)Montparnasse and Éponine have something going on, though it’s not clear what.
Montparnasse escaped capture after the attempted robbery because he left early, “more in a mood to amuse himself with the daughter than play hired assassin for the father.” In a later chapter, he’s described as “perhaps [Thénardier’s] unofficial son-in-law.”
It’s not clear how far it goes, though he’s more interested than she is. (She clearly has a thing for Marius from the moment you first meet her as a teenager.) In any case, it’s odd that Hugo dances around this, considering how frank he is about, for instance, Fantine’s relationship with Tholomyes.
Mostly in
https://hyperborea.org/les-mis/book/lark/
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)I love this scanning error in the Kindle edition of Les Miserables: “It is her own thoughts that are reaching meh!”
That, and it’s amusing that Marius believes in telepathy.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)
At one point during the campaign to build up support for the revolution, Enjolras starts sending his lieutenants out to recruit various guilds and workers for their cause. He has one last group to recruit. He was thinking of sending Marius, but he doesn’t show up anymore. (He’s despondent over having caught a glimpse of the girl whose name he still doesn’t know after all this time, and realizing he’ll never see her again.)
Grantaire volunteers.
“But you don’t believe in anything?”
“I believe in you.” *bats eyelashes* (OK, no eyelashes).
Yeah, he’s desperate to prove himself, specifically to Enjolras. It’s never entirely clear whether it’s hero worship or a crush (though in the case of the latter, it’s not as if Hugo would have made it clear in the 1860s)
Or…maybe he’s not so eager. Enjolras checks up on him later, and he’s playing dominoes with the marble-workers he was supposed to recruit.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)When we meet the Thenardiers again in Paris, they’ve lost the inn, and M. Thenardier is running a series of scams begging for money through letters. He diversifies his identities, tactics and targets in the pitches. Today he’d claim to be a Nigerian prince in one letter and a lottery commissioner in another. But the letter begging his neighbor (a penniless student named Marius) for money is about as honest as it could be…except for his name, which he’s given as Jondrette.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)Eponine in the musical is sad, but seems to be mostly getting along as best as she can under the circumstances. In the book, though, the Thenardiers are dirt poor after they lose the inn. She’s malnourished, dressed in rags that don’t have a hope of keeping her warm even in the snow, has a husky voice like “a bronchitic old man,” is missing teeth, and is down to skin and bones. “A blend of fifty and fifteen.” When she first visits Marius, she hasn’t eaten in three days.
Hugo compares her, and girls like her, to “flowers dropped in the street which lie fading in the mud until a cartwheel comes to crush them.”
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)It takes most of a year for Marius to learn Cosette’s name. Once while they’re stealing glances at each other in the park, Valjean drops his handkerchief by accident. It’s embroidered U.F. for Ultime Fauchelevent (his current alias). Marius finds it, believes it’s hers, and decides her name must be Ursula. Later, when he learns that her father’s name starts with a U, he’s despondent, because the one thing he thought he knew about her has been taken away from him.
Since identity is the one thing that Hugo seems to keep limited to POV, for hundreds of pages they’re referred to by Courfeyrac’s nicknames for the duo: Monsieur Leblanc (because of his hair) and Mademoisele Lanoire (because she usually wears black, or did when she was younger).
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)While the musical takes liberties in condensing a year of Marius and Cosette’s courtship into two days, there is precedent in the novel for love at first sight…or at least, love at first glance.
Marius notices Jean Valjean and Cosette frequenting the same park as him for over a year, but pays them no mind until he stops going for a while, then comes back and she’s hit puberty. Even then, he doesn’t really notice until one day Marius’ and Cosette’s eyes meet. *ZAP!*
Suddenly he’s very self-conscious. The next day, he starts wearing his best clothes when going to the park, making sure he gets seen by her, and then starts thinking, huh, maybe the gentleman might think I’m acting a little odd.
One day they walk by his bench, and she glances at him. He’s overcome…but also worried because his boots are dusty and he’s sure she must have noticed.
They steal glances at each other, flirting from a distance. Marius starts hiding behind trees and statues so that he and Cosette can see each other but Valjean can’t see him.
About this time Valjean starts getting suspicious and starts changing their routine to see if Marius will follow. Marius, being an idiot, does. Not long after, Valjean stops bringing Cosette to the park.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)To read aloud is to assure oneself that one is reading, and there are persons who read very loudly indeed, as though positively proclaiming the fact.
Like everyone else he had a label, since at that time nobody could live without one, but his ‘ism’ was of a non-committed kind: he was not a royalist, a Bonapartist, a chartist, an Orleanist, or an anarchist — simply a book-ist.
Marius is one of those people who throws himself whole-heartedly into his beliefs, especially when they reverse.
He grows up in a Restoration-friendly household that hates Napoleon, the Republic, and the Empire, but when he discovers they’ve lied about his father, who was a decorated soldier under Napoleon, he completely throws himself into supporting the Republic, to the extent that he embarrasses himself in front of his friends who, while they support the ideals of the Republic, aren’t too fond of Napoleon.
Later on he ties all his well-being to his hoped-for life with Cosette, going from the heights of happiness when they’re together to the depths of complete and utter despair when he fears he’ll never see her again.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)Anyone walking through the little town of Vernon in those days, and crossing the beautiful stone bridge which, let us hope, will soon be replaced by some hideous construction of cables and girders…
Part 1: Fantine didn’t start with Fantine, and Part 2: Cosette didn’t start with Cosette, so naturally, Part 3: Marius doesn’t start with Marius either. It starts with the urchins of Paris.
Paris has the best street urchins, or at least they did back in the good old days. Victor Hugo presents a fascinating, idealized description of the typical Paris urchin, then goes on to present the urchin as a microcosm of Paris, which he sees as a microcosm of — and the center of — the world. Let’s just say this won’t be the last time Hugo expounds on the wonders of Paris.
Eventually we’re introduced to Gavroche, the family he occasionally visits (name given as Jondrette, though we get a few clues as to who they really are), and their next-door neighbor, a penniless student named Marius.
Coincidentally, they live in the same dreary tenement that Valjean once rented a room in when he first brought Cosette to Paris. This will not be the last coincidence in this book, not by a long shot.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)
Fauchelevent comes up with a great cover story to get Valjean to join him as assistant gardener and enroll Cosette in the convent school. Only one problem: they have to come in through the front door. He can sneak Cosette out in a basket, but a grown man?
Meanwhile, he’s also trying to figure out how to get an empty coffin out of the grounds, since the convent is defying city regulations to bury their dead on-site. How can he POSSIBLY solve these two problems?
What follows is a surprising example of gallows humor. It was around here that I started really noticing Hugo’s dry wit, and it’s actually quite funny to watch the plan fall apart as one thing goes wrong after another. The grave digger Fauchelevent had planned to get drunk so he could sneak Valjean out of the coffin turns out to be dead. The new guy? Teetotaler. Hugo has fun with his quirks: a failed writer who still works as a scribe for illiterate clients. Love letters by day, graves by night…
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)Becoming Cosette’s surrogate father is as major a turning point for Valjean’s soul as the incident with the bishop. This doesn’t come through in the stage musical at all, but they made it central in the movie, and Victor Hugo flat-out compares the two epiphanies in the novel: The bishop taught him virtue, while Cosette taught him the meaning of love. Hugo even ponders whether Valjean’s no-good-deed-goes-unpunished experience would have sent him back into bitterness if he hadn’t met her.
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)