watched your raven cycle amv In Dreams again and just wanted to let you know i still love it so much!!! it's such a masterpiece, makes me so happy every time i come around and watch it again <3
Awww thank you so much!! I can’t believe people are still rewatching it since the video turned 10 years old this year 💀 Absolutely unreal. It was so much work, but has definitely been one of the more rewarding creative projects I’ve done because of the trc community. Fandom of all time truly.
Long story short, when I was reading Les Mis last year, I thought it would be fun if I compiled a list of books each of the characters in Les Amis have canonically read based on the references they make. It was all fun and games until I realized just how many allusions Grantaire makes and then I regretted all of my life choices. This man won't shut up. His is definitely the longest booklist, no question. If you've read any of my other booklists (which you can find here) and wondered why I dropped off the face of the earth for a while, it was because the Grantaire booklist is twice the length of every other booklist. I actually had to split it into two posts because I had too many links and tumblr cut me off.
It's worth noting, Grantaire probably manages to read so much because he canonically goes to the public library!! We love to see it, even if he calls it a pile of oyster shells… whatever that means.
The characters in Les Amis make lots of references to Ancient Greece, but Grantaire makes the most allusions to Greek mythology of the group. According to the Encyclopédie entry on "Mythologie" as early as 1765: "This is why knowledge, at least superficial knowledge, of la fable is so widespread. Our theater, our lyrical and dramatic plays, and our poetry of all genres allude to it constantly; the engravings, paintings, and statues that decorate our cabinets, galleries, ceilings, and gardens are almost always derived from la fable." (translation from Dorothy Johnson's book on the topic, link) So apparently this obsession with Greek mythology wasn't at all unusual for the time. In that book by Dorothy Johnson, she makes the argument that it was especially popular during and after the French Revolution because artists turned to mythology to use as shorthand for big, complex emotional ideas they were having during such turbulent times. I'm sure you could say a lot about our current era and the renewed popularity of Greek mythology-inspired stories for us too, but that would be its own essay.
TLDR: Graintaire is an avid reader who reads a wide range of genres. He reads the most fiction of anyone in the group and, even in his nonfiction, he definitely prefers a juicy story to a true story. Sometimes he says things that are just plain wrong and he frequently comes frustratingly close to having some really good takes but always fucks it up at the last minute. He also makes a lot of references that foreshadow he is going to kill himself and a lot of references to stories about doomed or unrequited yearning. Hm, wonder what that could be about.
Also, I should specify that there are a lot of historical people and events that Grantaire name-drops that are not necessarily linked to a particular piece of literature, so I’m not necessarily going to cover those ones here. If you notice any random Russian monarch or battle that Grantaire mentions that's missing here, it’s because I’m trying to just stick to literary allusions or historical factoids that are tied specifically to a piece of literature. Sorry, I had to draw the line somewhere or this list would never end. So let's get into it...
La mort de Loizerolles by Francois-Simon Loizerolles (French)
Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères by Charlotte Robespierre (French, English excerpt)
“All those words — justice for the people, rights of man, social contract, French Revolution, Republic, democracy, humanity, civilization, religion, progress — for Grantaire came very close to having no meaning whatsoever. He could not take them seriously. Scepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had left him with not a single idea intact. He lived with irony. This was his fundamental premise: ‘There’s only one sure thing, my full glass.’ He derided any self-sacrifice on the part of anyone, father or brother, Loizerolles or the younger Robespierre. ‘A lot of good it’s done them to end up dead!’ he would cry. He used to say about the crucifix, ‘That was a good piece of carpentry.’” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
The very first thing we learn about Grantaire is that he’s cynical to a fault, and we’re provided with an itemized list of things that he thinks are particularly pointless. These are important receipts because later Grantaire will list off a bunch of things he supposedly cares about to impress Enjolras, and it’s almost the same list as these things he apparently tells everyone all the time that he thinks are stupid... He’s so embarrassing sometimes. But, anyway, Hugo makes reference to a couple specific stories from pop culture of the time to serve as specific examples of people Grantaire finds particularly pointless. Loizerolles and Robespierre were both people who died in Paris in the late 1700’s, who sacrificed themselves out of love and became immortalized by plenty of newspaper articles, operas, and books written about them by the survivors they left behind.
When Grantaire makes fun of Loizerolles, he’s talking about the lawyer Jean-Simon Aved de Loizerolles. This guy was famously imprisoned along with his son, the poet Francois-Simon, during the Reign of Terror and it was commonly believed that when the guards came looking for a Loizerolles, he stepped up and took his son’s place at the guillotine to save his son’s life. It was later discovered that he was probably the one who was supposed to be executed after all, but it was a well known story at the time about a father’s selfless love. There was even a one-act opera about it called Loizerolles ou L'héroïsme paternel that premiered at the Théâtre des Amis de la Patrie on Christmas day 1795, and according to this review I found (link) it was apparently pretty accurate to how the papers talked about the story. That is to say, extremely heroic and sensationalized. Later, within Grantaire’s lifetime, the son of Loizerolles survived and wrote a poem, La mort de Loizerolles, about his dad (originally published in 1813, republished with additional material in 1828) that also memorialized this sensational, fictional version of events (link). Grantaire will always prefer a juicy story over a true story.
The younger Robespierre mentioned here does not refer to our boy Maximilien Robespierre, but his younger brother Augustin Robespierre. When the Reign of Terror was coming to a close and Maximilien Robespierre’s execution was decided, Augustin reportedly volunteered to be executed as well instead of forsaking his brother. It’s kind of funny that our first example is an execution that was perpetuated by Robespierre and the other execution was targeted at Robespierre. I have to imagine this was an intentional contrast, emphasizing that people all over the political spectrum are martyring themselves for their loved ones and it means equally nothing to Grantaire. (And also Jesus, who is not really on the French political spectrum but also famously sacrificed himself and does not get Grantaire’s respect for it. We’ll get back to him in a minute, put a pin in it for now.)
Basically all these people voluntarily went to their own execution out of love for someone else, and Victor Hugo tells us, in detail, just how stupid Grantaire thinks they are for doing that. Before, y’know, Grantaire will do exactly that himself by the end of the novel. For most of his time in the novel, Grantaire claims to be devoted to Enjolras entirely, but we watch him repeatedly fail to really understand Enjolras or the kind of ideas that Enjolras represents. And it’s because of this fundamental difference: Enjolras would die for something and Grantaire wouldn’t. Grantaire’s whole character arc is leading him to understanding the power of legacy and love and the point of being alive, which will ironically culminate in him finally dying for something. So when Grantaire makes fun of Loizerolles or Robespierre or Jesus, Victor Hugo is immediately foreshadowing that Grantaire is going to become that exact kind of person.
Henri IV’s Hunting Party by Charles Collé (English, English song)
“A womanizer and a gambler, often drunk, he liked to annoy these young idealists by constantly singing to himself, to the tune of ‘Long Live Henri IV’, ‘I loves the girls and I loves good wine.’” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
These are two lines from ‘Long Live Henri IV’ or ‘Vive Henri IV’ as heard in the three-act comedy Henri IV’s Hunting Party (La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV) by Charles Collé, though the melody is far older and actually served as a leitmotif for French royalty in various plays throughout the 19th century. Including Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty! The tune was used as the unofficial anthem of France during the Bourbon Restoration period with different lyrics and during the French Revolution to rally support for the royalist cause and praise the monarchy. So obviously Grantaire is being a little shit and singing this very royalist song but specifically only the parts from the theatre version about wine and womanizing and not the actual pro-monarchy stuff, just to be annoying. It’s so silly. What an absolutely dumb thing for him to do for no good reason. Classic Grantaire.
The Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius (English, French)
Tenth Nemean Ode by Pindar (English)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja. Their existence depends on being fronted by another man. Their names follow on and are never written without the conjunction ‘and’ in front of them. Their lives do not belong to them. They are the adjunct of a fate that is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was the reverse of Enjolras.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Alright, here we go. In his introduction, Grantaire is compared to a whole list of guys known for being a counterpart to another guy, the “reverse of Enjolras,” though in his case the bond is unreciprocated. I’m going to speedily cover all of them here except for one (Pylades) which I’m saving for later because that one comes back at the end in a more significant way.
The first on the list is Pollux. Castor and Pollux are twin half-brothers with the same mother but different fathers. Pollux has a god for a father (usually Zeus) and Castor has a mortal for a father (usually Tyndareus, king of Sparta). If you’re familiar with the myth of Leda and the swan, these are two of the kids that come after that. Castor and Pollux make appearances in several stories but they’re hardly ever the main characters. Take The Agonautica, for example. In that story, they’re just two of the ensemble of guys on the Argo. They get one standout moment when the Argo lands on an island with a king that challenges everyone to box him and since Pollux is supposedly an excellent boxer he volunteers for the match and wins (except he punches the king to death so drama ensues anyway). This obviously doesn’t have that much to do with the comparison being made here in Les Mis, though we are told elsewhere that Grantaire is good at boxing, but it is representative of the way that these two characters always seem to pop up as a duo. I found that the two of them are referenced pretty frequently as an iconic duo in French newspapers at the time. And the first translation of The Argonautica from Greek to French was done by Jean-Jacques-Antoine Caussin de Perceval in 1796, so it would still be pretty contemporary. I’m including it here because it was probably a large part of the zeitgeist regarding the two and for the boxing factoid.
However, I’d say the main myth that’s exclusively about these two characters is probably the origin story of the constellation Gemini. Pindar covers it in one of his Victory Odes, telling the story of Pollux choosing to give up his immortal place on Olympus to give his dying brother half his godliness so that he wouldn’t go to Hades alone. I’m sure this isn’t foreshadowing for anything that might happen in Les Mis.
The Iliad by Homer (English)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Next up we have Patroclus, of Achilles and Patroclus fame. There are a lot of references to The Iliad throughout the revolutionary parts of Les Mis, but Grantaire isn’t around for any of the epic battle scenes that get compared to the Trojan War. He’s just an unrequited version of this guy who is primarily known for being a doomed companion who dies for Achilles.
People have been arguing since time immemorial whether Achilles and Patroclus had a romantic or platonic relationship. Aeschines says it’s obviously gay and Homer is a coward for not saying they’re gay (link). Xenophon says no they’re just friends and also Orestes and Pylades are just friends too, you people don’t know what friends are like (link). Plato reports that Phaedrus says it’s gay but only if Achilles bottoms and Aeschylus is dead wrong for saying Achilles tops when he’s such an obvious twink (link). Aeschylus apparently had strong feelings about Achilles as a gay top but unfortunately his Iliad fanfic Myrmidones is mostly lost to time. Hundreds of years later, in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s classic medieval epic poem Roman de Troie verses 13163-13194, Hector specifically mentions Achilles and Patroclus have sex but is really homophobic about it and implies that the gods are using him to punish Achilles for being gay* (link). In the 17th century, Shakespeare has Achilles and Patroclus cameo as lovers in Troilus and Cressida (link), though the nature of this cameo is also debated, along with Shakespeare’s own sexuality. There are countless, very prolific people from history weighing in on this for over a thousand years and none of them agree. This discourse will last forever.
So idk how Victor Hugo interprets it, but he chose to use this relationship to characterize how Grantaire feels about Enjolras. Make of that what you will.
*=Hector very notably loses his fight against Achilles right after he says this, so uhhh I guess the gods said gay rights after all?
The Aeneid by Virgil (English)
“Episode of Nisus and Euryalus” Hours of Idleness by Lord Byron (English)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Nisus and Euryalus are minor characters in book 5 and 9 of The Aeneid who die tragically together. Hmmm, this dying together thing is starting to seem like a theme on this list. In her Les Mis dissertation, Grace Eloise Ebberly highlights the parallels between Nisus’ death scene and Grantaire’s later on, adding another layer to the foreshadowing in this introduction (link).
In general, Nisus and Euryalus are inseparable companions and, like Patroclus and Achilles, there is a lot of ambiguity in the ancient source material about whether these two were meant to be lovers or very good friends. In 1807, Lord Byron devoted an entire poem in his Hours of Idleness to Nisus and Euryalus, paraphrasing just their parts in The Aeneid. And, well, it’s Lord Byron, so obviously it’s full of queer undertones. Actually, in the same year, on July 5, 1807, he wrote a letter to his friend Elizabeth Bridget Pigot where he uses a reference to Nisus and Euryalus as if it’s recognizable shorthand for being gay and in love (link). Very interesting. He also mentions Orestes and Pylades as gay shorthand too, but just keep putting a pin in that for now. I promise we’ll come back to it.
And, just for the record, Victor Hugo was almost definitely familiar with the Byron version. Not only was Byron generally a huge force in the Romantic movement, Victor Hugo wrote an obituary for Byron after his passing in 1824 (link) where he expresses admiration for his poetry and says he wishes they could have been friends. It’s actually very sweet, even though he can’t resist doing literary criticism of Byron’s poetic transitions and over-the-top character descriptions during his obituary lmfao. Never change, Victor Hugo.
Toxaris by Lucian (English)
On Friendship by Michel de Montaigne (English)
Testament of Eudamidas by Poussin (link)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Eudamidas is one of the lesser known guys on this list by modern standards, but he would’ve been pretty familiar in Grantaire’s time. The story of Eudamidas was originally told by Lucian of Samasota in ~160 AD, then retold in French by the Renaissance philosopher Montaigne in his 1580 essay On Friendship, and then it inspired the 1644-1648 painting Testament of Eudamidas by Poussin (link), which had a massive resurgence in popularity in the late 18th century and brought Eudamidas back into the pop consciousness of Revolutionary era Parisians (link).
As for the story itself, Eudamidas had two significant friends: Aretaeus of Corinth and Charixenus of Sicyon. Both of them were richer than him and so Eudamidas left the care of his elderly mother and unmarried daughter to them in his will. When he died, only Aretaeus was still alive, but he reportedly honored the will, took in Eudamidas’s family, and cared for them as if they were his own. It’s a bit of an outlier in Grantaire’s list since there are no battles or glorious mutual deaths at the end of it, but it still has a lot to say about what it means to devote your life to someone and know that devotion is reciprocated, especially when one of you dies.
The most famous French translation by Michel de Montaigne was published after the death of his own close friend and platonic soulmate La Boétie, and I think it goes particularly hard on that theme. By his own account, he was using his writing to work through the loss of the single most significant relationship in his life. And the conclusion he came to is that Eudamidas was doing his friends a favor by asking for their help, not the other way around. That true friendship means you wouldn’t begrudgingly take on responsibilities for your friend, but that you’d be happy for those responsibilities because they give you a chance to demonstrate how much you love your friend. That’s genuinely really sweet. Sometimes we want our friends to inconvenience us: to ask us for that trip to the airport or to cover dinner for them or to help them move. It means they trust us and that we can show them how much that trust is met with our love in return.
And that’s, fundamentally, the relationship that Grantaire cannot have with Enjolras. This trust, this joy at asking or being asked to do things for someone else just to make their life easier, is not there. Oof.
The Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian (English)
Life of Alexander by Plutarch (English)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Hephaestion was the childhood friend and lifelong companion of Alexander the Great, with a relationship that was often compared to Achilles and Patroclus by historians and also by Alexander himself. A lot. If you learn one thing from this reference, it should be that Alexander the Great absolutely kinned Achilles. According to Plutarch 8.2-3, he even slept with a copy of The Iliad under his pillow… though this might not be strictly true, Plutarch is a little flexible with historical accuracy (link, link). But I like to believe it, because it’s funny. And, yet again, just like with Achilles and Patroclus, it’s not really agreed upon whether Alexander and Hephaestion were best friends or lovers. I could list sources weighing in on both sides here as well, but honestly it would be redundant because a lot of the discourse comes down to the constant comparisons between the two and the Patrochilles relationship. So it’s essentially the same discourse again. Arrian and Plutarch wrote two of the major ancient biographies that cover the life of Alexander, and neither of them say anything specific about the nature of the relationship, though they both mention Achilles and Patroclus a lot. What they do make clear is just how important this relationship was to the both of them. When Hephaestion suddenly died at age 32, “Alexander’s grief was uncontrollable” (Plutarch) and he actually died within a year too.
If you’re starting to see a pattern in the doomed, ambiguously gay guys that Grantaire is being compared to… Yeah. That’s kind of the vibe here. One example could’ve been a coincidence, but Victor Hugo is really making this a pattern.
Télephe by Jean-Joseph de Pechméja (French)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Last on this list of guys is the most contemporary reference in Grantaire’s time: the French author Jean-Joseph de Pechméja and his doctor friend Jean Baptiste Léon Dubreuil. Professionally, Pechméja was probably best known for publishing radical anti-slavery passages in Raynal's Histoire des deux indes and his socialist Utopian novel Télephe, which tells the story of Hercules’ son Telephus and was published the year before Pechméja died in 1785. He also dedicated the book to Dubreuil (“Le respect, la tendresse, offrent cet hommag e, à la vertu austèlc, à l'amitié généreuse, à la puissance conservatrice”).
Pechméja and Dubreuil were lifelong friends who moved to Paris and lived together for at least a decade, reportedly sharing finances and everything else. Very cute. In 1785, Dubreuil got sick and died, then Pechméja died a few days later. The two were buried under the same tombstone. A translation of the engraving on that tombstone was roughly: “Here lie two friends: Esteem, gratitude, and the tenderest friendship have erected this monument for them.” I actually had to go on a bit of a deep dive about this tombstone because I was seeing people repeat this quote a lot, but I couldn’t find any evidence of it actually existing when I checked out the graveyard’s catalogue of headstones. Turns out, this is because the tombstone was repossessed and destroyed by the state during the Reign of Terror. Oh no! (link)
At first glance, you might get the impression this is kind of an obscure reference, but not so! While searching through newspapers and literature from the time, I found so many references to these guys all the way through the 1860’s. They were a hot topic! Even Benjamin Franklin had a copy of Pechméja’s book (link). I found a few letters to the editor in the Journal de Paris where someone from Saint-Germain en Laye wrote in to report on the extraordinary friendship exhibited by these two men (og letter on August 11, 1785 (link) and a follow up letter on August 23, 1785 (link)). This is the earliest version of the story I could find without looking too hard, and it has a lot of elements that are used in every subsequent retelling, like calling them a modern day Orestes and Pylades. A lot of people do that. For example, the 1813 poem, La Forêt de Saint-Germain (link), also calls them the Orestes and Pylades of their time, as does this L'Industriel de Saint-Germain-en Laye article from July 30, 1852 (link) covering the anniversary of the hospital in Saint-Germain. The two of them were principle benefactors of the hospital “who provided, says Dulaure, an example of this friendship offered to us by fabulous Greece, in Orestes and Pilades.” Then another article from L'Industriel de Saint-Germain-en Laye in December 12, 1857 (link) describes things to see on a Historic Walk near Paris which concludes with the story of Pechméja and Dubreuil, calling them a modern day Orestes and Pylades and Nisus and Euryalus! So, yeah, it’s probably not a coincidence that all these guys who are always being compared to each other are all together on the list Victor Hugo has made here in Les Mis. They are basically the guys to reference in early-to-mid 1800’s France when you want to describe a super epic friendship between two men.
So, overall, whether you interpret all of the guys from this list as friends or lovers or a mix of both, the important thing is that all of these men were utterly devoted to another person. They are remembered for the sacrifices they made out of love for their most important person. But Grantaire scoffs and makes sarcastic asides about people who do that, and that’s why his yearning for a connection like Pollux or Patroclus is not ever going to be reciprocated. He’s scrambling to make an authentic connection when he cannot be authentic to save his life. This list is essentially Victor Hugo executing a particularly devastating combo move to hammer home why Grantaire is fundamentally incapable of getting the love he craves. And he won’t be able to until he finally understands why all these men gave their lives for their companion. But that comes later.
The Bible, Book of Ecclesiastes (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘Ecclesiastes says: “All is vanity.” I agree with that fellow, who probably never existed. Not wanting to go about stark-naked, Zero clothed himself in vanity. O vanity!’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
“He used to say about the crucifix, ‘That was a good piece of carpentry.’” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
“[Grantaire:] ‘Ah! there’s no morality on this earth, I call to witness the myrtle, symbol of love, the laurel, symbol of war, the silly old olive, symbol of peace, the apple tree that almost choked Adam on one of its pips, and the fig tree, grand-papa of petticoats.’” (Les Mis 4.12.2)
Much like with Enjolras and the Book of Ezekiel, we’ve got another Victor Hugo-assigned Bible passage for Grantaire: Ecclesiastes. I asked my friend who went to Catholic school to give me the rundown on Ecclesiastes (thanks Jared!) and it sounds like a good fit for Grantaire. It’s got a lot of philosophy that circles themes of heaviness, devotion, depression, and nihilism. It can be skeptical and contrary, and people still debate whether the ultimate theme is that God gives life meaning or that life has no meaning. Even if you haven’t read the book, you’ve probably run into some reference to it. Several idioms like “nothing new under the sun” come from Ecclesiastes and it has its fingerprints all over so much of Western literature, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Hemingway. So that’s cool!
Grantaire makes a few other irreverent jokes about the Bible throughout Les Mis that are not based on Ecclesiastes (the part in his introduction where he makes fun of Jesus for dying, later when he jokes about God being broke, when he calls Adam’s fig leaf the “grand-papa of petticoats”, etc.) so he’s likely generally familiar with its content at large. He actually invokes a lot of religions throughout the book - he’ll talk about Islam, Olympus, and Christianity all in the same breath. But I still think Ecclesiastes deserves a special shout out because it’s the subject of a drunken monologue Grantaire gives for 3 WHOLE PAGES. He starts by invoking the line from Ecclesiastes about how “all is vanity” and most of the subsequent allusions are examples of the ways that people are fools for vanity - dressing up their vocabulary or station in life just to feel like they’re better than other people, when in fact this belief in their own superiority makes them terrible. Basically, life is pointless and everyone is terrible. An appropriate theme for Grantaire’s long drunk rambling about how he wants to drink to forget life, yeesh. He is so not okay.
