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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)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)
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)