SPIDERS GRANTAIRE, or, the best historical discovery i have ever made
so i was searching scanned archives of historical books for references to the names of the amis outside of les mis, like you do, in order to try and find clues for why hugo picked the names that he did. i found a few things (which i’ll make a post about later), but i wasn’t having much luck overall… until i found this sentence in a french scientific journal (Cosmos: revue des sciences et de leurs applications) from 1895:
for those of you who don’t speak french, allow me to translate:
A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Grantaire has, near Philadelphia (United States), the largest spider “farm.”
…okay cosmos, you have my attention. the full article is even better:
and another rough translation:
The art of giving bottled wine the appearance of age. - More and more things are counterfeited in our age. This is why there are forged diamonds and other precious stones, ivory, gold, rubber. Now, here’s an example found in the sale of phony old wines, that is, wine stored in bottles having the appearance of age. To make bottles appear older and obtain a better price for their contents, a new industry was created, that of spider cultivation. A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Grantaire has, near Philadelphia (United States), the largest spider “farm.” His stock usually consists of thousands of spiders originating mostly from the selection of spiders imported from France.
This industry also exists in the Loire region, but on a smaller scale. There are however ten establishments devoted to the cultivation of spiders in this department. These spiders are sold for around 60 francs per hundred, and the clientele consists of french wine-growers who use them for a clever, if not recommendable, purpose.
Three months after the introduction of 60 francs’ worth of spiders to a newly stocked wine cellar, the bottles are covered from cork to cork in spiderwebs. The uneducated person, seeing these bottles completely covered in spiderwebs, naturally concludes that the wine which they contain is old, and so one can get a better price for it.
and it gets better — apparently this story went “viral,” in a nineteenth-century sense, appearing throughout different american newspapers and journals, including the scientific fucking american. here’s an excerpt from the story about it in the hartford locomotive:
“average ami raises 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average ami eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Grantaire, who lives in pennsylvania & raises over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted”
here’s the headline of the san francisco call’s article:
HE HAS A MOTHERFUCKING SPIDER FARM.
the text of the article (which we can all read because it is available online, thank the old gods and the new) includes an interview with spiders grantaire, in which he waxes rhapsodically about his charges in exactly the way that you imagine the grantaire of les mis would:
“They think I feed them now,” said Pierre, “but I fool them for you. They have brains, these little creatures. Ah, they are cunning. After you see them and I tell you of them you will not crush them more. You will say, ‘The spider can teach me something. I will Watch him. He is a diplomat, an architect, a mathematician. His knowledge is worth having.’ Ah, there is a fine fellcw running on your neck. Don’t knock him off. He will not bite you. They are harmless. He wishes to give you a bon jour and make your acquaintance. […]
“But what money is there in it, you ask. Men Dieu, money, money—always money. I, who love my pets, to be always thinking of what they sell for! I will tell you now, and then you will talk no more of money, and I can show you something. A customer comes to me. He is a wine merchant from New York or Philadelphia, or perhaps he writes. He says that he has just stocked a cellar with five-year-old port or Burgundy, or something else. The bottles have brushed clean in shipping. They look like new and common. They will not sell for old wine. He has attached to them labels of twenty, thirty or forty years ago, some year of a grand vintage. He tells me so many hundred bottles. I know how many of my pets will soon cover his cellar in cobwebs of the finest old kind. I put them in little small paper boxes, a pair in a box. I ship then, in a crate, with many holes for air. Maybe I send 200, 300 or 400 spiders. For them I ask half a franc each, si, for every hundred. In two months you would think his cellar was not disturbed for the last forty years. It has cost him $40, or $50 maybe, but he may sell the wine for $1,000 —yes, more than that—above what it had brought without any pets had dressed the bottles in robes of long ago.”
one million stories, please, about a grantaire who miraculously survives the barricade and moves to the united states where he starts a spider farm and keeps the flame of the revolution alive by bilking snobby fat cats out of their wine money.
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