One last note before we get into it, but I cannot figure out this thing Grantaire says about Zero clothing himself in vanity. It might be a typo for Zeno, but I really couldn’t find anything in Zeno’s paradoxes or the history of stoicism that would specifically relate to this line either. It could also be a joke about the concept of the number zero I guess. Idk, I’m at a loss. I feel like sometimes Grantaire just says things.
The Animal Kingdom Vol. 3 by Georges Cuvier and Pierre-Andre Latreille (French)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘a woodlouse is a pterygibranchia.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
This is part of a long list Grantaire rattles off making fun of people for calling simple things big words to sound smarter or more important. Most of these examples are basic synonyms, but this one is a very specific reference to the French zoologist Pierre-Andre Latreille, who did pretty significant early work in the classification of insects, including this defunct term for a subclass of isopod crustaceans. Early efforts to create a system of taxonomy for animals tended to ignore insects altogether, but in the early 1800’s there was a sudden boom in zoologists attempting to figure out how to classify them, Latreille included (link). There wasn’t one agreed-upon method of subdividing insects at the time, so lots of books and pamphlets were getting published in such quick succession that often even the zoologists that agreed with each other would miss the latest updates and publish conflicting systems. Le Règne Animal (The Animal Kingdom) was a massive project by French naturalist Georges Cuvier to classify the entire animal kingdom using comparative anatomy. The 1817 first edition used Latreille’s sixth system of crustacean classification, which included the ptérygibranche, but by its second printing Latreille had already moved on to a new system of classification and the term was removed from the book. So we know literally the exact book Grantaire would have read to see this word.
This is a very significant book, no doubt, but the word itself is from such a specific point in time, only made official in a specific number of books, about such a specific animal. I’ve seen some translations of Les Mis actually replace this word altogether because it’s so defunct and obscure. I have no idea why this is something Victor Hugo remembered and cared about enough to reference unless this is like the French 1800’s version of “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.” But I have to guess that its hyper-specific nature is part of the joke here.
“Caligula” Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (English)
Ballad of the New Sir John Barleycorn (English excerpt)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘Kings make a plaything of human pride. Caligula appointed a horse as consul. Charles II knighted a Sir Loin. So now take pride of place between Consul Incitatus and Baron of Beef.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Still going on his rant about vanity, Grantaire makes reference to two infamous stories about corrupt monarchs using their unchecked power to do ridiculous things.
First up, Emperor Caligula. Most of the information we know about Caligula comes from the historian Suetonius, whose account is not flattering. He talks at length about how much Caligula loved his favorite horse: he sent soldiers to quiet down neighborhoods so his horse’s sleep wouldn’t be disturbed, gave the horse furniture and a retinue of slaves, invited people to eat dinner with the horse, and intended to make the horse a Consul. Suetonius actually theorizes at the end of the chapter that someone might have drugged Caligula and gave him brain damage. You know you’ve hit a low point when the historian recording your life assumes you must have undiagnosed brain damage to explain your behavior.
Second up, we’ve got the myth of Sir Loin. According to folklore, Charles II gave this name to an excellent cut of beef. Apparently the pun “Sir Loin” can be found in writing as early as 1630 (predating Charles II) and the term “a baron of beef” appears in Johnson’s Dictionary as early as 1775 so this is almost definitely not a real thing that happened. Yet again we can see that Grantaire does not always pick the most accurate sources for his pop culture drama. This one actually gave me quite the run-around because over and over again I kept finding sources from the 1800’s explaining this joke (link, link, link) and almost all of them claimed it was a verse from the Ballad of the New Sir John Barleycorn, but I cannot for the life of me find a full version of the song with this verse in it. But I know in my heart this has to be the source, because it’s a weird little folk song about alcohol! So of course Grantaire would know it! But idk, I’ll only ever know those couple of lines I guess. Maybe it is only those couple of lines? Truly a mystery.
Bacchus and Ariadne by Antoine-Jean Gros (1820) (link)
Portrait of Jean-Antoine Chapel by Antoine-Jean Gros (1824) (link)
Portrait of Madame Récamier by Antoine-Jean Gros (1825) (link)
Le Génie de la France anime les Arts, protège l'Humanité by Antoine-Jean Gros (1827) (link)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘However, I’ve always been witty. When I was a pupil of Gros, instead of messing about with paints I spent my time filching apples. Painting is an art of abstraction." (Les Mis 3.4.4)
This anecdote refers to the French painter Antoine-Jean Gros. He’s mostly known for his paintings of Napoleon and the fiery, expressive style of his brushstrokes that helped influence the early Romantic movement. He was also a student of Jacques Louis David, who helped inspire the popularity of mythology in visual art at the time, and Gros was very devoted to his master’s legacy. However, Gros is mostly being referenced here to set up a grammatical pun. In French, Grantaire ends his little story about studying art under Gros by saying “rapin est le mâle de rapine,” which is basically saying that he spent his time as an art student stealing apples because he knows that rapin (painter’s assistant) is the masculine form of rapine (thievery). Ohoho, tasteful chuckle. They just cut this joke entirely from most of the English versions lol. But, to be fair, I don’t know how I’d translate this joke either.
Anyway, this is obviously not a book or literary reference, but I had to include it because for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why everyone in the fandom thought Grantaire was a painter. Egg on my face. Turns out, beyond claiming to be a student at an artist’s studio here, Grantaire actually makes a lot of references to paintings or stories that are specifically made popular by paintings. I’ve already mentioned one (Testament of Eudamidas), but there are a few more coming up as well. No one else in the book does this nearly as much, it feels like an intentional choice by Victor Hugo, which is really cool. But, canonically, Grantaire spent more time stealing apples than painting, so everybody take note of that.
I’m not sure exactly when Grantaire was supposedly a student in Gros’s studio. Students generally ranged in age from 15-20’s so, since Grantaire is 25 when he says this in 1828, that means Grantaire could’ve studied under him basically at any point between 1818-1827, though most likely early in that range. According to the 1857 obituary of the artist Eugine Goyet (link), Gros’s atelier had sixty students at least one year when Goyet studied there between 1816-1827. In 1820, another one of Gros’s students, Louis Boilly, made a charcoal sketch of at least 25 students currently studying in Gros’s studio (link). So it seems like the position wasn’t so exclusive that it would be completely unrealistic for Grantaire to have actually done this. It’s a bit of a brag because it was a pretty reputable studio, but it was also during Gros’s critical flop era, so Grantaire wouldn’t have assisted on any of Gros’s really famous pieces. I’ve included a list of the paintings Gros’s studio put out during the range of possible dates that Grantaire might’ve been assisting him. (Two of them even have fruit in it - the apples, oh no! Gros, watch out!) Personally, because of the earlier timeframe and the subject matter, I’m tempted to say Grantaire was around for the painting of Bacchus and Ariadne because… well, it’s Bacchus, god of wine, that’s too perfect. But I have no definitive proof. It’s just the vibes.
Speaking of vibes, of all the artists Victor Hugo could’ve name-dropped, another reason he might’ve chosen Gros was that the guy was famously depressed and eventually drowned himself in the Seine in 1835. So even though he’s not dead at this point in the book, a reader would know to associate Grantaire with that vibe. Especially during this drunken monologue where Grantaire keeps talking about how he hates life and happiness is a farce. If my friend was talking like this, I’d be worried. So, on top of getting a fun anecdote about Grantaire’s art studies, we get another bit of subtle foreshadowing that this guy will probably kill himself. All from a terrible pun about stealing apples.
“Diogenes” Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (English)
The School of Athens by Raphael (link)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘There are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes’ cloak.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
“[Grantaire:] ‘In Paris even the rag-pickers are sybarites. Diogenes would just as soon have been a rag-picker on Place Maubert as a philosopher in Piraeus.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
“[Grantaire:] ‘That pile of oyster-shells they call a library puts me off thinking. All that paper! All that ink! All that scribbling! The amount that’s been written! Which numbskull was it that said man was a featherless biped?’” (Les Mis 4.12.2)
It completely tracks that Grantaire reads up on Diogenes the Cynic, one of the founders of cynicism and a complete troll. This is probably his idol. Diogenes rejected materialism and lived in voluntary poverty for most of his life, so his cloak was famously tattered. Apparently he largely did this as a statement about the vanity of his fellow philosophers and their opulent, exclusive purple robes. So these first two quotes are both a good example of a thing with many holes, and a reference to someone who also thinks that other people are full of themselves and deserve to be mocked. It’s an economical reference. And it’s a fact that’s mostly immortalized in paintings! I told you there would be more painting references. Diogenes’ tattered cloak was depicted most memorably in Raphael’s The School of Athens. And, in fact, a tapestry copy of that very painting was commissioned by Louis XIV in 1689 and has hung in the French National Assembly Chamber since 1879 (link). This obviously would have been after Les Mis was published, but I think it helps demonstrate the presence this painting had in France at the time.
Later, in 4.12.2, Grantaire makes a pun about the library by referencing a famous debate between Plato and Diogenes. The one about man being a featherless biped. You might have heard this one before, it occasionally makes the rounds on tumblr for whatever inscrutable reason certain historical anecdotes gain tumblr immortality. We know about this little story because Diogenes Laertius (a different Diogenes) wrote about it in his biography of his namesake. Basically, “sans plume” can either mean without a feather or without a feather quill, so he’s essentially saying man can’t be a featherless biped because the people in the library are never without their feather quills.
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare (English)
Le Mort de César by Voltaire (French)
Natural History, Book 34 by Pliny the Elder (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘Whom do you admire, the man killed or his killer? Caesar or Brutus? Generally people are in favour of the killer. Long live Brutus! He killed a man! That’s virtue for you. Virtue? Maybe, but madness too. These great men are strangely flawed. The Brutus who killed Caesar was fond of a statue of a little boy. This statue was by the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also carved that figure of an Amazon known as the “Shapely-legged”, Eucnemos, which Nero took with him on his travels. This Strongylion left only two statues that put Nero and Brutus in agreement with each other.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘There was in the great square in Corinth a statue carved by Silanion and recorded by Pliny. This statue represented Epistates. What did Epistates do? He invented a wrestler’s led hook. That sums up Greece and glory.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Next, Grantaire joins the club of Les Amis members who weigh in on Brutus. Enjolras remains the only uncritical stan because Grantaire’s opinion is closer to Combeferre’s, though of course he words his criticism more crudely. He mentions the famous Caesar stabbing incident, which was popularized by the Shakespeare play and its first French translation by Voltaire, but he actually goes into more detail about an art history anecdote from Pliny’s Natural History book 34. Basically, this supposedly great man (Brutus) and this infamously corrupt man (Nero) both love the same artist (Strongylion), so they’re perhaps more similar than people like to admit. Blah blah, everyone is terrible at the end of the day; there are no great men, only the best places to consume alcohol and forget life. Typical Grantaire doom spiral.
It’s also another art reference, though we don’t have either of these statues anymore, just the references to them made by writers in antiquity. Pliny is definitely the main source for this anecdote, though the Roman poet Martial also describes the statue he calls “Brutus’s Boy” or “Brutus’s Favorite” (link). The archeologist Antonio Corso has a chapter in The Art of Praxiteles where he references other comparable statues with all the written descriptions of Strongylion’s work and gives an approximation of what they might have looked like, if you’re interested in that kind of stuff (link). Anyway, Grantaire is pretty judgy of Brutus on this front. He seems to imply this statue is a little young for Brutus lol, but it is also a canonical reference to men being attracted to men, so that’s cool.
Later in the same drunken monologue, he brings up another statue by the artist Silanion, which is a reference to another anecdote from the same passage of Pliny’s Natural History. He really liked this book, or at least that one chapter about all the statues. I hadn’t previously read this part of Pliny’s Natural History, but I was familiar with his weird medical advice chapters. And considering Grantaire makes multiple references to having fits of hypochondria and hangs out a lot with pseudoscience-lover Joly, I think he’s probably at least dipped into the weird medical stuff too. I don’t have proof, this is just the vibes.
Ars Poetica by Horace (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘Everything obeys success, even grammar. Si volet usus, says Horace.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Ars Poetica is an influential critical poem that basically gives a list of advice on how to write poetry and plays. A few phrases from it are in common literary use now, like “in media res.” It had a general influence on European literature, but more so specifically on French drama. The particular line that Grantaire is quoting, from line 71, literally means something like “as usage dictates.” It’s not a particularly telling quote, but it’s fun to see that Grantaire reads some literary theory - he’s an artsy guy, he’s interested in the craft. He also references Horace again later, so it seems like this is an author he checks out frequently.
“Life of Phocion” Parallel Lives by Plutarch (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘You want me to start admiring nations? Which nation, if you please? Is it Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of an earlier age, slew Phocion, another Coligny, and fawned on tyrants to such an extent that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus, “His urine attracts bees.” The most prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas, who was so small and puny he was obliged to weigh his shoes with lead so as not to be blown away by the wind.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Phocion only has a few written sources about him, and Plutarch’s coverage of him is definitely the most thorough, so we have a pretty good idea where Grantaire probably learned this anecdote. Victor Hugo has referenced a few other people well known from their chapters in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives too, so this tracks. Plutarch described Phocion “The Good” as a good man devoted to the state who was falsely accused of treason and executed. He likens this to Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a man of integrity whose murder marked the beginning of the St Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 and the subsequent exodus of Huguenots from France. You can probably pick most of this up from context clues. Grantaire is just listing examples of good men or good politicians who weren’t appreciated in their time as an example of how the Athenians weren’t that great after all.
Bibliotheca by Diodorus Siculus (English, English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘You want me to start admiring nations? Which nation, if you please? Is it Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of an earlier age, slew Phocion, another Coligny, and fawned on tyrants to such an extent that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus, “His urine attracts bees.” The most prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas, who was so small and puny he was obliged to weigh his shoes with lead so as not to be blown away by the wind.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
This is kind of a weird one. Pisistratus is an Athenian tyrant from the 500’s BCE, but Anacephorus is just straight up not a guy. When you search for his name online you get literally no results except this exact Les Mis quote. According to the Donougher deluxe edition footnotes, this is possibly a reference to Ephorus instead, a Greek historian who wrote the first universal history which has since been lost. So obviously this exact quote can’t have been attributed to him either, but other ancient historians referenced his work extensively so Victor Hugo might be paraphrasing their work and crediting Ephorus but mistranscribing his name. It’s a stretch, but it’s my best guess.
Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca, literally translated as Library, heavily relied on Ephorus’ research. He even called his work the Library to give credit to the fact that he was mostly compiling the research of other writers together in one place. In sections 9.2 and 9.4 he mentions short anecdotes about the people fawning over Pisistratus’ tyranny that are close enough to this joke that I opted to include them here, though they don’t have the exact line Grantaire uses about the urine attracting bees. Personally, I think that’s a Hugo original piss joke. Grantaire makes another piss joke about Queen Isabella and Jean Prouvaire also makes a piss joke about the Pissevache waterfall, so we know Victor Hugo is not above potty humor.
Anyway, piss joke aside, he ultimately does all this to contrast the people’s acceptance of Pisistratus with their condemnation of Phocion the Good. But tbh, in Pisistratus’ defense, he does sound pretty cool. He was constantly being exiled and coming back to rule again in kind of silly ways. Herodotus tells a story about how one time he hired this six foot tall lady he found in the countryside to pretend to be Athena and uber him into the city in a chariot so people would think he was blessed by Olympus (link). Idk, Grantaire, I think you have to admit that’s funny.
Varia Historia, 9.14 by Aelian (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘You want me to start admiring nations? Which nation, if you please? Is it Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of an earlier age, slew Phocion, another Coligny, and fawned on tyrants to such an extent that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus, “His urine attracts bees.” The most prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas, who was so small and puny he was obliged to weigh his shoes with lead so as not to be blown away by the wind.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Philitas was a Greek poet and literary scholar whose work only survives in fragments today. But that’s not important, what’s important is that he was reportedly super skinny and the Roman author Aelian wrote a little anecdote in his Varia Historia about how he was so comically frail he had to weigh his shoes with lead lest he be blown away by the wind. I found a pretty cool JSTOR article by Alan Cameron on why exactly this was a joke people made in ancient times (link) but I think regardless of the very specific context of Philitas as a comic subject, the silly mental image of this little guy being blown away by the wind is kind of a timeless joke.
The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan by James Kirke Paulding (English)
“Advice to a Young Tradesman” by Benjamin Franklin (English)
🚨 Cotton is King by David Christy (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘And if I don’t admire John Bull, shall I admire Brother Jonathan? I don’t much care for that slave-owning brother. Take away “Time is money”, and what’s left of England? Take away “Cotton is king”, and what’s left of America?’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Grantaire’s anti-slavery rant, let’s gooo! Even though most of the boys reference the work of abolitionists (and Victor Hugo even compares them at one point to John Brown, high praise), Grantaire is the only one who actually mentions a disdain for slavery on the page. Gotta give credit where credit is due. Although… Grantaire is also the only member of the group who debatably says a racist slur too. I’m not a linguist so I don’t know all the historical context but the word he says in French when he talks about “the negro with his glass beads” a few sentences before this section seems to be pretty derogatory and at least one edition of Les Mis (Rose) straight up translated it as the n-word. Sigh. Every time Grantaire does something right (being an abolitionist) he fucks it up (saying a slur). C’mon man, get it together.
John Bull and Brother Jonathan were satirical terms used to refer to colonial England and America. The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan is a good topical example of the two personas being used together to criticize the countries in question though Paulding went on to publish a lot of other satirical novellas using these caricatures (link). According to Webster’s Dictionary of the era, the term “John Bull” was first used in Arbuthnot’s satirical allegory The History of John Bull (1712). Brother Jonathan had its origins in the American Revolutionary War, originally in reference to Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull, but eventually shifted to become a national sobriquet instead of reference to a particular guy.
Grantaire also characterizes England and America disparagingly using two idioms. “Time is money” is a concept that’s been around for a long long time, but Benjamin Franklin coined the particular wordage in his 1748 essay “Advice to a Young Tradesman.” Beyond the founding father stuff and the kite with the lightning, Benjamin Franklin was also famous for writing really sassy and catchy advice, and became the source of the particular wording of a lot of idioms we still use today (an apple a day, early to bed early to rise, etc). He also did a lot of other weird things like catfishing as a middle aged widow named Silence Dogood to get published as a teen. And he was probably in a pagan sex cult, but I really don’t have time to get into that. It’s possible Grantaire is just using the idiom without reading the source material, but it makes so much sense that he would enjoy Benjamin Franklin’s writing. Trust me.
And, lastly, ahem… 🚨 Grantaire saying “cotton is king” here is actually an anachronism! 🚨Ohohoho I’ve got you now, Victor Hugo! The earliest recorded use of the phrase was in 1855. So while technically this is Victor Hugo making a mocking reference to the title of David Christy’s 1855 pro-slavery book Cotton is King, Grantaire shouldn’t be able to because the book hasn’t been written yet. So, uh, according to Les Mis, Grantaire actually came up with this phrase himself because he hates slavery that much. Wow, amazing.
The History of Peter the Great by Voltaire (English)
Essay on the Manners and Spirits of Nations by Voltaire (English)
“[Grantaire:] ‘Germany is all lymph, Italy is all bile. Shall we go into raptures about Russia? Voltaire admired it. He also admired China.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
The two books that Grantaire references here are the biography that Voltaire wrote about Peter the Great and his Essay on the Manners and Spirits of Nations, or Essai ser les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, which praised the achievements made by China at that point in time. This whole rant that Grantaire is going on about how Europeans aren’t inherently any better than other countries despite their vanity is a more sarcastic spin on the very genuine opinion at the heart of Voltaire’s Essai. Voltaire argued that Europe had a tendency to dismiss the wisdom and developments of other countries just because they were different. Grantaire is acknowledging this point, but really honing in on how this makes Europe look like an ignorant asshole instead of actually singing the praises of any other country. Grantaire would absolutely be one of those people who wears a “I hate everyone equally” shirt. He comes so close to a genuine criticism of Eurocentrism, but can’t help himself from backing off and making a cynical joke instead. I see why he frustrates Enjolras so much. He has so many valid criticisms and then he just shrugs and says something really defeatist instead of caring about literally anything.
“Anecdotes of Fashion” Curiosities of Literature, Vol. I by Isaac D’Israeli (English)
Memoirs of Louis XIV by Saint-Simon (English)
“[Grantaire:] ‘Now war, civilized war, reduces and subsumes all forms of banditry, from the brigandage of Spanish irregulars in the gorges of Mount Jaxa to marauding Comanches in Doubtful Pass. Bah! You’ll tell me that Europe’s nonetheless better than Asia? I agree that Asia is a joke. But I don’t really see that you peoples of the West can afford to mock the Grand Lama, having included in your manners and refinements all the complicated squalors of majesty, from Queen Isabella’s dirty shift to the Dauphin’s commode.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
The Isabella line refers to the legend that Isabella of Castile said she wouldn’t wash her underwear until the end of the siege of Granada. Which may have been conflated with a different legend that a different Isabella, Isabella Clara Eugenia, said she wouldn’t wash her underwear until the end of the siege of Ostend. There are written sources in the 19th century giving stories about both Isabellas as the source for why Isaballine is the name for a particular shade of pale-yellow (link, link), but honestly it seems like the story was more word-of-mouth folklore rather than something that came from a specific book. For reference, this is what isabelline color looks like (link). Get it? Because it’s like piss-stained underwear? Lmao, sorry to everyone who at some point actually bought and used the paint I found in that link. Unless it was to paint your bathroom. Actually, wait, that’s amazing. Brb, I’m going to call my landlord about something really quick.
As for the Dauphin’s commode, I did some digging and didn’t find a specific anecdote about any particular dauphin or their chamberpot. The Dauphin is a title given to the heir apparent to the throne of France, and for a while he was like the guy to mention when you were making reference to a generic fancy guy. For example, Huck Finn makes a joke about it, during the scene where two bandits are trying to one-up each other with fancy fake identities and one of them claims to be the Lost Dauphin of France, though a lot of editions change it to the more generic “duke” so modern audiences would get the joke. So my best guess is that this is just generally about fancy guys and the ornate chamber pots they had in Versailles and all their weird etiquette surrounding it. Idk, there was a weird amount of toilet drama in Versailles, the luxury of the furniture would definitely have generally been at odds with how reportedly filthy the place was, which is Grantaire’s general point here. The Duc de Saint-Simon wrote a lot of gossip about Versailles which are petty, dramatic, and were really popular at the time - and they have lots of toilet drama. These memoirs were massive! There’s so much detail and Saint-Simon is not a brief man. Apparently he’s really good at character work and building compelling snapshots of the time, but he has incredibly long diatribes about other random stuff breaking this info up. Hm, sounds like a certain someone we know. (...Honestly, I meant Grantaire, but this could also apply to Victor Hugo.) Anyway, I might be wrong! Someone please dm me if there’s a particularly juicy anecdote about the dauphin’s toilet that I couldn’t find.
Also, I don’t usually include really general historical references that aren’t about a particular story / didn’t have some kind of literature or dramaturgical footprint in Paris at the time, but at this point I feel compelled to point out when Grantaire is bullshitting. And he is bullshitting when he talks about the marauding Comanches in Doubtful Pass. I think he’s actually referencing the skirmishes that took place around this time in Doubtful Canyon, which is a part of Apache Pass and, as you might have guessed, is occupied by the Apache tribe not the Comanche tribe. He obviously only half remembers reading about them at all.
Life of Caesar by Plutarch (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘I am, I declare, a voluptuary, I eat at Richard’s at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets in which to roll naked Cleopatra!’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
In his biography Life of Caesar, Plutarch depicts a scene where Cleopatra has her servant Apollodorus wrap her up in a bed-sack or carpet and carry her in to sneakily visit Caesar. He’s so impressed with her boldness and cleverness that they have sex and he gives her some political favors she wanted. Cleopatra charming Caesar into becoming her political ally is widely reported, but the specific part about the bed-sack is a mistake specifically from the Plutarch version that later caught on. Grantaire makes a couple references to Plutarch’s biographies, so he’s definitely a fan. As a whole, I get the impression Grantaire cares less about strict historical accuracy and more about which historians really capture an iconic moment.
Speaking of, I thought for sure this was going to be another painting reference because this exact moment, Plutarch inaccuracy and all, is captured in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s iconic Cleopatra and Caesar (link) which helped solidify the public memory of Cleopatra getting smuggled in a carpet. But I was totally wrong because the painting was actually finished 4 years after Les Mis was published and 34 years after Grantaire would be dead! French people in the mid-19th century just loved Plutarch I guess.
Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of Artaxerxes by Anne-Louis Girodet (link)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘Hands down, Aigle de Meaux! I’m utterly unimpressed by that gesture, of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes’ trifles. You’ve no need to quieten me. Besides, I feel sad.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Finally, we’re reaching the end of Grantaire’s long drunken rant about vanity… with another reference to a painting! Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of Artaxerxes depicts a famous anecdote in which Hippocrates (of the Hippocratic Oath) demonstrates his medical ethics by turning down a bribery. There is an irony in Grantaire using this scene of unwavering moral integrity to describe Bossuet just telling him to shut up because he’s been yelling for too long. It adds a certain amount of gravitas to the situation that’s very unwarranted, and I think that’s part of why Grantaire says it. But he’s probably mostly referencing that flirty leg Hippocrates is giving in the painting. Bossuet must have been striking quite a pose when he turned to shush Grantaire here.
“Fleuve du Tage” arrangement by Hector Berlioz (English, French song)
“Narcissus and Echo” Metamorphoses by Ovid (English)
“‘Echo, plaintive nymph,’ Grantaire sang under his breath.” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Grantaire is singing a line from an 1810 song called “Fleuve du Tage” by Joseph Hélitas de Meun and Jean-Joseph Benoît Pollet, which is based on the story of the nymph Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In 1819, the composer Berlioz published an arrangement of the song which is much easier to find in recordings than the original, and since Berlioz was Victor Hugo’s friend I feel like he probably listened to his version anyway.
Grantaire references a couple different stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Apparently, the story collection was getting a bunch of new illustrated editions released around this time and, in her book on mythology and art history in Revolutionary Era France, Dorothy Johnson says that Metamorphoses attained a popularity “verging on mania” (link). I can only imagine that, faced with such rapidly changing times, a story collection about reckoning with transformation would feel really relevant.
The reference isn’t nearly as random as it sounds in English. In the line before this one, Bossuet is going off about property law, ending with a list of words that, in French, use assonance to create a sort of sing-songy effect: “domaniaires et domaniaux, hypothécaires et hypothécaux…” Hypothécaux ends in the sound “echo,” so Grantaire is playing off of this by echoing that sound with a reference to a song about Echo. It’s a very literary but bad pun. I actually saw a tumblr post about this line a while back (here) where someone said that Grantaire is basically pulling the equivalent of someone today who hears “let’s get down to business” and has to respond with “to defeat the Huns!” That is honestly the best explanation of what he’s doing here and I’m not going to try to describe it any other way.
Furthermore, in doing this pun under his breath as an echo while no one pays attention to him, he’s sort of reenacting the myth of Echo. Something he probably relates to because of, you know, the way he’s constantly trying to get Enjolras’s attention and failing miserably. The pun has layers.
Le Bal de Sceaux (The Ball at Sceaux) by Honoré de Balzac (English)
“Once, trusting in some lovely September sunshine, Marius allowed himself to be taken along by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and Grantaire to the [ball] at Sceaux, hoping - what a pipe dream! - that he might perhaps find her there. He did not, of course, see the girl he was looking for. ‘Yet this is the place where all lost women are to be found,’ Grantaire grumbled privately.” (Les Mis 3.8.1)
In LM 3.8.1, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and Grantaire persuade Marius to go to a ball at Sceaux, a suburb of Paris. I think this part is probably a reference to Balzac’s novella The Ball at Sceaux, especially this little aside Grantaire says when Marius doesn’t find his mystery girl at the ball. The novella was a part of Le Comédie Humaine, which was a massive collection of popular novels and short stories by Honoré de Balzac depicting French society in the Bourbon Restoration and July Monarchy, providing social commentary through the mode of pop fiction.
The Ball at Sceaux came out in 1830, just in time for the boys to have read it before they dragged their morose friend out to party in the suburbs. The story follows Émilie de Fontaine, a beautiful daughter from a prominent family who has rejected all her previous suitors because they don’t meet her impossibly high standards. Then she goes to a Ball at Sceaux (title drop) and meets Maximilien de Longueville, who is as handsome and stylish as he is mysterious. Émilie becomes determined to figure out who he is, so she starts taking carriage rides through neighborhoods she thinks he might live in and goes back to the ball several times in hopes of running into him. Eventually through some wacky hijinx she does find him and they fall in love, but alas, Émilie discovers that Maximilien has been working as a salesclerk this whole time. She’s so horrified she breaks up with him on the spot. She marries her elderly uncle for his title instead, but then a few years later when she’s sitting there at a party with her 70-year-old husband she looks up and sees Maximilien walking in the door. Turns out he was actually a viscount who had selflessly given his inheritance to his siblings to save them from ruin and that’s why he’d been working in the shop. Now he’s unbelievably rich and hot and every girl in the room wants to marry Maximilien while Émilie’s sitting there watching him from afar thinking about how she once had the chance to marry him but she had said see you later boy, he wasn’t good enough for her. It’s literally the plot of Sk8er Boi by Avril Lavigne.
Anyway, it’s basically just a timely reference to young people having social and relationship drama at a ball. There’s a flattering comparison to be made between Maximilien and Marius: both young men from prestigious families living in poverty because of their principles. And a slightly less flattering comparison to be made between Émilie and Marius: instantly falling in love with a mysterious stranger who they know nothing about and running around town desperately trying to find them. The boys are apparently trying to Hallmark movie their bro into a meet-cute, and they’re disappointed it’s not working.
On the Principles of Political Morality by Maximilien Robespierre (English)
Discours sur l’organisation des Gardes nationales by Maximilien Robespierre (French)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘I’ll talk to them about Robespierre, of course! And about Danton. About principles.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
“Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very close to Café Musain. He went out, and came back five minutes later. He had gone home to put on a Robespierre-style waistcoat.
‘Red,’ he said as he came in, gazing intently at Enjolras.” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
In LM 4.1.6, Grantaire lists a bunch of politicians and publications to Enjolras that he claims to be familiar with in an attempt to impress Enjolras. I talked about basically everything on this list in my Enjolras booklist, but it’s also somewhat informative about Grantaire’s reading habits as well. I mean, I do believe he read these things even if he doesn’t take them seriously. So I’m going to discuss them again!
One of the very first things we learn about Grantaire is how he publicly, repeatedly makes fun of Robespierre’s brother for dying alongside him because he cared about his political ideals. So it’s incredibly funny that he leads his pitch to Enjolras by how he’ll of course talk about Robespierre and his principles. He’s absolutely just trying to appeal to things he knows Enjolras likes. And then, to make things even more cringe, he runs home and it turns out he owns a Robespierre-style waistcoat (in red, of course) which he puts on and runs back to the Cafe for absolutely no reason but to make intense eye contact with Enjolras while pointing out his waistcoat before leaving to immediately fuck up the task Enjolras assigned him. Like… there is literally no reason he does any of this but to try and impress Enjolras and he bombs so hard. To make things worse, the task he volunteers for is to talk to the marble workers and painters! This is literally ex-painter’s assistant Grantaire’s assignment to win and he just can’t do it. This is so cringggge omg.
So, anyway, what is a Robespierre waistcoat? Apparently, it was a style like the one in this painting (link) with dramatic lapels that are really wide and flop outside of the coat almost to the shoulders. I have yet to see a version of the musical where Grantaire is actually wearing one of these, but he absolutely should!
Speeches of Georges Jacques Danton (English)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘I’ll talk to them about Robespierre, of course! And about Danton. About principles.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
Another French revolutionary orator on Grantaire’s list to impress Enjolras. Enjolras never references Danton directly, but Grantaire thinks Enjolras likes him and I’m tempted to agree. Danton is another one of the main revolutionaries associated with Robespierre and The Terror. This is a bit of an easy guess for Grantaire, because we know Enjolras likes The Terror. Reportedly, Danton, unlike Robespierre and Saint-Just, never gave manuscripts to journalists and most of his speeches were extemporaneous. So despite being present for so much of history during this era, he doesn’t have as much published work to point to for this reference. Because of that and because this is such a minor reference, I decided not to look too hard and just included a collection of speeches compiled in 1910. Obviously that’s way after Enjolras and Grantaire would be dead, but the same speeches would’ve been available in their time, just printed in other places like Le Moniteur or whatever. Speaking of anachronistic Danton references, there’s a whole Hark! A Vagrant episode (321) about Danton, and in the description Kate Beaton also laments how the guy didn’t write anything down. You and me both, queen.
Révolutions de Paris edited by Louis-Marie Prudhomme - Several articles in translation (English)
Histoire generale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la Revolution francaise by Louis-Marie Prudhomme (French)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘But I’m not being given the credit I deserve. When I put my mind to it, I’m terrific. I’ve read Prudhomme, I’m familiar with the Social Contract, I know by heart my constitution of the year II.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
This is another one that Grantaire thinks Enjolras likes. Prudhomme ran one of the best-known revolutionary newspapers and a few books about the revolutionary period and The Terror. In a kind of funny turn of events, this one tangentially connects back to an earlier reference Grantaire made. Most notably, Prudhomme’s Histoire, roughly translated as Impartial Errors, Mistakes and Crimes Committed During the French Revolution, is a six volume account of the terrors and faults of the French National Convention. It has a passage that mentions Loizerolles died because of vindictive prison guards, which is apparently closer to the truth of what really happened than the version Grantaire references earlier (link). So if he read that particular part of Prudhomme’s work, he obviously didn’t care.
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (English)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘But I’m not being given the credit I deserve. When I put my mind to it, I’m terrific. I’ve read Prudhomme, I’m familiar with the Social Contract, I know by heart my constitution of the year II.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
I talk a bit in Enjolras’s booklist about how much he loves Jean-Jacques Rousseau - defending him for abandoning his children, referring to him by his first name like they’re friends, and giving a Social Contract 101 lesson at the barricade. Grantaire has definitely picked up on this, so he mentions that he’s familiar with it while he’s trying to impress Enjolras with how woke and well-read he is. Rousseau’s Social Contract is a huge influence on the politics of Les Amis in general and even though Grantaire doesn’t believe in that kind of stuff, it seems like he’s at least read up on it. Reportedly.
There is no Constitution of Year II!
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘I’ve read Prudhomme, I’m familiar with the Social Contract, I know by heart my constitution of the year II. “The liberty of the citizen ends where the liberty of another citizen begins.” Do you take me for a brute beast? I have in my drawer an old promissory note from the time of the Revolution. The rights of man, the sovereignty of the people, for God’s sake!’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
There was a Constitution of Year I (1793) and a Constitution of Year III (1795), but there was no Constitution of Year II! I nearly drove myself insane on this one, assuming I must be missing some really obscure, little-known fact from French history, but no. Grantaire’s just making shit up and paraphrasing the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen. This might just be a typo, but I like to believe it’s actually an in-universe character trait that sometimes Grantaire just says shit during his long rants and it’s completely wrong but no one notices because he’s been talking for eight whole minutes before he gets to his point. No wonder Enjolras isn’t impressed by Grantaire here. He would definitely notice this error. Embarrassing.
Le Père Duchesne edited by Jacques René Hébert - Several articles in translation (English)
“The Père Duchesne Supports the Terror,” Le Père Duchesne, no. 234 (English)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘The rights of man, the sovereignty of the people, for God’s sake! I am even a bit of a Hébertist. I can keep coming out with some wonderful things, watch in hand, for a whole six hours by the clock.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
This one is an absolute delight to read and actually hysterical if this is the kind of rhetoric that Grantaire thinks will impress Enjolras. Genuinely lmao. The Hébertists were a political group associated with journalist Jacques René Hébert, the founder and editor of the irreverent radical newspaper Le Père Duchesne. They were proponents of extreme revolutionary ideas during the Reign of Terror, but their leadership was ultimately executed in 1794. Yet again, we have no concrete proof that Enjolras actually read Hébertist literature, but Grantaire certainly thinks this is the kind of thing that would be impressive to Enjolras.
And this is where I hit the limit to the number of links you're allowed on a tumblr post. To be continued...
And here's the rest of the booklist that I couldn't fit in the first post, because Grantaire yaps so much...
Odes 1.11 by Horace (English)
“It was Grantaire who discovered Corinthe. He went in because of the carpe horas and returned because of the carpe au gras.” (Les Mis 4.12.1)
This sentence is the result of a pun Hugo has been circling for several paragraphs. The tavernkeeper is trying to write about the house specialty of stuffed carp (carpe au gras) but transcribes it wrong (carpe horas) and ends up with a Latin phrase that means “seize the hours” or, contextually, “come into my tavern.” Grantaire recognizes the pun on Horace’s carpe diem from Odes 1.11 and comes into the tavern. He’s just a big fan of Horace.
Calendrier Républicain (French Republican Calendar) by the National Convention (French)
Floréal by Louis Lafitte and Salvatore Tresca (link)
“[Grantaire:] ‘And then I ran into a pretty girl I know, as lovely as springtime, who deserves to be called Floréal’” (Les Mis 4.12.2)
The French Republican Calendar was a new calendar developed and used for about 12 years in Revolutionary Era France, between 1793 and 1805. Basically, while the revolutionaries were breaking with a lot of traditions of the Old Regime, they decided that the calendar should also go and made a brand new secular calendar celebrating the “era of liberty.” It had twelve 30 day months split into 10 day cycles and then 5 random other days added on to line up with a solar year. This was not in sync with the rest of the world and obviously did not last, but I respect the attempt.
The months were all named after nature, and were characterized by portraits of women drawn and engraved by Louis Laffite and Salvatore Tresca that represented the themes embodied by the name of each new month. The second month of spring was called Floréal, literally “flower.” This reference Grantaire is making is a pretty basic comparison of spring to youth and beauty, but done in a way that’s very French at the turn of the 19th century. Also, it’s another art reference, sort of. And, look, you can find what name they assigned your birthday using this website (link)! I’m a goat! (I found the link thanks to a post by @xiranjayzhao, thanks king)
Just a fun fact, but Tolkien’s Nûmenorean Calendar is literally just this calendar but in Elvish! It’s not the calendar they use during the Lord of the Rings, it’s the historical calendar used in Gondor that predates that one and is ironically named the Kings’ Reckoning. Anyway this has absolutely nothing to do with Grantaire, I just think it’s fun that Tolkien saw this calendar and thought it was cool enough to include it in Middle Earth.
History of Rome, Book 5 by Livy (English)
“[Grantaire:] ‘As for rightfulness, do you know what rightfulness is? The Gauls want Clusium, Rome protects Clusium and asks the Gauls what wrong Clusium has done them. Brennus replies, “The wrong that Alba did you, the wrong that Fidenae did you, the wrong the Aequi, the Volsci and the Sabines did you. They were your neighbors. The Clusians are ours. We have the same understanding of what it means to be neighbors as you do. You stole Alba, we’re taking Clusium.” Rome said, “You will not take Clusium.” Brennus took Rome. Then he cried, “Vae victis!” That’s what rightfulness is.’” (Les Mis 4.12.2)
The Latin phrase “vae victis” comes from Book 5, Chapter 48 of Livy’s History of Rome. It means “woe to the vanquished!” and is both the last sentence and the theme of that chapter that Grantaire is paraphrasing here. In the story, this quote is said when the Romans protest the unfair treatment they’re getting from the Gauls, so the Gauls make the situation blatantly even more unfair and basically tell them that they decide what’s fair because they’re the victors. Kind of an apt quote for a pessimist to retain. In Grantaire’s version, he’s using this anecdote to describe an acquaintance of his who recently got married to an ugly banker, so it’s extremely melodramatic.
…I couldn’t find the source for those Swiss cockerels
“[Grantaire:] ‘Whatever your opinion, whether you favour the lean cockerel like the canton of Uri, or the fat cockerel like the canton of Glarus, it doesn’t matter.’” (Les Mis 4.12.2)
Grantaire is referencing an old Swiss legend about the origin of the border between the canton of Uri and Glarus, which falls in an odd place in the Klausen Pass (not the summit, but 8 kilometers down the slope). According to the legend, the two cantons tired of bickering over the location of the border and decided to settle it with a chicken race. The canton of Glarus fed their chicken really well the day before the racing and the canton of Uri starved theirs. On the day of the race, the Glarus cockerel overslept and so the hungry Uri cockerel won the race and so the canton of Uri has most of the mountain on their side of the border.
It was really, really hard to find where Grantaire may have conceivably read this story. The sources I could find were all from the late 1800’s and referred to the story as if it was a famous local folk tale (such as this British article from 1892 which compares the story to ancient Greece because of the way a runner dies at the end and this 1899 copy of Legends of Switzerland). I really came up with no leads on where Grantaire picked this up. There was a lot of overlap and cultural exchange in publishing between Switzerland and France during this time. Several famous French authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Madame de Staël lived and wrote in Switzerland. Geneva specifically was a big publishing hub for France. So it’s not hard to imagine how local Swiss legends might make themselves known to Parisians of the time… I just didn’t have any luck finding a specific source myself. Alas. You can check out those other versions of the story if you want, they just won’t be the version Grantaire read.
L’Alcoran de Mahomet translated by André Du Ryer (English)
“[Grantaire:] ‘I don’t understand why Turks are generally looked down on. There’s some good in Mohammed. All due respect to the inventor of seraglios with houris and paradises with odalisques! Let’s not insult Islam, the only religion graced with a henhouse!’” (Les Mis 4.12.2)
…….Sigh. Yet again, Grantaire comes so close to a genuinely good opinion on anti-racism, interrupted by his need to make a joke out of everything. I am becoming Enjolras as I go through this list. I want to shake Grantaire.
Anyway, the history of translating the Quran is actually really interesting. Prior to the Enlightenment, many translations into western languages were not literal and not even translated directly from Arabic. They used a Latin translation as their source, and were primarily meant to serve as commentary to non-Muslim readers. Right at the beginning of the Enlightenment, in 1647, Du Ryer did the first ever translation of the Quran from the original Arabic into a spoken western language (French)… but also calls the religion ridiculous and ends with a condemnation of Islam. Yikes. There is some compelling evidence that Du Ryer might have been up against religious censorship at the time, and published a version that wouldn’t get him in trouble with religious authorities despite earnestly caring about the average French citizen learning more about the Middle East (link), but obviously it was imperfect one way or the other. Regardless, it was a milestone in translation and access to Islamic texts for the general public. It kicked off a wave of Orientalism in France throughout the 17th century and had new editions being printed throughout the 19th century. And apparently Grantaire liked it! Though whether he read it out of genuine curiosity or just to be edgy and counter-culture, who can say. I bet he and Jean Prouvaire had conversations about it though.
Geography by Strabo (English)
“[Grantaire:] ‘Marius belongs to the poet breed. Whoever says poet, says madman. Timbraeus Apollo.’” (Les Mis 4.12.2)
This is another French pun that doesn’t quite translate into English. Literally, Thymbra is one of the places Apollo was worshipped, known there as Apollo Thymbraios, while the French word timbré figuratively means cracked or crazy. So Grantaire’s making a joke that it kind of sounds like he’s known as Crazy Apollo. It’s only really loosely an allusion and more of a pun, but Apollo’s being mentioned so I wanted to talk about it. This is my list, I can do what I want. The shrine to Apollo in Thymbra and his epithet Apollo Thymbraios were documented in Strabo’s Geography, which had just received a full French translation commissioned by the government in Paris between 1805 and 1819 (link) so I think that’s a topical enough source for this particular nickname. Apollo was also just a popular guy at the time. He’s acting pretty crazy in both his short stories in Metamorphoses (“Apollo and Daphne” and “Hyacinth”), which were super popular at the time as well but don’t mention anything about Thymbra. Also, as I covered in the Enjolras booklist, the Apollo Belvedere statue was extremely famous in France at the time on account of Napoleon stealing it.
A lot of people assume Grantaire is the one who called Enjolras Apollo at the barricade, but I want it on the record that’s never confirmed in the book. In fact, this is the only time he mentions Apollo and he’s using it as a nickname for Marius. Make of that what you will.
The Golden Ass by Apuleius (English)
Les Amours de Psyché et Cupidon by Jean de La Fontaine (English)
Psyche Abandoned and Cupid and Psyche by Jacques Louis David (link, link)
Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss by Antonio Canova (link)
“And in a vaporous layer vaguely condensed into a bat’s wing, three silent Furies take shape, Nightmare, Night and Death, hovering over sleeping Psyche. Grantaire was not yet at that dire stage, far from it.” (Les Mis 4.12.2)
This is an allusion to the story of Cupid and Psyche, specifically a scene from Book 6 of Apuleius’s myth The Golden Ass. The myth was popularized in France by La Fontaine in 1669, when he published his own version of the myth set in Versailles. Centuries later, when Neoclassicism had its boom in literature and visual arts in post-Revolutionary France, the myth of Eros and Psyche gained new cultural relevancy and inspired a LOT of new art (link).
One notable example is the statue Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss by Canova that actually depicts the exact scene Victor Hugo is referencing here in Les Mis, and was added to the Louvre’s collection in 1824! You can even see the little jar of stygian sleep laying on the ground next to Psyche, that’s so fun. Jacques Louis David also did a few paintings on the subject, which I’ve included here because he was such a powerhouse in the art movement. Also, David was Gros’s teacher, so Grantaire’s grand-teacher in a way, and he did that super famous painting of Leonidas at Thermopylae (called Leonidas at Thermopylae) so we know Victor Hugo fucks with this guy.
But back to Psyche. The scene that Victor Hugo is referencing here specifically is the part where Psyche opens a jar of sleep she retrieved from the Underworld and goes into a magical coma. In the myth, it is described as a deep, stygian sleep like death itself and it comes from a jar, so that’s primarily why Victor Hugo is using this reference to describe the type of black-out drunk that Grantaire wants to be. Additionally, this is during the part of the myth where Psyche is in despair because Cupid got mad and ghosted her so she’s wandering around thinking about killing herself. In Les Mis at this point, Grantaire crashed Joly and Bossuet’s breakfast date, then a little child urchin showed up with a message inviting Bossuet to the barricade but not Grantaire because his vibes are bad. Grantaire crashes out because Enjolras obviously hates him and doesn’t want to invite him to the barricade, so his friends try to cheer him up by buying him more drinks even though they already commented on him drinking two whole bottles of wine for breakfast. Victor Hugo tells us that Grantaire drinks explicitly to get black-out drunk, that he craves the abyss and to not think about life, which is… worrisome. But also really reminiscent of Psyche wanting to kill herself! Anyway, eventually the barricade sort of gets built around him so he’s allowed in by default but Enjolras still tries to kick him off the barricade lmao.
“Pygmalion” Metamorphoses by Ovid (English)
Titian’s Mistress by Titian (link)
“‘Matelote is ugly!’ [Grantaire] cried. ‘Matelote is the perfection of ugliness! Matelote is a chimera. This is the secret of her birth: a Gothic Pygmalion, who made gargoyles for cathedrals, one fine morning fell in love with the most horrible of them. He begged Love to bring it to life, and Matelote was the result. Look at her, citizens! She has chrome-yellow hair like Titian’s mistress, and she’s a good girl.’” (Les Mis 4.12.3)
Pygmalion is the title character from a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. We’ve already discussed a bit about how popular the Metamorphoses was in France at the time, and apparently “Pygmalion” was no exception and “experienced a resurgent popularity in French theater and literature” during the turn of the century through the later 1800’s (link). Grantaire makes a couple references to that story collection and, just saying, he sure does seem to pick out a lot of the stories about yearning and unrequited love. Unlike “Narcissus and Echo,” this one has a happy ending, but, c’mon, it’s literally about an artist falling in love with a beautiful, virginal marble statue who is incapable of reciprocating his feelings. Wow, I wonder why this story resounded with Grantaire lol! This is so embarrassing!! But also he deserves to be embarrassed because this is such a rude thing to say about Matelote. Anyway, there was a pretty famous French painting by Girodet, Pygmalion et Galatée, that premiered at the Salon of 1819 that also seems worth mentioning here because it would’ve been topical (link).
Speaking of paintings, Grantaire makes an explicit reference to a painting in this same paragraph, this time to a Titian. Titian’s mistress was a model who was featured in several paintings by Titian. I don’t think the specific painting called Titian’s Mistress was ever in Paris, but Titian had other pieces in the Louvre, including Woman with a Mirror (link), which also feature a similar mystery blonde lady presumed to be Titian’s mistress. So you can pretty much look at any of them and get the reference. Titian also famously did a series of paintings based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, though not Pygmalion, which might explain the transition here or might just be a coincidence. You never really know with Grantaire.
Essai de Statique Chimique by Jean-Baptiste Dumas (English, French)
“[Grantaire:] ‘Comrades, we shall overthrow the government as sure as there are fifteen intermediate acids between margaric acid and formic acid.’” (Les Mis 4.12.3)
This is apparently a reference to the work of the French chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas, who was a pioneer in determining atomic weight, among other things. His Essai de Statique Chimique was officially published in 1842, but covered material that was delivered in public lectures at the Sorbonne throughout his tenure there, starting in 1829. The lectures were very popular and drew huge crowds of several hundred people, which I guess included Grantaire sometimes. Just for the record, I double-checked and I do think he’s correct here about the acids - formic acid only has 1 carbon while margaric acid has 17 carbon atoms, so there would be 15 acids between them. He loves to retain a random factoid. I also think it’s kind of funny that he casually references the fact that he goes to public lectures about atomic chemistry for fun right before he goes off about how his dad always hated him for being bad at math lol.
Iphigenia Among the Taurians by Euripides (English)
Iphigénie en Tauride by Christopher Willibald Gluck (English)
“One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet. In that sequence, O and P are inseparable. You might just as well say O and P as Orestes and Pylades. A true satellite of Enjolras, Grantaire lived within this circle of young men. He dwelt among them, only with them was he happy, he followed them everywhere. His pleasure was to watch these figures come and go in a wine-induced haze. They put up with him because of his good humor. In his belief, Enjolras looked down on this sceptic; and in his sobriety, on this drunkard. He spared him a little lordly pity. Grantaire was an unwanted Pylades.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Chapter 13: ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK (Les Mis 5.1.23)
“And turning to Enjolras, he said to him deferentially, ‘With your permission?’” (Les Mis 5.1.23)
Finally… last but not least…. it’s time to circle back to Orestes and Pylades. As I’ve mentioned, these two come up a lot in 19th century French writing of all sorts whenever someone is talking about some kind of epic friendship or partnership between two guys. Gluck’s French opera Iphigénie en Tauride was so popular it kept getting revivals and reportedly ran over 400 times (link), so the average Parisian would probably be familiar with these characters. Its source material, Euripides’ Iphigenia Among the Taurians, was apparently popular too. There’s lots of ye olde fanart of these characters and this play specifically, including this statue and this vase of the boys that were on display in the Louvre in the early 1800’s. We’ve also talked a fair amount about Orestes and Pylades being used as queer shorthand during this era, and Gluck’s opera played a large part in that, though probably not intentionally, by putting a lot of focus on the deep relationship between Orestes and Pylades (link). And now Grantaire’s entire relationship with Enjolras is being exemplified by whether or not it represents these guys. Once again, is this intentional on Victor Hugo’s part? Who can say. But this sure does keep happening.
Grantaire’s character and his role as a foil to Enjolras is bookended by comparisons to Orestes and Pylades. In his introduction, Grantaire is “an unwanted Pylades,” and Enjolras pointedly does not fill the role of Orestes out of disdain for Grantaire and his lack of belief. But the chapter where they both die is named “Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk,” finally making the comparison to the both of them together. At a glance there’s not much that Enjolras has in common with the myth of Orestes. He’s not a matricide, he’s not haunted by Furies or driven to madness, he’s not on trial, and he’s specifically an only child. However, his death scene is a mirror to a particular scene in Iphigenia Among the Taurians and Iphigénie en Tauride. Tldr, Orestes and Pylades get stranded and caught on an island that sacrifices all outsiders and are sentenced to die, but Iphigenia offers them a deal that one of them can live if they agree to deliver a letter to her brother for her. Orestes offers up Pylades as the messenger so that his friend won’t die for his crimes. But Pylades wants Orestes to be the messenger so that he won’t have to live without him — “It would be shameful for me to go on living while you do not. I sailed with you and I must die with you.” — and so the two keep offering to die for each other or die together, which is only averted by Iphigenia’s discovery that Orestes is the brother she was trying to contact so they all plot to escape together. In Les Mis, Grantaire is unnoticed by the firing squad that’s about to kill Enjolras, and he could escape if he stays quiet but he chooses instead to announce his presence to them and asks Enjolras for permission to die with him. Now that he finally is willing to die for something, Enjolras accepts him. Grantaire is no longer an “unwanted Pylades,” he’s welcomed to die together as a duo with a smile. It’s interesting to me that, of all the versions of stories with Orestes and Pylades, the reference is not to the original by Aeschylus, but to the one play at the end of Orestes’ long tragic saga where he gets a surprise happy ending. One that focuses on companionship and healing over righteous violence at the end of the day. Even though our Orestes and Pylades die for real in the Les Mis version, I don’t think it’s supposed to be sad. This unexpected connection at the last minute, where the skeptic finally learns to die for something, proves that this revolution wasn’t pointless.
Oh, and if you’ve been on tumblr for any length of time, you too have probably heard of Orestes and Pylades! They’re the “it’s rotten work” guys from Anne Carson’s An Oresteia (link). Wow, Victor Hugo, truly a tumblrina before his time.
…And that’s it! I’m not an expert on French history or literature, so if you happen to know any references that I missed, definitely hit me up and add on. In the meantime, thanks for reading!!
Long story short, when I was reading Les Mis last year, I thought it would be fun if I compiled a list of books each of the characters in Les Amis have canonically read based on the references they make. It was all fun and games until I realized just how many allusions Grantaire makes and then I regretted all of my life choices. This man won't shut up. His is definitely the longest booklist, no question. If you've read any of my other booklists (which you can find here) and wondered why I dropped off the face of the earth for a while, it was because the Grantaire booklist is twice the length of every other booklist. I actually had to split it into two posts because I had too many links and tumblr cut me off.
It's worth noting, Grantaire probably manages to read so much because he canonically goes to the public library!! We love to see it, even if he calls it a pile of oyster shells… whatever that means.
The characters in Les Amis make lots of references to Ancient Greece, but Grantaire makes the most allusions to Greek mythology of the group. According to the Encyclopédie entry on "Mythologie" as early as 1765: "This is why knowledge, at least superficial knowledge, of la fable is so widespread. Our theater, our lyrical and dramatic plays, and our poetry of all genres allude to it constantly; the engravings, paintings, and statues that decorate our cabinets, galleries, ceilings, and gardens are almost always derived from la fable." (translation from Dorothy Johnson's book on the topic, link) So apparently this obsession with Greek mythology wasn't at all unusual for the time. In that book by Dorothy Johnson, she makes the argument that it was especially popular during and after the French Revolution because artists turned to mythology to use as shorthand for big, complex emotional ideas they were having during such turbulent times. I'm sure you could say a lot about our current era and the renewed popularity of Greek mythology-inspired stories for us too, but that would be its own essay.
TLDR: Graintaire is an avid reader who reads a wide range of genres. He reads the most fiction of anyone in the group and, even in his nonfiction, he definitely prefers a juicy story to a true story. Sometimes he says things that are just plain wrong and he frequently comes frustratingly close to having some really good takes but always fucks it up at the last minute. He also makes a lot of references that foreshadow he is going to kill himself and a lot of references to stories about doomed or unrequited yearning. Hm, wonder what that could be about.
Also, I should specify that there are a lot of historical people and events that Grantaire name-drops that are not necessarily linked to a particular piece of literature, so I’m not necessarily going to cover those ones here. If you notice any random Russian monarch or battle that Grantaire mentions that's missing here, it’s because I’m trying to just stick to literary allusions or historical factoids that are tied specifically to a piece of literature. Sorry, I had to draw the line somewhere or this list would never end. So let's get into it...
La mort de Loizerolles by Francois-Simon Loizerolles (French)
Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères by Charlotte Robespierre (French, English excerpt)
“All those words — justice for the people, rights of man, social contract, French Revolution, Republic, democracy, humanity, civilization, religion, progress — for Grantaire came very close to having no meaning whatsoever. He could not take them seriously. Scepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had left him with not a single idea intact. He lived with irony. This was his fundamental premise: ‘There’s only one sure thing, my full glass.’ He derided any self-sacrifice on the part of anyone, father or brother, Loizerolles or the younger Robespierre. ‘A lot of good it’s done them to end up dead!’ he would cry. He used to say about the crucifix, ‘That was a good piece of carpentry.’” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
The very first thing we learn about Grantaire is that he’s cynical to a fault, and we’re provided with an itemized list of things that he thinks are particularly pointless. These are important receipts because later Grantaire will list off a bunch of things he supposedly cares about to impress Enjolras, and it’s almost the same list as these things he apparently tells everyone all the time that he thinks are stupid... He’s so embarrassing sometimes. But, anyway, Hugo makes reference to a couple specific stories from pop culture of the time to serve as specific examples. Loizerolles and Robespierre were both people who died in Paris in the late 1700’s, who sacrificed themselves out of love and became immortalized by plenty of newspaper articles, operas, and books written about them by the survivors they left behind.
When Grantaire makes fun of Loizerolles, he’s talking about the lawyer Jean-Simon Aved de Loizerolles. This guy was famously imprisoned along with his son, the poet Francois-Simon, during the Reign of Terror and it was commonly believed that when the guards came looking for a Loizerolles, he stepped up and took his son’s place at the guillotine to save his son’s life. It was later discovered that he was probably the one who was supposed to be executed after all, but it was a well known story at the time about a father’s selfless love. There was even a one-act opera about it called Loizerolles ou L'héroïsme paternel that premiered at the Théâtre des Amis de la Patrie on Christmas day 1795, and according to this review I found (link) it was apparently pretty accurate to how the papers talked about the story. That is to say, extremely heroic and sensationalized. Later, within Grantaire’s lifetime, the son of Loizerolles survived and wrote a poem, La mort de Loizerolles, about his dad (originally published in 1813, republished with additional material in 1828) that also memorialized this sensational, fictional version of events. Grantaire will always prefer a juicy story over a true story.
The younger Robespierre mentioned here does not refer to our boy Maximilien Robespierre, but his younger brother Augustin Robespierre. When the Reign of Terror was coming to a close and Maximilien Robespierre’s execution was decided, Augustin reportedly volunteered to be executed as well instead of forsaking his brother. It’s kind of funny that our first example is an execution that was perpetuated by Robespierre and the other execution was targeted at Robespierre. I have to imagine this was an intentional contrast, emphasizing that people all over the political spectrum are martyring themselves for their loved ones and it means equally nothing to Grantaire. (And also Jesus, who is not really on the French political spectrum but also famously sacrificed himself and does not get Grantaire’s respect for it. We’ll get back to him in a minute, put a pin in it for now.)
Basically all these people voluntarily went to their own execution out of love for someone else, and Victor Hugo tells us, in detail, just how stupid Grantaire thinks they are for doing that. Before, y’know, Grantaire will do exactly that himself by the end of the novel. For most of his time in the novel, Grantaire claims to be devoted to Enjolras entirely, but we watch him repeatedly fail to really understand Enjolras or the kind of ideas that Enjolras represents. And it’s because of this fundamental difference: Enjolras would die for something and Grantaire wouldn’t. Grantaire’s whole character arc is leading him to understanding the power of legacy and love and the point of being alive, which will ironically culminate in him finally dying for something. So when Grantaire makes fun of Loizerolles or Robespierre or Jesus, Victor Hugo is immediately foreshadowing that Grantaire is going to become that exact kind of person.
Henri IV’s Hunting Party by Charles Collé (English, English song)
“A womanizer and a gambler, often drunk, he liked to annoy these young idealists by constantly singing to himself, to the tune of ‘Long Live Henri IV’, ‘I loves the girls and I loves good wine.’” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
These are two lines from ‘Long Live Henri IV’ or ‘Vive Henri IV’ as heard in the three-act comedy Henri IV’s Hunting Party (La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV) by Charles Collé, though the melody is far older and actually served as a leitmotif for French royalty in various plays throughout the 19th century. Including Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty! The tune was used as the unofficial anthem of France during the Bourbon Restoration period with different lyrics and during the French Revolution to rally support for the royalist cause and praise the monarchy. So obviously Grantaire is being a little shit and singing this very royalist song but specifically only the parts from the theatre version about wine and womanizing and not the actual pro-monarchy stuff, just to be annoying. It’s so silly. What an absolutely dumb thing for him to do for no good reason. Classic Grantaire.
The Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius (English, French)
Tenth Nemean Ode by Pindar (English)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja. Their existence depends on being fronted by another man. Their names follow on and are never written without the conjunction ‘and’ in front of them. Their lives do not belong to them. They are the adjunct of a fate that is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was the reverse of Enjolras.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Alright, here we go. In his introduction, Grantaire is compared to a whole list of guys known for being a counterpart to another guy, the “reverse of Enjolras,” though in his case the bond is unreciprocated. I’m going to speedily cover all of them here except for one (Pylades) which I’m saving for later because that one comes back at the end in a more significant way.
The first on the list is Pollux. Castor and Pollux are twin half-brothers with the same mother but different fathers. Pollux has a god for a father (usually Zeus) and Castor has a mortal for a father (usually Tyndareus, king of Sparta). If you’re familiar with the myth of Leda and the swan, these are two of the kids that come after that. Castor and Pollux make appearances in several stories but they’re hardly ever the main characters. Take The Agonautica, for example. In that story, they’re just two of the ensemble of guys on the Argo. They get one standout moment when the Argo lands on an island with a king that challenges everyone to box him and since Pollux is supposedly an excellent boxer he volunteers for the match and wins (except he punches the king to death so drama ensues anyway). This obviously doesn’t have that much to do with the comparison being made here in Les Mis, though we are told elsewhere that Grantaire is good at boxing, but it is representative of the way that these two characters always seem to pop up as a duo. I found that the two of them are referenced pretty frequently as an iconic duo in French newspapers at the time. And the first translation of The Argonautica from Greek to French was done by Jean-Jacques-Antoine Caussin de Perceval in 1796, so it would still be pretty contemporary. I’m including it here because it was probably a large part of the zeitgeist regarding the two and for the boxing factoid.
However, I’d say the main myth that’s exclusively about these two characters is probably the origin story of the constellation Gemini. Pindar covers it in one of his Victory Odes, telling the story of Pollux choosing to give up his immortal place on Olympus to give his dying brother half his godliness so that he wouldn’t go to Hades alone. I’m sure this isn’t foreshadowing for anything that might happen in Les Mis.
The Iliad by Homer (English)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Next up we have Patroclus, of Achilles and Patroclus fame. There are a lot of references to The Iliad throughout the revolutionary parts of Les Mis, but Grantaire isn’t around for any of the epic battle scenes that get compared to the Trojan War. He’s just an unrequited version of this guy who is primarily known for being a doomed companion who dies for Achilles.
People have been arguing since time immemorial whether Achilles and Patroclus had a romantic or platonic relationship. Aeschines says it’s obviously gay and Homer is a coward for not saying they’re gay (link). Xenophon says no they’re just friends and also Orestes and Pylades are just friends too, you people don’t know what friends are like (link). Plato reports that Phaedrus says it’s gay but only if Achilles bottoms and Aeschylus is dead wrong for saying Achilles tops when he’s such an obvious twink (link). Aeschylus apparently had strong feelings about Achilles as a gay top but unfortunately his Iliad fanfic Myrmidones is mostly lost to time. Hundreds of years later, in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s classic medieval epic poem Roman de Troie verses 13163-13194, Hector specifically mentions Achilles and Patroclus have sex but is really homophobic about it and implies that the gods are using him to punish Achilles for being gay* (link). In the 17th century, Shakespeare has Achilles and Patroclus cameo as lovers in Troilus and Cressida (link), though the nature of this cameo is also debated, along with Shakespeare’s own sexuality. There are countless, very prolific people from history weighing in on this for over a thousand years and none of them agree. This discourse will last forever.
So idk how Victor Hugo interprets it, but he chose to use this relationship to characterize how Grantaire feels about Enjolras. Make of that what you will.
*=Hector very notably loses his fight against Achilles right after he says this, so uhhh I guess the gods said gay rights after all?
The Aeneid by Virgil (English)
“Episode of Nisus and Euryalus” Hours of Idleness by Lord Byron (English)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Nisus and Euryalus are minor characters in book 5 and 9 of The Aeneid who die tragically together. Hmmm, this dying together thing is starting to seem like a theme on this list. In her Les Mis dissertation, Grace Eloise Ebberly highlights the parallels between Nisus’ death scene and Grantaire’s later on, adding another layer to the foreshadowing in this introduction (link).
In general, Nisus and Euryalus are inseparable companions and, like Patroclus and Achilles, there is a lot of ambiguity in the ancient source material about whether these two were meant to be lovers or very good friends. In 1807, Lord Byron devoted an entire poem in his Hours of Idleness to Nisus and Euryalus, paraphrasing just their parts in The Aeneid. And, well, it’s Lord Byron, so obviously it’s full of queer undertones. Actually, in the same year, on July 5, 1807, he wrote a letter to his friend Elizabeth Bridget Pigot where he uses a reference to Nisus and Euryalus as if it’s recognizable shorthand for being gay and in love (link). Very interesting. He also mentions Orestes and Pylades as gay shorthand too, but just keep putting a pin in that for now. I promise we’ll come back to it.
And, just for the record, Victor Hugo was almost definitely familiar with the Byron version. Not only was Byron generally a huge force in the Romantic movement, Victor Hugo wrote an obituary for Byron after his passing in 1824 (link) where he expresses admiration for his poetry and says he wishes they could have been friends. It’s actually very sweet, even though he can’t resist doing literary criticism of Byron’s poetic transitions and over-the-top character descriptions during his obituary lmfao. Never change, Victor Hugo.
Toxaris by Lucian (English)
On Friendship by Michel de Montaigne (English)
Testament of Eudamidas by Poussin (link)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Eudamidas is one of the lesser known guys on this list by modern standards, but he would’ve been pretty familiar in Grantaire’s time. The story of Eudamidas was originally told by Lucian of Samasota in ~160 AD, then retold in French by the Renaissance philosopher Montaigne in his 1580 essay On Friendship, and then it inspired the 1644-1648 painting Testament of Eudamidas by Poussin (link), which had a massive resurgence in popularity in the late 18th century and brought Eudamidas back into the pop consciousness of Revolutionary era Parisians (link).
As for the story itself, Eudamidas had two significant friends: Aretaeus of Corinth and Charixenus of Sicyon. Both of them were richer than him and so Eudamidas left the care of his elderly mother and unmarried daughter to them in his will. When he died, only Aretaeus was still alive, but he reportedly honored the will, took in Eudamidas’s family, and cared for them as if they were his own. It’s a bit of an outlier in Grantaire’s list since there are no battles or glorious mutual deaths at the end of it, but it still has a lot to say about what it means to devote your life to someone and know that devotion is reciprocated, especially when one of you dies.
The most famous French translation by Michel de Montaigne was published after the death of his own close friend and platonic soulmate La Boétie, and I think it goes particularly hard on that theme. By his own account, he was using his writing to work through the loss of the single most significant relationship in his life. And the conclusion he came to is that Eudamidas was doing his friends a favor by asking for their help, not the other way around. That true friendship means you wouldn’t begrudgingly take on responsibilities for your friend, but that you’d be happy for those responsibilities because they give you a chance to demonstrate how much you love your friend. That’s genuinely really sweet. Sometimes we want our friends to inconvenience us: to ask us for that trip to the airport or to cover dinner for them or to help them move. It means they trust us and that we can show them how much that trust is met with our love in return.
And that’s, fundamentally, the relationship that Grantaire cannot have with Enjolras. This trust, this joy at asking or being asked to do things for someone else just to make their life easier, is not there. Oof.
The Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian (English)
Life of Alexander by Plutarch (English)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Hephaestion was the childhood friend and lifelong companion of Alexander the Great, with a relationship that was often compared to Achilles and Patroclus by historians and also by Alexander himself. A lot. If you learn one thing from this reference, it should be that Alexander the Great absolutely kinned Achilles. According to Plutarch 8.2-3, he even slept with a copy of The Iliad under his pillow… though this might not be strictly true, Plutarch is a little flexible with historical accuracy (link, link). But I like to believe it, because it’s funny. And, yet again, just like with Achilles and Patroclus, it’s not really agreed upon whether Alexander and Hephaestion were best friends or lovers. I could list sources weighing in on both sides here as well, but honestly it would be redundant because a lot of the discourse comes down to the constant comparisons between the two and the Patrochilles relationship. So it’s essentially the same discourse again. Arrian and Plutarch wrote two of the major ancient biographies that cover the life of Alexander, and neither of them say anything specific about the nature of the relationship, though they both mention Achilles and Patroclus a lot. What they do make clear is just how important this relationship was to the both of them. When Hephaestion suddenly died at age 32, “Alexander’s grief was uncontrollable” (Plutarch) and he actually died within a year too.
If you’re starting to see a pattern in the doomed, ambiguously gay guys that Grantaire is being compared to… Yeah. That’s kind of the vibe here. One example could’ve been a coincidence, but Victor Hugo is really making this a pattern.
Télephe by Jean-Joseph de Pechméja (French)
“There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Last on this list of guys is the most contemporary reference in Grantaire’s time: the French author Jean-Joseph de Pechméja and his doctor friend Jean Baptiste Léon Dubreuil. Professionally, Pechméja was probably best known for publishing radical anti-slavery passages in Raynal's Histoire des deux indes and his socialist Utopian novel Télephe, which tells the story of Hercules’ son Telephus and was published the year before Pechméja died in 1785. He also dedicated the book to Dubreuil (“Le respect, la tendresse, offrent cet hommag e, à la vertu austèlc, à l'amitié généreuse, à la puissance conservatrice”).
Pechméja and Dubreuil were lifelong friends who moved to Paris and lived together for at least a decade, reportedly sharing finances and everything else. Very cute. In 1785, Dubreuil got sick and died, then Pechméja died a few days later. The two were buried under the same tombstone. A translation of the engraving on that tombstone was roughly: “Here lie two friends: Esteem, gratitude, and the tenderest friendship have erected this monument for them.” I actually had to go on a bit of a deep dive about this tombstone because I was seeing people repeat this quote a lot, but I couldn’t find any evidence of it actually existing when I checked out the graveyard’s catalogue of headstones. Turns out, this is because the tombstone was repossessed and destroyed by the state during the Reign of Terror. Oh no! (link)
At first glance, you might get the impression this is kind of an obscure reference, but not so! While searching through newspapers and literature from the time, I found so many references to these guys all the way through the 1860’s. They were a hot topic! Even Benjamin Franklin had a copy of Pechméja’s book (link). I found a few letters to the editor in the Journal de Paris where someone from Saint-Germain en Laye wrote in to report on the extraordinary friendship exhibited by these two men (og letter on August 11, 1785 (link) and a follow up letter on August 23, 1785 (link)). This is the earliest version of the story I could find without looking too hard, and it has a lot of elements that are used in every subsequent retelling, like calling them a modern day Orestes and Pylades. A lot of people do that. For example, the 1813 poem, La Forêt de Saint-Germain (link), also calls them the Orestes and Pylades of their time, as does this L'Industriel de Saint-Germain-en Laye article from July 30, 1852 (link) covering the anniversary of the hospital in Saint-Germain. The two of them were principle benefactors of the hospital “who provided, says Dulaure, an example of this friendship offered to us by fabulous Greece, in Orestes and Pilades.” Then another article from L'Industriel de Saint-Germain-en Laye in December 12, 1857 (link) describes things to see on a Historic Walk near Paris which concludes with the story of Pechméja and Dubreuil, calling them a modern day Orestes and Pylades and Nisus and Euryalus! So, yeah, it’s probably not a coincidence that all these guys who are always being compared to each other are all together on the list Victor Hugo has made here in Les Mis. They are basically the guys to reference in early-to-mid 1800’s France when you want to describe a super epic friendship between two men.
So, overall, whether you interpret all of the guys from this list as friends or lovers or a mix of both, the important thing is that all of these men were utterly devoted to another person. They are remembered for the sacrifices they made out of love for their most important person. But Grantaire scoffs and makes sarcastic asides about people who do that, and that’s why his yearning for a connection like Pollux or Patroclus is not ever going to be reciprocated. He’s scrambling to make an authentic connection when he cannot be authentic to save his life. This list is essentially Victor Hugo executing a particularly devastating combo move to hammer home why Grantaire is fundamentally incapable of getting the love he craves. And he won’t be able to until he finally understands why all these men gave their lives for their companion. But that comes later.
The Bible, Book of Ecclesiastes (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘Ecclesiastes says: “All is vanity.” I agree with that fellow, who probably never existed. Not wanting to go about stark-naked, Zero clothed himself in vanity. O vanity!’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
“He used to say about the crucifix, ‘That was a good piece of carpentry.’” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
“[Grantaire:] ‘Ah! there’s no morality on this earth, I call to witness the myrtle, symbol of love, the laurel, symbol of war, the silly old olive, symbol of peace, the apple tree that almost choked Adam on one of its pips, and the fig tree, grand-papa of petticoats.’” (Les Mis 4.12.2)
Much like with Enjolras and the Book of Ezekiel, we’ve got another Victor Hugo-assigned Bible passage for Grantaire: Ecclesiastes. I asked my friend who went to Catholic school to give me the rundown on Ecclesiastes (thanks Jared!) and it sounds like a good fit for Grantaire. It’s got a lot of philosophy that circles themes of heaviness, devotion, depression, and nihilism. It can be skeptical and contrary, and people still debate whether the ultimate theme is that God gives life meaning or that life has no meaning. Even if you haven’t read the book, you’ve probably run into some reference to it. Several idioms like “nothing new under the sun” come from Ecclesiastes and it has its fingerprints all over so much of Western literature, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Hemingway. So that’s cool!
Grantaire makes a few other irreverent jokes about the Bible throughout Les Mis that are not based on Ecclesiastes (the part in his introduction where he makes fun of Jesus for dying, later when he jokes about God being broke, when he calls Adam’s fig leaf the “grand-papa of petticoats”, etc.) so he’s likely generally familiar with its content at large. He actually invokes a lot of religions throughout the book - he’ll talk about Islam, Olympus, and Christianity all in the same breath. But I still think Ecclesiastes deserves a special shout out because it’s the subject of a drunken monologue Grantaire gives for 3 WHOLE PAGES. He starts by invoking the line from Ecclesiastes about how “all is vanity” and most of the subsequent allusions are examples of the ways that people are fools for vanity - dressing up their vocabulary or station in life just to feel like they’re better than other people, when in fact this belief in their own superiority makes them terrible. Basically, life is pointless and everyone is terrible. An appropriate theme for Grantaire’s long drunk rambling about how he wants to drink to forget life, yeesh. He is so not okay.
One last note before we get into it, but I cannot figure out this thing Grantaire says about Zero clothing himself in vanity. It might be a typo for Zeno, but I really couldn’t find anything in Zeno’s paradoxes or the history of stoicism that would specifically relate to this line either. It could also be a joke about the concept of the number zero I guess. Idk, I’m at a loss. I feel like sometimes Grantaire just says things.
The Animal Kingdom Vol. 3 by Georges Cuvier and Pierre-Andre Latreille (French)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘a woodlouse is a pterygibranchia.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
This is part of a long list Grantaire rattles off making fun of people for calling simple things big words to sound smarter or more important. Most of these examples are basic synonyms, but this one is a very specific reference to the French zoologist Pierre-Andre Latreille, who did pretty significant early work in the classification of insects, including this defunct term for a subclass of isopod crustaceans. Early efforts to create a system of taxonomy for animals tended to ignore insects altogether, but in the early 1800’s there was a sudden boom in zoologists attempting to figure out how to classify them, Latreille included (link). There wasn’t one agreed-upon method of subdividing insects at the time, so lots of books and pamphlets were getting published in such quick succession that often even the zoologists that agreed with each other would miss the latest updates and publish conflicting systems. Le Règne Animal (The Animal Kingdom) was a massive project by French naturalist Georges Cuvier to classify the entire animal kingdom using comparative anatomy. The 1817 first edition used Latreille’s sixth system of crustacean classification, which included the ptérygibranche, but by its second printing Latreille had already moved on to a new system of classification and the term was removed from the book. So we know literally the exact book Grantaire would have read to see this word.
This is a very significant book, no doubt, but the word itself is from such a specific point in time, only made official in a specific number of books, about such a specific animal. I’ve seen some translations of Les Mis actually replace this word altogether because it’s so defunct and obscure. I have no idea why this is something Victor Hugo remembered and cared about enough to reference unless this is like the French 1800’s version of “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.” But I have to guess that its hyper-specific nature is part of the joke here.
“Caligula” Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (English)
Ballad of the New Sir John Barleycorn (English excerpt)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘Kings make a plaything of human pride. Caligula appointed a horse as consul. Charles II knighted a Sir Loin. So now take pride of place between Consul Incitatus and Baron of Beef.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Still going on his rant about vanity, Grantaire makes reference to two infamous stories about corrupt monarchs using their unchecked power to do ridiculous things.
First up, Emperor Caligula. Most of the information we know about Caligula comes from the historian Suetonius, whose account is not flattering. He talks at length about how much Caligula loved his favorite horse: he sent soldiers to quiet down neighborhoods so his horse’s sleep wouldn’t be disturbed, gave the horse furniture and a retinue of slaves, invited people to eat dinner with the horse, and intended to make the horse a Consul. Suetonius actually theorizes at the end of the chapter that someone might have drugged Caligula and gave him brain damage. You know you’ve hit a low point when the historian recording your life assumes you must have undiagnosed brain damage to explain your behavior.
Second up, we’ve got the myth of Sir Loin. According to folklore, Charles II gave this name to an excellent cut of beef. Apparently the pun “Sir Loin” can be found in writing as early as 1630 (predating Charles II) and the term “a baron of beef” appears in Johnson’s Dictionary as early as 1775 so this is almost definitely not a real thing that happened. Yet again we can see that Grantaire does not always pick the most accurate sources for his pop culture drama. This one actually gave me quite the run-around because over and over again I kept finding sources from the 1800’s explaining this joke (link, link, link) and almost all of them claimed it was a verse from the Ballad of the New Sir John Barleycorn, but I cannot for the life of me find a full version of the song with this verse in it. But I know in my heart this has to be the source, because it’s a weird little folk song about alcohol! So of course Grantaire would know it! But idk, I’ll only ever know those couple of lines I guess. Maybe it is only those couple of lines? Truly a mystery.
Bacchus and Ariadne by Antoine-Jean Gros (1820) (link)
Portrait of Jean-Antoine Chapel by Antoine-Jean Gros (1824) (link)
Portrait of Madame Récamier by Antoine-Jean Gros (1825) (link)
Le Génie de la France anime les Arts, protège l'Humanité by Antoine-Jean Gros (1827) (link)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘However, I’ve always been witty. When I was a pupil of Gros, instead of messing about with paints I spent my time filching apples. Painting is an art of abstraction." (Les Mis 3.4.4)
This anecdote refers to the French painter Antoine-Jean Gros. He’s mostly known for his paintings of Napoleon and the fiery, expressive style of his brushstrokes that helped influence the early Romantic movement. He was also a student of Jacques Louis David, who helped inspire the popularity of mythology in visual art at the time, and Gros was very devoted to his master’s legacy. However, Gros is mostly being referenced here to set up a grammatical pun. In French, Grantaire ends his little story about studying art under Gros by saying “rapin est le mâle de rapine,” which is basically saying that he spent his time as an art student stealing apples because he knows that rapin (painter’s assistant) is the masculine form of rapine (thievery). Ohoho, tasteful chuckle. They just cut this joke entirely from most of the English versions lol. But, to be fair, I don’t know how I’d translate this joke either.
Anyway, this is obviously not a book or literary reference, but I had to include it because for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why everyone in the fandom thought Grantaire was a painter. Egg on my face. Turns out, beyond claiming to be a student at an artist’s studio here, Grantaire actually makes a lot of references to paintings or stories that are specifically made popular by paintings. I’ve already mentioned one (Testament of Eudamidas), but there are a few more coming up as well. No one else in the book does this nearly as much, it feels like an intentional choice by Victor Hugo, which is really cool. But, canonically, Grantaire spent more time stealing apples than painting, so everybody take note of that.
I’m not sure exactly when Grantaire was supposedly a student in Gros’s studio. Students generally ranged in age from 15-20’s so, since Grantaire is 25 when he says this in 1828, that means Grantaire could’ve studied under him basically at any point between 1818-1827, though most likely early in that range. According to the 1857 obituary of the artist Eugine Goyet (link), Gros’s atelier had sixty students at least one year when Goyet studied there between 1816-1827. In 1820, another one of Gros’s students, Louis Boilly, made a charcoal sketch of at least 25 students currently studying in Gros’s studio (link). So it seems like the position wasn’t so exclusive that it would be completely unrealistic for Grantaire to have actually done this. It’s a bit of a brag because it was a pretty reputable studio, but it was also during Gros’s critical flop era, so Grantaire wouldn’t have assisted on any of Gros’s really famous pieces. I’ve included a list of the paintings Gros’s studio put out during the range of possible dates that Grantaire might’ve been assisting him. (Two of them even have fruit in it - the apples, oh no! Gros, watch out!) Personally, because of the earlier timeframe and the subject matter, I’m tempted to say Grantaire was around for the painting of Bacchus and Ariadne because… well, it’s Bacchus, god of wine, that’s too perfect. But I have no definitive proof. It’s just the vibes.
Speaking of vibes, of all the artists Victor Hugo could’ve name-dropped, another reason he might’ve chosen Gros was that the guy was famously depressed and eventually drowned himself in the Seine in 1835. So even though he’s not dead at this point in the book, a reader would know to associate Grantaire with that vibe. Especially during this drunken monologue where Grantaire keeps talking about how he hates life and happiness is a farce. If my friend was talking like this, I’d be worried. So, on top of getting a fun anecdote about Grantaire’s art studies, we get another bit of subtle foreshadowing that this guy will probably kill himself. All from a terrible pun about stealing apples.
“Diogenes” Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (English)
The School of Athens by Raphael (link)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘There are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes’ cloak.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
“[Grantaire:] ‘In Paris even the rag-pickers are sybarites. Diogenes would just as soon have been a rag-picker on Place Maubert as a philosopher in Piraeus.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
“[Grantaire:] ‘That pile of oyster-shells they call a library puts me off thinking. All that paper! All that ink! All that scribbling! The amount that’s been written! Which numbskull was it that said man was a featherless biped?’” (Les Mis 4.12.2)
It completely tracks that Grantaire reads up on Diogenes the Cynic, one of the founders of cynicism and a complete troll. This is probably his idol. Diogenes rejected materialism and lived in voluntary poverty for most of his life, so his cloak was famously tattered. Apparently he largely did this as a statement about the vanity of his fellow philosophers and their opulent, exclusive purple robes. So these first two quotes are both a good example of a thing with many holes, and a reference to someone who also thinks that other people are full of themselves and deserve to be mocked. It’s an economical reference. And it’s a fact that’s mostly immortalized in paintings! I told you there would be more painting references. Diogenes’ tattered cloak was depicted most memorably in Raphael’s The School of Athens. And, in fact, a tapestry copy of that very painting was commissioned by Louis XIV in 1689 and has hung in the French National Assembly Chamber since 1879 (link). This obviously would have been after Les Mis was published, but I think it helps demonstrate the presence this painting had in France at the time.
Later, in 4.12.2, Grantaire makes a pun about the library by referencing a famous debate between Plato and Diogenes. The one about man being a featherless biped. You might have heard this one before, it occasionally makes the rounds on tumblr for whatever inscrutable reason certain historical anecdotes gain tumblr immortality. We know about this little story because Diogenes Laertius (a different Diogenes) wrote about it in his biography of his namesake. Basically, “sans plume” can either mean without a feather or without a feather quill, so he’s essentially saying man can’t be a featherless biped because the people in the library are never without their feather quills.
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare (English)
Le Mort de César by Voltaire (French)
Natural History, Book 34 by Pliny the Elder (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘Whom do you admire, the man killed or his killer? Caesar or Brutus? Generally people are in favour of the killer. Long live Brutus! He killed a man! That’s virtue for you. Virtue? Maybe, but madness too. These great men are strangely flawed. The Brutus who killed Caesar was fond of a statue of a little boy. This statue was by the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also carved that figure of an Amazon known as the “Shapely-legged”, Eucnemos, which Nero took with him on his travels. This Strongylion left only two statues that put Nero and Brutus in agreement with each other.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘There was in the great square in Corinth a statue carved by Silanion and recorded by Pliny. This statue represented Epistates. What did Epistates do? He invented a wrestler’s led hook. That sums up Greece and glory.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Next, Grantaire joins the club of Les Amis members who weigh in on Brutus. Enjolras remains the only uncritical stan because Grantaire’s opinion is closer to Combeferre’s, though of course he words his criticism more crudely. He mentions the famous Caesar stabbing incident, which was popularized by the Shakespeare play and its first French translation by Voltaire, but he actually goes into more detail about an art history anecdote from Pliny’s Natural History book 34. Basically, this supposedly great man (Brutus) and this infamously corrupt man (Nero) both love the same artist (Strongylion), so they’re perhaps more similar than people like to admit. Blah blah, everyone is terrible at the end of the day; there are no great men, only the best places to consume alcohol and forget life. Typical Grantaire doom spiral.
It’s also another art reference, though we don’t have either of these statues anymore, just the references to them made by writers in antiquity. Pliny is definitely the main source for this anecdote, though the Roman poet Martial also describes the statue he calls “Brutus’s Boy” or “Brutus’s Favorite” (link). The archeologist Antonio Corso has a chapter in The Art of Praxiteles where he references other comparable statues with all the written descriptions of Strongylion’s work and gives an approximation of what they might have looked like, if you’re interested in that kind of stuff (link). Anyway, Grantaire is pretty judgy of Brutus on this front. He seems to imply this statue is a little young for Brutus lol, but it is also a canonical reference to men being attracted to men, so that’s cool.
Later in the same drunken monologue, he brings up another statue by the artist Silanion, which is a reference to another anecdote from the same passage of Pliny’s Natural History. He really liked this book, or at least that one chapter about all the statues. I hadn’t previously read this part of Pliny’s Natural History, but I was familiar with his weird medical advice chapters. And considering Grantaire makes multiple references to having fits of hypochondria and hangs out a lot with pseudoscience-lover Joly, I think he’s probably at least dipped into the weird medical stuff too. I don’t have proof, this is just the vibes.
Ars Poetica by Horace (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘Everything obeys success, even grammar. Si volet usus, says Horace.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Ars Poetica is an influential critical poem that basically gives a list of advice on how to write poetry and plays. A few phrases from it are in common literary use now, like “in media res.” It had a general influence on European literature, but more so specifically on French drama. The particular line that Grantaire is quoting, from line 71, literally means something like “as usage dictates.” It’s not a particularly telling quote, but it’s fun to see that Grantaire reads some literary theory - he’s an artsy guy, he’s interested in the craft. He also references Horace again later, so it seems like this is an author he checks out frequently.
“Life of Phocion” Parallel Lives by Plutarch (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘You want me to start admiring nations? Which nation, if you please? Is it Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of an earlier age, slew Phocion, another Coligny, and fawned on tyrants to such an extent that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus, “His urine attracts bees.” The most prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas, who was so small and puny he was obliged to weigh his shoes with lead so as not to be blown away by the wind.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Phocion only has a few written sources about him, and Plutarch’s coverage of him is definitely the most thorough, so we have a pretty good idea where Grantaire probably learned this anecdote. Victor Hugo has referenced a few other people well known from their chapters in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives too, so this tracks. Plutarch described Phocion “The Good” as a good man devoted to the state who was falsely accused of treason and executed. He likens this to Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a man of integrity whose murder marked the beginning of the St Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 and the subsequent exodus of Huguenots from France. You can probably pick most of this up from context clues. Grantaire is just listing examples of good men or good politicians who weren’t appreciated in their time as an example of how the Athenians weren’t that great after all.
Bibliotheca by Diodorus Siculus (English, English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘You want me to start admiring nations? Which nation, if you please? Is it Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of an earlier age, slew Phocion, another Coligny, and fawned on tyrants to such an extent that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus, “His urine attracts bees.” The most prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas, who was so small and puny he was obliged to weigh his shoes with lead so as not to be blown away by the wind.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
This is kind of a weird one. Pisistratus is an Athenian tyrant from the 500’s BCE, but Anacephorus is just straight up not a guy. When you search for his name online you get literally no results except this exact Les Mis quote. According to the Donougher deluxe edition footnotes, this is possibly a reference to Ephorus instead, a Greek historian who wrote the first universal history which has since been lost. So obviously this exact quote can’t have been attributed to him either, but other ancient historians referenced his work extensively so Victor Hugo might be paraphrasing their work and crediting Ephorus but mistranscribing his name. It’s a stretch, but it’s my best guess.
Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca, literally translated as Library, heavily relied on Ephorus’ research. He even called his work the Library to give credit to the fact that he was mostly compiling the research of other writers together in one place. In sections 9.2 and 9.4 he mentions short anecdotes about the people fawning over Pisistratus’ tyranny that are close enough to this joke that I opted to include them here, though they don’t have the exact line Grantaire uses about the urine attracting bees. Personally, I think that’s a Hugo original piss joke. Grantaire makes another piss joke about Queen Isabella and Jean Prouvaire also makes a piss joke about the Pissevache waterfall, so we know Victor Hugo is not above potty humor.
Anyway, piss joke aside, he ultimately does all this to contrast the people’s acceptance of Pisistratus with their condemnation of Phocion the Good. But tbh, in Pisistratus’ defense, he does sound pretty cool. He was constantly being exiled and coming back to rule again in kind of silly ways. Herodotus tells a story about how one time he hired this six foot tall lady he found in the countryside to pretend to be Athena and uber him into the city in a chariot so people would think he was blessed by Olympus (link). Idk, Grantaire, I think you have to admit that’s funny.
Varia Historia, 9.14 by Aelian (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘You want me to start admiring nations? Which nation, if you please? Is it Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of an earlier age, slew Phocion, another Coligny, and fawned on tyrants to such an extent that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus, “His urine attracts bees.” The most prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas, who was so small and puny he was obliged to weigh his shoes with lead so as not to be blown away by the wind.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Philitas was a Greek poet and literary scholar whose work only survives in fragments today. But that’s not important, what’s important is that he was reportedly super skinny and the Roman author Aelian wrote a little anecdote in his Varia Historia about how he was so comically frail he had to weigh his shoes with lead lest he be blown away by the wind. I found a pretty cool JSTOR article by Alan Cameron on why exactly this was a joke people made in ancient times (link) but I think regardless of the very specific context of Philitas as a comic subject, the silly mental image of this little guy being blown away by the wind is kind of a timeless joke.
The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan by James Kirke Paulding (English)
“Advice to a Young Tradesman” by Benjamin Franklin (English)
🚨 Cotton is King by David Christy (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘And if I don’t admire John Bull, shall I admire Brother Jonathan? I don’t much care for that slave-owning brother. Take away “Time is money”, and what’s left of England? Take away “Cotton is king”, and what’s left of America?’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Grantaire’s anti-slavery rant, let’s gooo! Even though most of the boys reference the work of abolitionists (and Victor Hugo even compares them at one point to John Brown, high praise), Grantaire is the only one who actually mentions a disdain for slavery on the page. Gotta give credit where credit is due. Although… Grantaire is also the only member of the group who debatably says a racist slur too. I’m not a linguist so I don’t know all the historical context but the word he says in French when he talks about “the negro with his glass beads” a few sentences before this section seems to be pretty derogatory and at least one edition of Les Mis (Rose) straight up translated it as the n-word. Sigh. Every time Grantaire does something right (being an abolitionist) he fucks it up (saying a slur). C’mon man, get it together.
John Bull and Brother Jonathan were satirical terms used to refer to colonial England and America. The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan is a good topical example of the two personas being used together to criticize the countries in question though Paulding went on to publish a lot of other satirical novellas using these caricatures (link). According to Webster’s Dictionary of the era, the term “John Bull” was first used in Arbuthnot’s satirical allegory The History of John Bull (1712). Brother Jonathan had its origins in the American Revolutionary War, originally in reference to Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull, but eventually shifted to become a national sobriquet instead of reference to a particular guy.
Grantaire also characterizes England and America disparagingly using two idioms. “Time is money” is a concept that’s been around for a long long time, but Benjamin Franklin coined the particular wordage in his 1748 essay “Advice to a Young Tradesman.” Beyond the founding father stuff and the kite with the lightning, Benjamin Franklin was also famous for writing really sassy and catchy advice, and became the source of the particular wording of a lot of idioms we still use today (an apple a day, early to bed early to rise, etc). He also did a lot of other weird things like catfishing as a middle aged widow named Silence Dogood to get published as a teen. And he was probably in a pagan sex cult, but I really don’t have time to get into that. It’s possible Grantaire is just using the idiom without reading the source material, but it makes so much sense that he would enjoy Benjamin Franklin’s writing. Trust me.
And, lastly, ahem… 🚨 Grantaire saying “cotton is king” here is actually an anachronism! 🚨Ohohoho I’ve got you now, Victor Hugo! The earliest recorded use of the phrase was in 1855. So while technically this is Victor Hugo making a mocking reference to the title of David Christy’s 1855 pro-slavery book Cotton is King, Grantaire shouldn’t be able to because the book hasn’t been written yet. So, uh, according to Les Mis, Grantaire actually came up with this phrase himself because he hates slavery that much. Wow, amazing.
The History of Peter the Great by Voltaire (English)
Essay on the Manners and Spirits of Nations by Voltaire (English)
“[Grantaire:] ‘Germany is all lymph, Italy is all bile. Shall we go into raptures about Russia? Voltaire admired it. He also admired China.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
The two books that Grantaire references here are the biography that Voltaire wrote about Peter the Great and his Essay on the Manners and Spirits of Nations, or Essai ser les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, which praised the achievements made by China at that point in time. This whole rant that Grantaire is going on about how Europeans aren’t inherently any better than other countries despite their vanity is a more sarcastic spin on the very genuine opinion at the heart of Voltaire’s Essai. Voltaire argued that Europe had a tendency to dismiss the wisdom and developments of other countries just because they were different. Grantaire is acknowledging this point, but really honing in on how this makes Europe look like an ignorant asshole instead of actually singing the praises of any other country. Grantaire would absolutely be one of those people who wears a “I hate everyone equally” shirt. He comes so close to a genuine criticism of Eurocentrism, but can’t help himself from backing off and making a cynical joke instead. I see why he frustrates Enjolras so much. He has so many valid criticisms and then he just shrugs and says something really defeatist instead of caring about literally anything.
“Anecdotes of Fashion” Curiosities of Literature, Vol. I by Isaac D’Israeli (English)
Memoirs of Louis XIV by Saint-Simon (English)
“[Grantaire:] ‘Now war, civilized war, reduces and subsumes all forms of banditry, from the brigandage of Spanish irregulars in the gorges of Mount Jaxa to marauding Comanches in Doubtful Pass. Bah! You’ll tell me that Europe’s nonetheless better than Asia? I agree that Asia is a joke. But I don’t really see that you peoples of the West can afford to mock the Grand Lama, having included in your manners and refinements all the complicated squalors of majesty, from Queen Isabella’s dirty shift to the Dauphin’s commode.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
The Isabella line refers to the legend that Isabella of Castile said she wouldn’t wash her underwear until the end of the siege of Granada. Which may have been conflated with a different legend that a different Isabella, Isabella Clara Eugenia, said she wouldn’t wash her underwear until the end of the siege of Ostend. There are written sources in the 19th century giving stories about both Isabellas as the source for why Isaballine is the name for a particular shade of pale-yellow (link, link), but honestly it seems like the story was more word-of-mouth folklore rather than something that came from a specific book. For reference, this is what isabelline color looks like (link). Get it? Because it’s like piss-stained underwear? Lmao, sorry to everyone who at some point actually bought and used the paint I found in that link. Unless it was to paint your bathroom. Actually, wait, that’s amazing. Brb, I’m going to call my landlord about something really quick.
As for the Dauphin’s commode, I did some digging and didn’t find a specific anecdote about any particular dauphin or their chamberpot. The Dauphin is a title given to the heir apparent to the throne of France, and for a while he was like the guy to mention when you were making reference to a generic fancy guy. For example, Huck Finn makes a joke about it, during the scene where two bandits are trying to one-up each other with fancy fake identities and one of them claims to be the Lost Dauphin of France, though a lot of editions change it to the more generic “king” so modern audiences would get the joke. So my best guess is that this is just generally about fancy guys and the ornate chamber pots they had in Versailles and all their weird etiquette surrounding it. Idk, there was a weird amount of toilet drama in Versailles, the luxury of the furniture would definitely have generally been at odds with how reportedly filthy the place was, which is Grantaire’s general point here. The Duc de Saint-Simon wrote a lot of gossip about Versailles which are petty, dramatic, and were really popular at the time - and they have lots of toilet drama. These memoirs were massive! There’s so much detail and Saint-Simon is not a brief man. Apparently he’s really good at character work and building compelling snapshots of the time, but he has incredibly long diatribes about other random stuff breaking this info up. Hm, sounds like a certain someone we know. (...Honestly, I meant Grantaire, but this could also apply to Victor Hugo.) Anyway, I might be wrong! Someone please dm me if there’s a particularly juicy anecdote about the dauphin’s toilet that I couldn’t find.
Also, I don’t usually include really general historical references that aren’t about a particular story / didn’t have some kind of literature or dramaturgical footprint in Paris at the time, but at this point I feel compelled to point out when Grantaire is bullshitting. And he is bullshitting when he talks about the marauding Comanches in Doubtful Pass. I think he’s actually referencing the skirmishes that took place around this time in Doubtful Canyon, which is a part of Apache Pass and, as you might have guessed, is occupied by the Apache tribe not the Comanche tribe. He obviously only half remembers reading about them at all.
Life of Caesar by Plutarch (English)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘I am, I declare, a voluptuary, I eat at Richard’s at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets in which to roll naked Cleopatra!’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
In his biography Life of Caesar, Plutarch depicts a scene where Cleopatra has her servant Apollodorus wrap her up in a bed-sack or carpet and carry her in to sneakily visit Caesar. He’s so impressed with her boldness and cleverness that they have sex and he gives her some political favors she wanted. Cleopatra charming Caesar into becoming her political ally is widely reported, but the specific part about the bed-sack is a mistake specifically from the Plutarch version that later caught on. Grantaire makes a couple references to Plutarch’s biographies, so he’s definitely a fan. As a whole, I get the impression Grantaire cares less about strict historical accuracy and more about which historians really capture an iconic moment.
Speaking of, I thought for sure this was going to be another painting reference because this exact moment, Plutarch inaccuracy and all, is captured in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s iconic Cleopatra and Caesar (link) which helped solidify the public memory of Cleopatra getting smuggled in a carpet. But I was totally wrong because the painting was actually finished 4 years after Les Mis was published and 34 years after Grantaire would be dead! French people in the mid-19th century just loved Plutarch I guess.
Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of Artaxerxes by Anne-Louis Girodet (link)
“[Grantaire, drunk:] ‘Hands down, Aigle de Meaux! I’m utterly unimpressed by that gesture, of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes’ trifles. You’ve no need to quieten me. Besides, I feel sad.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Finally, we’re reaching the end of Grantaire’s long drunken rant about vanity… with another reference to a painting! Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of Artaxerxes depicts a famous anecdote in which Hippocrates (of the Hippocratic Oath) demonstrates his medical ethics by turning down a bribery. There is an irony in Grantaire using this scene of unwavering moral integrity to describe Bossuet just telling him to shut up because he’s been yelling for too long. It adds a certain amount of gravitas to the situation that’s very unwarranted, and I think that’s part of why Grantaire says it. But he’s probably mostly referencing that flirty leg Hippocrates is giving in the painting. Bossuet must have been striking quite a pose when he turned to shush Grantaire here.
“Fleuve du Tage” arrangement by Hector Berlioz (English, French song)
“Narcissus and Echo” Metamorphoses by Ovid (English)
“‘Echo, plaintive nymph,’ Grantaire sang under his breath.” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Grantaire is singing a line from an 1810 song called “Fleuve du Tage” by Joseph Hélitas de Meun and Jean-Joseph Benoît Pollet, which is based on the story of the nymph Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In 1819, the composer Berlioz published an arrangement of the song which is much easier to find in recordings than the original, and since Berlioz was Victor Hugo’s friend I feel like he probably listened to his version anyway.
Grantaire references a couple different stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Apparently, the story collection was getting a bunch of new illustrated editions released around this time and, in her book on mythology and art history in Revolutionary Era France, Dorothy Johnson says that Metamorphoses attained a popularity “verging on mania” (link). I can only imagine that, faced with such rapidly changing times, a story collection about reckoning with transformation would feel really relevant.
The reference isn’t nearly as random as it sounds in English. In the line before this one, Bossuet is going off about property law, ending with a list of words that, in French, use assonance to create a sort of sing-songy effect: “domaniaires et domaniaux, hypothécaires et hypothécaux…” Hypothécaux ends in the sound “echo,” so Grantaire is playing off of this by echoing that sound with a reference to a song about Echo. It’s a very literary but bad pun. I actually saw a tumblr post about this line a while back (here) where someone said that Grantaire is basically pulling the equivalent of someone today who hears “let’s get down to business” and has to respond with “to defeat the Huns!” That is honestly the best explanation of what he’s doing here and I’m not going to try to describe it any other way.
Furthermore, in doing this pun under his breath as an echo while no one pays attention to him, he’s sort of reenacting the myth of Echo. Something he probably relates to because of, you know, the way he’s constantly trying to get Enjolras’s attention and failing miserably. The pun has layers.
Le Bal de Sceaux (The Ball at Sceaux) by Honoré de Balzac (English)
“Once, trusting in some lovely September sunshine, Marius allowed himself to be taken along by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and Grantaire to the [ball] at Sceaux, hoping - what a pipe dream! - that he might perhaps find her there. He did not, of course, see the girl he was looking for. ‘Yet this is the place where all lost women are to be found,’ Grantaire grumbled privately.” (Les Mis 3.8.1)
In LM 3.8.1, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and Grantaire persuade Marius to go to a ball at Sceaux, a suburb of Paris. I think this part is probably a reference to Balzac’s novella The Ball at Sceaux, especially this little aside Grantaire says when Marius doesn’t find his mystery girl at the ball. The novella was a part of Le Comédie Humaine, which was a massive collection of popular novels and short stories by Honoré de Balzac depicting French society in the Bourbon Restoration and July Monarchy, providing social commentary through the mode of pop fiction.
The Ball at Sceaux came out in 1830, just in time for the boys to have read it before they dragged their morose friend out to party in the suburbs. The story follows Émilie de Fontaine, a beautiful daughter from a prominent family who has rejected all her previous suitors because they don’t meet her impossibly high standards. Then she goes to a Ball at Sceaux (title drop) and meets Maximilien de Longueville, who is as handsome and stylish as he is mysterious. Émilie becomes determined to figure out who he is, so she starts taking carriage rides through neighborhoods she thinks he might live in and goes back to the ball several times in hopes of running into him. Eventually through some wacky hijinx she does find him and they fall in love, but alas, Émilie discovers that Maximilien has been working as a salesclerk this whole time. She’s so horrified she breaks up with him on the spot. She marries her elderly uncle for his title instead, but then a few years later when she’s sitting there at a party with her 70-year-old husband she looks up and sees Maximilien walking in the door. Turns out he was actually a viscount who had selflessly given his inheritance to his siblings to save them from ruin and that’s why he’d been working in the shop. Now he’s unbelievably rich and hot and every girl in the room wants to marry Maximilien while Émilie’s sitting there watching him from afar thinking about how she once had the chance to marry him but she had said see you later boy, he wasn’t good enough for her. It’s literally the plot of Sk8er Boi by Avril Lavigne.
Anyway, it’s basically just a timely reference to young people having social and relationship drama at a ball. There’s a flattering comparison to be made between Maximilien and Marius: both young men from prestigious families living in poverty because of their principles. And a slightly less flattering comparison to be made between Émilie and Marius: instantly falling in love with a mysterious stranger who they know nothing about and running around town desperately trying to find them. The boys are apparently trying to Hallmark movie their bro into a meet-cute, and they’re disappointed it’s not working.
On the Principles of Political Morality by Maximilien Robespierre (English)
Discours sur l’organisation des Gardes nationales by Maximilien Robespierre (French)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘I’ll talk to them about Robespierre, of course! And about Danton. About principles.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
“Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very close to Café Musain. He went out, and came back five minutes later. He had gone home to put on a Robespierre-style waistcoat.
‘Red,’ he said as he came in, gazing intently at Enjolras.” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
In LM 4.1.6, Grantaire lists a bunch of politicians and publications to Enjolras that he claims to be familiar with in an attempt to impress Enjolras. I talked about basically everything on this list in my Enjolras booklist, but it’s also somewhat informative about Grantaire’s reading habits as well. I mean, I do believe he read these things even if he doesn’t take them seriously. So I’m going to discuss them again!
One of the very first things we learn about Grantaire is how he publicly, repeatedly makes fun of Robespierre’s brother for dying alongside him because he cared about his political ideals. So it’s incredibly funny that he leads his pitch to Enjolras by how he’ll of course talk about Robespierre and his principles. He’s absolutely just trying to appeal to things he knows Enjolras likes. And then, to make things even more cringe, he runs home and it turns out he owns a Robespierre-style waistcoat (in red, of course) which he puts on and runs back to the Cafe for absolutely no reason but to make intense eye contact with Enjolras while pointing out his waistcoat before leaving to immediately fuck up the task Enjolras assigned him. Like… there is literally no reason he does any of this but to try and impress Enjolras and he bombs so hard. To make things worse, the task he volunteers for is to talk to the marble workers and painters! This is literally ex-painter’s assistant Grantaire’s assignment to win and he just can’t do it. This is so cringggge omg.
So, anyway, what is a Robespierre waistcoat? Apparently, it was a style like the one in this painting (link) with dramatic lapels that are really wide and flop outside of the coat almost to the shoulders. I have yet to see a version of the musical where Grantaire is actually wearing one of these, but he absolutely should!
Speeches of Georges Jacques Danton (English)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘I’ll talk to them about Robespierre, of course! And about Danton. About principles.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
Another French revolutionary orator on Grantaire’s list to impress Enjolras. Enjolras never references Danton directly, but Grantaire thinks Enjolras likes him and I’m tempted to agree. Danton is another one of the main revolutionaries associated with Robespierre and The Terror. This is a bit of an easy guess for Grantaire, because we know Enjolras likes The Terror. Reportedly, Danton, unlike Robespierre and Saint-Just, never gave manuscripts to journalists and most of his speeches were extemporaneous. So despite being present for so much of history during this era, he doesn’t have as much published work to point to for this reference. Because of that and because this is such a minor reference, I decided not to look too hard and just included a collection of speeches compiled in 1910. Obviously that’s way after Enjolras and Grantaire would be dead, but the same speeches would’ve been available in their time, just printed in other places like Le Moniteur or whatever. Speaking of anachronistic Danton references, there’s a whole Hark! A Vagrant episode (321) about Danton, and in the description Kate Beaton also laments how the guy didn’t write anything down. You and me both, queen.
Révolutions de Paris edited by Louis-Marie Prudhomme - Several articles in translation (English)
Histoire generale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la Revolution francaise by Louis-Marie Prudhomme (French)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘But I’m not being given the credit I deserve. When I put my mind to it, I’m terrific. I’ve read Prudhomme, I’m familiar with the Social Contract, I know by heart my constitution of the year II.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
This is another one that Grantaire thinks Enjolras likes. Prudhomme ran one of the best-known revolutionary newspapers and a few books about the revolutionary period and The Terror. In a kind of funny turn of events, this one tangentially connects back to an earlier reference Grantaire made. Most notably, Prudhomme’s Histoire, roughly translated as Impartial Errors, Mistakes and Crimes Committed During the French Revolution, is a six volume account of the terrors and faults of the French National Convention. It has a passage that mentions Loizerolles died because of vindictive prison guards, which is apparently closer to the truth of what really happened than the version Grantaire references earlier (link). So if he read that particular part of Prudhomme’s work, he obviously didn’t care.
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (English)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘But I’m not being given the credit I deserve. When I put my mind to it, I’m terrific. I’ve read Prudhomme, I’m familiar with the Social Contract, I know by heart my constitution of the year II.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
I talk a bit in Enjolras’s booklist about how much he loves Jean-Jacques Rousseau - defending him for abandoning his children, referring to him by his first name like they’re friends, and giving a Social Contract 101 lesson at the barricade. Grantaire has definitely picked up on this, so he mentions that he’s familiar with it while he’s trying to impress Enjolras with how woke and well-read he is. Rousseau’s Social Contract is a huge influence on the politics of Les Amis in general and even though Grantaire doesn’t believe in that kind of stuff, it seems like he’s at least read up on it. Reportedly.
There is no Constitution of Year II!
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘I’ve read Prudhomme, I’m familiar with the Social Contract, I know by heart my constitution of the year II. “The liberty of the citizen ends where the liberty of another citizen begins.” Do you take me for a brute beast? I have in my drawer an old promissory note from the time of the Revolution. The rights of man, the sovereignty of the people, for God’s sake!’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
There was a Constitution of Year I (1793) and a Constitution of Year III (1795), but there was no Constitution of Year II! I nearly drove myself insane on this one, assuming I must be missing some really obscure, little-known fact from French history, but no. Grantaire’s just making shit up and paraphrasing the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen. This might just be a typo, but I like to believe it’s actually an in-universe character trait that sometimes Grantaire just says shit during his long rants and it’s completely wrong but no one notices because he’s been talking for eight whole minutes before he gets to his point. No wonder Enjolras isn’t impressed by Grantaire here. He would definitely notice this error. Embarrassing.
Le Père Duchesne edited by Jacques René Hébert - Several articles in translation (English)
“The Père Duchesne Supports the Terror,” Le Père Duchesne, no. 234 (English)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘The rights of man, the sovereignty of the people, for God’s sake! I am even a bit of a Hébertist. I can keep coming out with some wonderful things, watch in hand, for a whole six hours by the clock.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
This one is an absolute delight to read and actually hysterical if this is the kind of rhetoric that Grantaire thinks will impress Enjolras. Genuinely lmao. The Hébertists were a political group associated with journalist Jacques René Hébert, the founder and editor of the irreverent radical newspaper Le Père Duchesne. They were proponents of extreme revolutionary ideas during the Reign of Terror, but their leadership was ultimately executed in 1794. Yet again, we have no concrete proof that Enjolras actually read Hébertist literature, but Grantaire certainly thinks this is the kind of thing that would be impressive to Enjolras.
And this is where I hit the limit to the number of links you're allowed on a tumblr post. To be continued...
Welcome to another installment of my slightly insane project to try and find all of the books that the members of Les Amis have canonically read based on the references they make in the book. The Cafe Musain Book Club, if you will. This time it’s all the allusions made by, about, or to Combeferre throughout Les Mis. And it’s a long one, so let’s jump right in.
In Combeferre’s introduction, Victor Hugo says “he read everything” and he’s not kidding. The guy’s a voracious and eclectic reader. Throughout the book, Combeferre doesn’t talk all that much, but when he does it’s dense with allusions. The references to words spoken ratio on this guy is crazy. Overall, he cares a lot about making information accessible to common people, and he backs that up by reading a bunch of pop science and pop fiction in addition to more dense academic stuff. Think Hank Green type sources.
TLDR: the people Combeferre references all tend to be proponents of public access to education, feminism, and racial equality. These are the big three for him. He’s got a dry sense of humor and he actually really loves comedy. He also, perhaps more than anyone else in the group, explicitly seeks out opinions that are controversial or contrary to his own in order to understand his adversaries. He’s an empathetic and down-to-earth guy!
Also, for the record, I feel like Combeferre’s usual typecast as a nerdy intellectual is missing a little something. The nerdiest things he does are all based in anti-elitism. When he points out inaccuracies in the dictionary, he’s not being pedantic, he’s doing it to criticize an institution that wants to impose restrictive rules on people to prove there’s one proper way to speak. When he talks about the wave theory of light or the structure of an artery, he didn’t learn those things from an expensive private education, he showed up to a public lecture focused on equalizing access to education! He would support the fuck out of PBS. (Actually, if you’re American and you love Combeferre, go donate to your local PBS station, I’m not even kidding.) Also, he loves comedy plays and believes in ghosts and the healing power of magnets. He’s honestly such a manic pixie dream girl.
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind by the Marquis de Condorcet (English)
“On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship” by the Marquis de Condorcet (English)
“Enjolras gave expression to its [the Revolution’s] divine right and Combeferre its natural right. The former aligned himself with Robespierre, the latter stood close to Condorcet.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
This comparison refers to the Marquis de Condorcet: a mathematician and politician who advocated for public education, a constitutional government, and equal rights for people of all races and genders. He was an active member and eventually the president of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks and apparently was known for being pretty radical in his advocacy for women to have full equal rights of citizenship to men. In his essay “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship,” he actually said that anti-feminism and preventing women access to birth control or divorce was an act of tyranny. What a cool guy. Ultimately, though he wasn’t officially executed during the Reign of Terror, he did die in prison after being arrested by the Jacobin faction.
One of his most notable books is his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. It was published posthumously in 1795 and essentially claims the progress of science and human rights are interconnected throughout history. So by furthering access to education, we will further the fight for social justice. This is, in a nutshell, a really good summary of Combeferre’s basic worldview as well and a really good starting point to understanding his character.
I feel like it’s also worth pointing out that even though Combeferre does give a big speech about women at the barricade, it seems like Condorcet was WAY more feminist than Victor Hugo was capable of portraying. Which is unfortunate, because so many of the people Combeferre looks up to are super feminist. Feminist king, let’s gooo!
Popular Lectures on Astronomy by François Arago (English)
“Fresnel” Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men by François Arago (English)
“He read everything, went to the theatre, attended public lectures, learned from Arago about the polarization of light, was fascinated by a talk in which Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire explained the twin functions of the external carotid artery and the internal carotid artery, the one that leads into the face and the other that leads into the brain.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Dominique-François Arago was a director of the Paris Observatory, who was well known in Paris for conducting a very popular series of lectures to the general public explaining scientific developments. Arago amassed a pretty huge following over the 33 years he did these public lectures and had an entire amphitheater built at the Observatory to accommodate all the people who attended. (Which his successor destroyed to build himself a personal apartment smh.) Throughout his career, he supported Augustin-Jean Fresnel’s wave theory of light, and the two worked together conducting experiments on the polarization of light. He also dabbled in magnetism but put a pin in that for now.
Arago was pretty busy with these lectures so he wasn’t publishing much during his (or Combeferre’s) lifetime, but his posthumous publications cover a lot of the same material he would have been talking about while Combeferre was alive. For example, Popular Lectures on Astronomy was published in 1845 but covered material from (you’ll never guess) popular lectures on astronomy that he gave at the Royal Observatory of Paris between 1812 and 1845. These included the public lectures he gave on the polarization of light, which Combeferre is referencing here. Likewise, Fresnel’s biography in Biographies was originally delivered as a lecture in 1830. Actually, it was read precisely on July 26, 1830, apparently literally right after Arago read the news about Charles X passing the July Ordinances which suspended the press that led to the July Revolution of 1830. Just a fun fact.
It should surprise no one that the guy was also a pretty liberal republican who advocated for public education. After Combeferre would be dead, he also managed to abolish flogging in the military and succeeded in procuring the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. Cool!
Philosophie Anatomique by Geoffrey Sainte-Hilaire (French)
“He read everything, went to the theatre, attended public lectures, learned from Arago about the polarization of light, was fascinated by a talk in which Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire explained the twin functions of the external carotid artery and the internal carotid artery, the one that leads into the face and the other that leads into the brain.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Saint-Hilaire was a naturalist who was part of the Academy of Sciences and worked as a professor of zoology at the University of Paris. During his time there, he did research in anatomy and wrote the Philosophie Anatomique and generally did a lot of work pushing forward the science of evolutionary biology. Presumably the talk he gave would have been a lecture while he was a part of the staff for the University of Paris after he released this book. Combeferre goes to a lot of public lectures on science!
The Political Thought of Saint-Simon selected texts by Saint-Simon (English)
The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier selected texts by Charles Fourier (English)
He was well-informed, keeping pace with scientific developments, comparing Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphering hieroglyphics, splitting the stones that he found and studying geology, drawing a silkworm moth from memory, pointing out the incorrect French in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, reading Puységur and Deleuze, affirming nothing, not even miracles, denying nothing, not even ghosts, dipping into old issues of Le Moniteur, pondering.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier were both early utopian socialists and proto-feminists who had a huge impact on early international socialism. Basically, utopian socialists believed that, instead of achieving socialism through rebellion or class war, the masses would naturally adopt a socialist society if they were convinced well enough. Fourier and Saint-Simon started different schools of socialist thought, but they both pushed the idea of gender equality really strongly. Charles Fourier is actually credited with coining the term “feminism,” which is cool. (But the guy was also really, really antisemitic, which is not cool.) Yet again, Combeferre is reading up on his feminist theory. Good for him.
There was plenty of criticism about the elitism of Saint-Simonian socialism because it didn’t seem to abolish social classes, just invent new ones. Saint-Simon also says some wild shit about how his ideological opponents should be “treated like cattle” and at one point shot himself in the head SIX TIMES but didn’t die. Damn. He also tried to worship Isaac Newton. None of that’s important, but it’s all kind of weird so I wanted to mention it.
Charles Fourier had some ideas that are thought of as really commonplace today (like feminism) but also some that just sound… odd. He had this whole theory about “passions” that didn’t stick around and he predicted that when the world reached its utopian ideal state the ocean would turn to lemonade and the polar ice caps would melt, which… y’know actually he might not be all wrong about the polar ice caps. He was also ardently pro-gay in his advocacy for free love, and even explicitly talked about lesbians and non-binary people! This guy was either really ahead of his time or completely off the wall and nothing in between.
Dictionnaire de l’Académie (French)
He was well-informed, keeping pace with scientific developments, comparing Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphering hieroglyphics, splitting the stones that he found and studying geology, drawing a silkworm moth from memory, pointing out the incorrect French in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, reading Puységur and Deleuze, affirming nothing, not even miracles, denying nothing, not even ghosts, dipping into old issues of Le Moniteur, pondering.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
This was the first official French dictionary, produced by the Académie Française as part of their mission to document and regulate the French language. The 5th edition was published in 1798 and would have been the most contemporary version for Combeferre. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie was always met with a certain amount of criticism. Its slow release meant it couldn’t keep up with the evolution of language and was always a little out of date. Also the Académie’s goal in developing the dictionary was less to capture a record of how French was used but instead to dictate how French should be used. As such, it excluded regional words or technical language and Victor Hugo has a lot of opinions about slang (cue war flashback to the slang chapter) so obviously he has opinions about this and so does Combeferre. As we’ll get into later, Combeferre always has a snide opinion to give on the Académie Française, he loves dissing these elitist guys. They’re actually still around to this day and, as far as I can tell, still subject to a lot of the same criticisms. Did you know their uniform costs $50,000? Wild.
Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et à l'établissement du magnétisme animal by Marquis de Puységur (1784) (French)
Du magnétisme animal, considéré dans ses rapports avec diverses branches de la physique générale by Marquis de Puységur (1807) (French)
Histoire critique du magnétisme animal by Joseph-Philippe-Francois Deleuze (1813) (French)
Instruction pratique sur le magnétisme animal; suivie d’une lettre écrite a l’auteur par un médecin étranger by Joseph-Philippe-Francois Deleuze (1825) (French, English)
He was well-informed, keeping pace with scientific developments, comparing Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphering hieroglyphics, splitting the stones that he found and studying geology, drawing a silkworm moth from memory, pointing out the incorrect French in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, reading Puységur and Deleuze, affirming nothing, not even miracles, denying nothing, not even ghosts, dipping into old issues of Le Moniteur, pondering.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Alright, it’s time to dip briefly into a little ~animal magnetism~! We’re not really in the thick of it yet. Joly is a huge fan of this magnet pseudoscience so I’ll talk way more about it in his booklist. Basically, for now, what you need to know is that animal magnetism (or mesmerism) was an insanely popular medical fad in France around this time and literally almost everyone had very strong opinions on it. For his part, Combeferre likes the magnets. Puységur and Deleuze were major advocates for animal magnetism, key to its popularity in France, and published a lot of work about it that Combeferre apparently reads! I just pulled some of their most popular or seminal work here to keep it brief, but there is so much written material about this topic at the time, it’s overwhelming (link).
In short, the Marquis de Puységur was a disciple of Mesmer who made a school in Paris to teach people about magnetism. His research focused on the discovery of hypnotism (though he called it artificial somnambulism). In fact, he made a lot of discoveries about the subconscious mind, the benefits of building a rapport with your patient, and other concepts that would eventually become essential to the development of modern psychotherapy. His work was super popular and helped shift the focus of mesmerism from physical to psychological treatment.
Deleuze was another French researcher, very inspired by the work of Puységur, who had a huge impact on the movement in France. He published one of the most important popular manuals for the practice of animal magnetism. It was super popular and went through at least 4 editions in thirty years in France, that’s a lot of printing! (It also claimed that magnetism could cure alcoholism, but I guess Combeferre didn’t pass that factoid on to Grantaire.) Anyway, in addition to his practical guide, he also wrote a pretty comprehensive history of animal magnetism that was apparently known for being a very balanced record that didn’t ignore legitimate criticism, but ultimately he was still very impressed by what he found. This is an extremely Combeferre attitude, I can see why he’d trust this kind of research.
Le Moniteur Universel (French)
He was well-informed, keeping pace with scientific developments, comparing Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphering hieroglyphics, splitting the stones that he found and studying geology, drawing a silkworm moth from memory, pointing out the incorrect French in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, reading Puységur and Deleuze, affirming nothing, not even miracles, denying nothing, not even ghosts, dipping into old issues of Le Moniteur, pondering.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Le Moniteur was the main newspaper that covered the French Revolution and the proceedings of the National Assembly. Later, starting under Napoleon, it served as a daily record of the French government and was frequently used for government propaganda. The paper is brought up several times by a few different characters throughout Les Mis in a way that creates a clear delineation between old copies of Le Moniteur and the newer copies. The old ones are revolutionary. The new ones are ye olde Fox News. Marius radicalizes himself by reading, among other things, old copies of Le Moniteur at his university’s library. Meanwhile, Marius’s evil classist grandpa reads the new copies and Marius’s himbo cousin Théodule tries to impress their grandpa by saying “There should be no other newspaper than the Moniteur, and no other book than the Annuaire Militaire.”
The link I found above is to an archive of old issues of Le Moniteur. There are YEARS of them, with a lot of the speeches from the National Convention that iconic people like Robespierre, Saint-Just, or Danton gave. In fact, many of the transcriptions we have today came from the reporting in Le Moniteur. It’s a hugely significant newspaper for historians to understand that entire period of history, and it seems like Combeferre has tapped into that significance early.
Poetics by Aristotle (English)
Pratique du théâtre by Abbé d’Aubignac (English)
L’Art Poétique by Nicolas Boileau (French, English)
“Preface to Cromwell” by Victor Hugo (English)
“At the sight of a theatre poster displaying the title of a tragedy from the old, so-called classical, repertoire, Bahorel cried, ‘Down with the bourgeoisie's beloved tragedy!’
And Marius heard Combeferre reply, ‘You’re mistaken, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie likes tragedy, and on that score the bourgeoisie should be left alone. Tragedy in wigs has its own justification, and I’m not one of those who in the name of Aeschylus dispute its right to exist. There are in nature some crude designs; there are in creation some ready-made parodies: a beak that’s not a beak, wings that aren’t wings, flippers that aren’t flippers, feet that aren’t feet, a plaintive cry that makes you want to laugh - and there you have the duck. Now, since poultry and birds co-exist, I don’t see why classic tragedy shouldn’t play opposite antique tragedy.’” (Les Mis 3.4.3)
I had this foolish hope that I’d be able to narrow down a specific list of plays this quote could conceivably be referencing by using the genre and year it was taking place in, but no such luck. However, there’s still something for the booklist because Combeferre is talking with some specificity about classic tragedy and the restrictive rules of French Neoclassical theater. These rules were largely imposed by The Académie Française, which Combeferre has already criticized earlier with their dictionary, so I feel pretty confident that he’s read up on this subject too.
In short, in the 1600’s a group of French playwrights decided that the plays of classic antiquity were the best and all new plays should follow the Three Unities described in Aristotle’s Poetics. That is the Unity of Action (a play should follow one action with minimal subplots), Unity of Time (a play should take place over a period of no more than 24 hours), and Unity of Place (a play should exist in a single location). These playwrights later founded The Académie Française, and made it compulsory for all published works to follow an even longer list of rules. I don’t have time to explain all of those here but if you’re interested in more details, PBS’s Crash Course on French Neoclassicism (link) is an amazing source! As you can imagine, there was a lot of elitism and strict adherence to a specific classic repertoire in French theater leading up to the point in time when Combeferre is having this conversation. Napoleon also released several decrees controlling which theaters were allowed to operate and what kind of plays they could show (link), which the Romantics viewed as state censorship (link). While Bahorel is straightforwardly indignant at elitist classic tragedy, Combeferre loves to play the devil’s advocate. Here, he makes a backhanded defense of the genre, implying that it’s a ridiculous version of the thing it’s trying so hard to be. Scathing.
Other than the Poetics, I picked a couple more major sources that helped to shape the Neoclassical movement and that Combeferre might have presumably read. The Pratique du théâtre was a handbook for aspiring writers, advising them on how to adhere to the classic rules of theater, which apparently had a huge impact on the development of the Neoclassical style (link). Boileau was also very inspired by the classic rules of theater when he wrote L’Art Poétique. The Literariness Journal describes it as a “formal statement of the principles of French classicism, and perhaps the most direct expression of neoclassical ideals anywhere” (link) and during Bossuet’s introduction to Marius, he rattles off a quote from L’Art Poétique verbatim, so I think it’s safe to assume that Combeferre might be familiar too. And, finally, there’s the preface to Cromwell, aka part of the reason I think we’re even getting this scene at all.
This conversation that Combeferre is having with Bahorel would have taken place in roughly 1828, which is right after Victor Hugo published his famous preface to his play Cromwell in 1827. I mean the preface was famous, not the play. The play was a total flop that had a SEVEN HOUR runtime, but the introduction became a manifesto of the Romantic movement and a seminal work on the topic. Then, just a few years later in 1830, the royal commissioner allowed Victor Hugo to stage his Romantic play Hernani at the Théâtre-Français, the most premier official venue in Paris. And this became the boiling point between the classicists and the Romantics. It completely popped off. And Victor Hugo loves to bring it up. So let’s be real, this whole thing is a wink wink nudge nudge reference to the face that Hernani is about to drop on the scene. It’s always about Hernani. Victor Hugo, you can’t fool me. Marius’s evil grandpa even insults Hernani so Hugo can make fun of people who think Hernani is bad, it’s a whole thing. So I truly believe he’s setting up a little self-reference to his cool moment he got to stick it to the classical theater community.
The French Charter of 1814 (English)
“In the last corner they were talking politics. The 1814 Charter was coming under criticism. Combeferre was weakly defending it, Courfeyrac was energetically attacking it.” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
Combeferre loves to play the devil’s advocate. The 1814 Charter was the basis for the constitutional monarchy under King Louis XVIII and then, briefly, King Charles X. The July Revolution of 1830 would be a direct response to King Charles X using it as an excuse to suspend the liberty of the press and other tyrannical changes. But that won’t be for a couple more years. Combeferre doesn’t actually believe in this Charter, but this is a group of friends that likes arguing for fun, so he’s always being contrary.
“The Cat That Turned Into a Woman” Fables by Jean de La Fontaine (English)
“Combeferre philosophically watched Louis XVIII’s masterpiece burn, and confined himself to the remark, ‘The charter that turned to ashes.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
This is a reference to La Fontaine’s fable “The Cat That Turned Into a Woman”. A lot of characters throughout Les Mis reference La Fontaine’s Fables, which is no surprise because they’re very popular. The moral of this one is that something’s true nature will always reveal itself no matter how its physical shape changes. Since he makes the allusion after Courfeyrac throws the charter into the fire for effect, he’s basically saying that the nature of the charter is unchanged despite Courfeyrac’s dramatic gesture.
Le Misanthrope by Molière (English, French song, French play recording)
“It was Combeferre, and this is what he was singing:
‘If Caesar had offered me glory and war,
But on pain of forsaking my mother’s love,
I’d have told great Caesar his prizes to keep,
I love my mother more, tra-la, I love my mother more.’” (Les Mis 3.4.5)
During the Revolution, it became extremely popular to recast, or make new lyrics for familiar tunes and publish or perform these new lyrics publicly, often for political reasons. This continued to be prevalent throughout the early 1800’s, so it’s a pretty normal thing for Combeferre to be doing here (link). Specifically, Combeferre is recasting a song the character Alceste sings in Molière’s Le Misanthrope (Act I scene ii), a comedy of manners that satirizes the hypocrisies of the French aristocracy. Combeferre loves Molière! I’ve included a link to a choir performing the song so you can get a sense of the tune, as well as a link to that part of the play, though the melody is less distinct in that one. For further reference, I found a university project uploaded on youtube that performs a skit of the act with Combeferre’s little song, though they cut off before that actual line (link). It does a good job conveying the vibe of this scene in English, and if you watch it just keep in mind that this is apparently peak comedy for Combeferre. He saw this and he memorized that song to use as a sick burn later. Like, “HA, Marius, you’re just as cringe as Oronte performing his sonnet in Le Misanthrope Act I scene ii!” Devastating. And honestly? …Accurate. Poor Marius will never recover.
I’ve seen people say that Molière is the French equivalent of Shakespeare, and I think that’s pretty accurate. His plays are funny, accessible reads that mocked the society of his time and tbh a lot of it holds up today. Combeferre makes another reference to Molière later and calls him a genius, so I think it’s safe to assume he’s a big fan. In fact, Combeferre really loves comedy in general and I think that’s really cute. Much like Molière, Combeferre has a dry, sarcastic sense of humor and he’s always saying short little cutting remarks to his friends. He’s often characterized by fans as the serious one with glasses when he canonically loves comedy more than anyone else in his friend group. The boys are all seeing Oppenheimer and he’s at Barbie having the time of his life.
The Athenian Constitution by Aristotle (English)
“Surrounded by students and artisans, Combeferre was talking about the dead, Jean Prouvaire, Bahorel, Mabeuf, and even Cabuc, and about Enjolras’s stern sorrow. He said, ‘Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus, Chaerea, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of anguish after the event.’” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
The Tyrranicides are back! Enjolras was previously compared to Harmodius and Aristogeiton during his introduction to emphasize his disinterest in dating women, and now Combeferre is referencing them for a very different reason. Whereas, for Enjolras, the emphasis was on their revolutionary violence, Combeferre is more interested in what comes after that act of violence.
Looking over this whole list of names, when Combeferre mentions the “moment of anguish after the event” he’s not talking about literal regret or sadness so much as he’s talking about the unexpected consequences of these people’s revolutionary actions. Their own executions, political retaliation, that sort of thing. All the primary ancient sources on the Tyrranicides are really celebratory of them, so there isn’t a lot of focus on their deaths after the assassination, but Aristotle talks a little bit more than others about Aristogeiton’s torture and eventual death. He’s mostly talking about how cool Aristogeiton is the whole time, but still. Combeferre is using these examples to ponder over the potential future consequences of their own revolution now that some of his friends have already died. Unlike Enjolras, he’s more interested in humanizing these people in order to understand how his friends might be remembered as well.
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare (English)
Le Mort de César by Voltaire (French)
The Bible, Gospel of Matthew (English)
“Surrounded by students and artisans, Combeferre was talking about the dead, Jean Prouvaire, Bahorel, Mabeuf, and even Cabuc, and about Enjolras’s stern sorrow. He said, ‘Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus, Chaerea, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of anguish after the event.’” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
“[Combeferre:] ‘Cicero metes out justice by the intellect just as Brutus metes out justice by the sword. For my own part, I condemn this latter form of justice, the blade, but antiquity allowed it.’” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
“[Combeferre:] ‘Caesar, violator of the Rubicon, bestowing as it they derived from him the dignities that derived from the people, not rising for the Senate, acted, as Eutropius says, like a king and almost like a tyrant, regia ac poene tyrannica. He was a great man. Too bad. Or so much the better - the lesson is all the more edifying. His twenty-three wounds affect me less than the spitting in Jesus Christ’s face. Caesar is stabbed by senators. Christ is treated with contempt by lackeys. In the greater outrage you sense the deity.’” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
Okay, we’ve got two allusions here. First off, we’ve got another reference to Brutus. In contrast to Enjolras’s whole-hearted celebration of Brutus as a revolutionary figure, Combeferre is more hesitant to praise political violence. This contrast between the two of them comes up a lot, so it’s no surprise here. Combeferre is a gentle guy so he’d prefer progress to be peaceful, but he also won’t outright condemn people who kill tyrants. As mentioned in the Enjolras book list, Shakespeare had a huge impact on the Romantic movement and Victor Hugo, so his play Julius Caesar is almost definitely a source for this Brutus reference. Voltaire’s version, La Mort de César, was the first translation of the play into French and the version most French-speakers in the early 19th century would be familiar with, so I’ve included it as well even though Voltaire’s play cuts out almost all the content after the assassination. Since Combeferre makes an explicit reference to the “anguish after the event,” aka Brutus’ slow decline and the failure of the Roman Republic, that would probably be a reference to the original Shakespeare version.
And, secondly, we have Combeferre’s Hugo-assigned Biblical reference! This one’s pretty simple, since Combeferre references the Gospel of Matthew, aka the Jesus part of the Bible. As opposed to Enjolras’s righteous fury, Combeferre is all about being nice to people, specifically women and the underprivileged.
“Caligula” and “Claudius” Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (English, English)
“Surrounded by students and artisans, Combeferre was talking about the dead, Jean Prouvaire, Bahorel, Mabeuf, and even Cabuc, and about Enjolras’s stern sorrow. He said, ‘Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus, Chaerea, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of anguish after the event.’” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
We’ll talk a little bit more about Emperor Caligula during Grantaire’s booklist, but if you’re not familiar with the name, basically he’s an infamous corrupt ruler of the Roman Empire. He did really weird things like trying to make his favorite horse a Consul so he tends to come up when people talk about comically evil Roman Emperors. Most of the information we know about Caligula comes from an account by the historian Suetonius, which includes a record of his eventual assassination. One of these assassins, and reportedly the one who struck the first blow, was Cassius Chaerea. He was later executed by the following emperor, Claudius, who was afraid the conspirators had also intended to assassinate him. The assassination itself is covered in the chapter “Caligula” and the ensuing execution is covered in the chapter “Claudius” so I included both of those here. Like the rest of this list, it’s another example of a guy who died as a consequence of his radical political action.
Roman History by Cassius Dio (English)
“Surrounded by students and artisans, Combeferre was talking about the dead, Jean Prouvaire, Bahorel, Mabeuf, and even Cabuc, and about Enjolras’s stern sorrow. He said, ‘Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus, Chaerea, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of anguish after the event.’” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
Stephanus was one of three assassins who plotted to kill the Roman Emperor Domitian, as recorded in the Epitome of Book LXVII of Dio’s Roman History. I wasn’t familiar with Domitian before this booklist, but this chapter on him was such a wild ride. The chapter opens with the line “Domitian was not only bold and quick to anger but also treacherous and secretive” and continues to somehow be even less flattering than that line prepared me for. Most of the account is just a list of comically evil things he did during his reign and how “there was no human being for whom he felt any genuine affection.” He’s paranoid, insecure, bloodthirsty, a sex menace to both women and men, and he won’t stop executing people for predicting his death. According to Dio, Domitian had an astrologer tell him all the people whose horoscopes indicated they’d try to usurp him and he just started going down the list having them all murdered. There’s actually a lot of astrologers and psychic visions that come into play in this story, but the important part is the assassination itself.
During the assassination, Stephanus led the charge and threw Domitian to the ground, but apparently everyone was so eager for this guy to die that some people who weren’t part of the plan also rushed into the room all at once to kill Domitian and they killed Stephanus too. So, Stephanus’s misstep was just being caught in the crossfires while killing Domitian, though his assassination was ultimately successful.
Cromwell by Victor Hugo (English)
“Surrounded by students and artisans, Combeferre was talking about the dead, Jean Prouvaire, Bahorel, Mabeuf, and even Cabuc, and about Enjolras’s stern sorrow. He said, ‘Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus, Chaerea, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of anguish after the event.’” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
We know this guy. Victor Hugo wrote a whole play about the aftermath of Cromwell’s revolution and the moral ambiguity of attaining power after toppling those in power, etc. etc. I cited this play in Enjolras’s booklist with the stipulation that, though the timeline checks out, I’m not sure the play would actually be to Enjolras’s taste. I don’t feel that way about Combeferre, I do think he would’ve checked this play out. I already mentioned the preface of this play when Combeferre was going off about classical theater, and I think Combeferre is actually very tapped into the discourse surrounding the rules of classical theater so he wouldn’t have missed this one.
“Adresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix” by Charlotte Corday (French)
“Surrounded by students and artisans, Combeferre was talking about the dead, Jean Prouvaire, Bahorel, Mabeuf, and even Cabuc, and about Enjolras’s stern sorrow. He said, ‘Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus, Chaerea, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of anguish after the event.’” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
Charlotte Corday famously murdered the revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Marat by stabbing him while he was in the bath. There’s an iconic painting done by Jacques-Louis David in the same year depicting the death that you might recognize, fittingly called The Death of Marat (link). Corday was also a revolutionary, but she was a Girondin and she didn’t like the Jacobins, so she thought that Marat was leading the people of France down a bad road. Yet again, we see a cheeky little example of how Combeferre is balancing out Enjolras’s more Jacobin sympathies by mentioning Corday as a revolutionary hero instead of Marat. Anyway, Charlotte Corday didn’t even try to get away with the assassination. She waited on site to be arrested and had a manifesto letter that she sent to the papers to be published afterwards explaining why she did it. By all accounts she had no regrets about the murder, but she was convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal and guillotined within a few days, so that’s probably the anguish after the event Combeferre is referencing here.
Since this is such a small reference, I opted to just include the letter that Charlotte Corday had published in the papers. She makes a few literary references herself during all of this. Her letter evokes Brutus from Voltaire’s La Mort de César and she reportedly carried a copy of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives with her to the murder, both works that get referenced elsewhere by Les Amis as well. That’s cool! It’s also very Combeferre to stan a woman revolutionary, even if she is a little bit more violent than he would like. Apparently, a lot of the contemporary coverage about her centered largely around gender and violence, so I guess we can imagine that Combeferre was reading up on his feminist news per usual (link). Love that for him.
“Karl-Ludwig Sand” Celebrated Crimes by Alexandre Dumas (English)
“Surrounded by students and artisans, Combeferre was talking about the dead, Jean Prouvaire, Bahorel, Mabeuf, and even Cabuc, and about Enjolras’s stern sorrow. He said, ‘Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus, Chaerea, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of anguish after the event.’” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
Ohohoho, okay we’ve got a bit of a weird one here re: the timeline. Technically, German student Karl Ludwig Sand assassinated the conservative dramatist August von Kutzebue (an alleged Russian spy and German traitor) in 1819, leading to Sand’s execution in 1820. It’s not an anachronistic reference for Combeferre to make in that regard. The event was a big deal in Germany and led to a lot of government restrictions on liberal and German nationalist groups. However, none of this was really common knowledge in Paris until Alexandre Dumas published a version of the story in his collection Celebrated Crimes, which wouldn’t be published until 1839. This is almost definitely the source that Combeferre is supposed to be referencing. A lot of the information Dumas published was based on interviews he personally did, so it wouldn’t have been widely available before his book came out. Plus Dumas and Hugo were friends, and Hugo wrote an unfinished play on the subject of another one of the crimes Dumas covered here. So I feel like all signs point to this being an anachronistic reference to Celebrated Crimes, but I’ll allow that technically Combeferre could’ve just been super ahead of his time and done his own research to make this reference.
Anyway, the point here is in line with all the other references Combeferre makes on this list. He was a man who, according to Dumas, “kings regarded as an assassin, judges as a fanatic, and the youth of Germany as a hero.” It is a good note to leave off on for Combeferre to punctuate his theme of what makes a martyr and how people will interpret the legacy of political violence after it’s done.
Georgics by Virgil (English)
Georgics translated by J.F. Raux, 1802 (French)
Georgics translated by Antoine de Cournand, 1804 (French)
Georgics translated by Abbé Delille, 1770 (French)
Georgics translated by Jacques-Charles-Louis Clinchamps de Malfilâtre, 1810 (French)
“And a moment later, such are the circuitous routes of conversational exchange, with Jean Prouvaire’s verses providing the transition, Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics, Raux with Cournand, Cournand with Delille, referring to the few passages translated by Malfilâtre, particularly the portents at Caesar’s death.” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
The Georgics are a four-book Latin poem by Virgil about agriculture, our relationship with the land, and hard work. There were several French translations released during the turn of the century, and apparently Combeferre has opinions about a lot of them. I went ahead and included all the versions he listed here in French. We don’t get to hear his specific opinions on these, but you can check them out if you’re interested.
Though most of the poem is instructional about agriculture, we are told that Combeferre is focusing specifically on the passages about Caesar’s death (in Book 1, lines 461-497). This is mostly covering the civil war following Caesar’s death, framing it as a cosmic upset that must be navigated carefully or Rome will suffer. This ties into the “anguish after the event” that he was discussing earlier; he remains focused on the consequences of these large political changes that must be survived.
De Officiis by Cicero (English)
“‘Caesar,’ said Combeferre, ‘was justly brought down. Cicero was harshly critical of Caesar, and he was right to be. That harshness is no diatribe. When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière, when Pope insults Shakespeare, when Fréron insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy and hatred that is being observed. Genius attracts insult, great men are always more or less subject to carping. But Zoilus and Cicero are two different matters. Cicero metes out justice by the intellect just as Brutus metes out justice by the sword. For my own part, I condemn this latter form of justice, the blade, but antiquity allowed it.” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
Cicero has a lot of written work that was hugely influential in ancient Rome, and Cicero’s impact on the Enlightenment and later the French Revolution was so huge that I really don’t have time to cover all of it here. Francesca Romana Berno wrote a whole essay on the relationship between Cicero’s work and the French Revolution (link) that’s super interesting if you want to know more about the topic, but in short he was an idol to the French republicans. Cicero also appeared as a minor character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where the conspirators consider inviting him to the assassination and then say never mind because “he will never follow any thing that other men begin.” Hysterical.
However, in the realm of actual historical documents, I think De Officiis is a good contender for the source of Combeferre’s little anecdote about Cicero criticizing Caesar here. It was one of his last publications, written at the end of his life during the fall of the Roman Republic, and considered one of his masterpieces. De Officiis literally means something like “On Duties” or “On Moral Obligations” and it was basically a practical guide to the moral duties of citizens. He criticized Caesar’s tyranny in large part because of the way that a lack of political rights negatively affects people’s moral virtues. All of this would be very topical to France at the turn of the century. Cicero also wrote letters that were critical of Caesar (I’m a big fan of the one where Cicero wishes he’d been invited to the Ides of March, that one’s really funny), but ultimately I think this treatise is more substantial and historically significant. Fun fact, it was the second book ever printed on a printing press!
Anyway, this whole anecdote is very utopian socialist of Combeferre, to say that publishing a particularly cutting critique of Caesar is as valid an execution as stabbing him to death and is an equally valid path to overthrowing a tyrant. I talked a little bit about Combeferre’s take on Caesar and Brutus earlier, but basically of course Combeferre idolizes this man who could rally an educated population with words instead of violence. This is Combeferre’s entire thing. However, even Cicero said “the ides of march was a fine deed, but half done” and Combeferre does admit that, despite his personal preferences, there was nothing unjust about killing Caesar. Just as we’re told that Enjolras has become a gentler version of himself by the time he gets to the barricade due to Combeferre’s influence, Combeferre is also at the barricade and ready to fight due to Enjolras’s influence. They’re a good balance to each other.
An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope (English)
The Iliad by Homer (English)
“‘Caesar,’ said Combeferre, ‘was justly brought down. Cicero was harshly critical of Caesar, and he was right to be. That harshness is no diatribe. When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière, when Pope insults Shakespeare, when Fréron insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy and hatred that is being observed. Genius attracts insult, great men are always more or less subject to carping.” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
Here, Combeferre rattles off a long list with examples of people who made a name for themselves by criticizing someone who was more talented than them out of envy. So we can assume that Combeferre has read both the criticism he’s referencing, and the works they’re criticizing. Let’s break those down!
First up we’ve got Zoilus insulting Homer. Zoilus was a scholar in the fourth century BC whose entire legacy is just how much he hated Homer. None of his works, including Against the Poetry of Homer, survived but we still know about this guy because of how much drama he was embroiled in. The ancient architect Vitruvius (of the Vitruvian Man fame) writes about him in On Architecture, mentioning a completely unverifiable account of Zoilus being such an insufferable Homer-anti that the king, a Homer stan, had him crucified or stoned to death by an angry mob (link). He even called him Homeromastix, or literally “Homer hater.” Wow. People truly never change, they are always getting pissed off about people’s bad takes and then writing fictionalized accounts of them publicly dying. Or maybe a mob really did kill Zoilus for being so insufferable, who can say. Anyway, a lot of authors have gone on to mention Zoilus as a catch-all term for a bitter and envious critic. So many that it has an entry in Merriam-Webster (link). Honestly I’ve gotta respect the legacy this man managed to garner. Miguel de Cervantes brought hating on Zoilus back into vogue in the Middle Ages when he called Zoilus a slanderer in his preface to Don Quixote. And then by the 18th century another hater from later in Combeferre’s list, Alexander Pope, ironically calls out Zoilus in his An Essay on Criticism: “Nay, should great Homer lift his awful head, Zoilus again would start up from the dead. Envy will Merit as its shade pursue, But like a shadow proves the substance true…” Victor Hugo has referenced both of these, but since Combeferre himself mentions Pope later in the same sentence and it’s more contemporary, I opted to go with that one as Combeferre’s source for this insult. But there’s a strong argument to be made for just the preface to Don Quixote as well.
Oh yeah, and as for Homer, I could’ve gone with The Iliad or The Odyssey because apparently Zoilus hated them both, but I opted for The Iliad because the other boys mention it so much and I wanted Combeferre to match his friends.
Eclogue 3 by Virgil (English)
Epode 10 by Horace (English)
“‘Caesar,’ said Combeferre, ‘was justly brought down. Cicero was harshly critical of Caesar, and he was right to be. That harshness is no diatribe. When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière, when Pope insults Shakespeare, when Fréron insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy and hatred that is being observed. Genius attracts insult, great men are always more or less subject to carping.” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
Not much is known about Maevius since none of his works (if he even had them) or biographical information survived. The two main sources proving this guy even existed are Virgil’s Eclogue 3, which mockingly mentions a poet named Maevius, and Horace’s Epode 10, which is just a long prayer to manifest “that stinker Mevius” dying horribly at sea. These two are commonly thought to be the same guy, remembered just for being really hated by guys who are more talented than him, presumably.
Zélinde, Comédie, Ou La Véritable Critique de l'Escole Des Femmes Et La Critique de la Critique by Jean Donneau de Visé (French)
L'école des Femmes (School for Wives) by Molière (English)
“‘Caesar,’ said Combeferre, ‘was justly brought down. Cicero was harshly critical of Caesar, and he was right to be. That harshness is no diatribe. When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière, when Pope insults Shakespeare, when Fréron insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy and hatred that is being observed. Genius attracts insult, great men are always more or less subject to carping.” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
Discourse over the rules of classic theater is back! Okay, Molière has appeared on Combeferre’s booklist before with Le Misanthrope, which Combeferre loves. To recap: He’s one of the great classic French playwrights, and the one who played the most loose with the rules of French classical theater. School for Wives was one of Molière’s early plays, and it was both extremely popular and controversial at the time. It’s a comedy that follows a creepy old man who is so insecure about the idea of being cheated on that he tries to marry his young ward who he’s raised to be naive to men and relationships. But it doesn’t work. She falls in love with someone else and escapes him. Critics of School for Wives thought it violated multiple of the rules of classic theater and they were incensed. Morality was a big one, accusations of obscenity were lobbied at the play a lot, but there was also a surprising amount of controversy surrounding verisimilitude, aka nitpicking scenes that were implausible (link). In retaliation, Molière wrote a one-act play response to the criticisms titled La critique de l’École des femmes and had it performed at the end of his play. It’s very meta. Basically the characters pretend they’ve just seen the play and discuss their opinions on it so Molière can characterize his detractors as losers and his supporters as cool, even though they all think they’ve won the argument by the end of the play. As you can probably predict, this pissed off a lot of people. The Duke of La Feuillade even assaulted Molière over it and many more people published responses making fun of the play (link). Enter Jean Donneau de Visé.
Visé published Zélinde, and based on the subtitle alone you can probably guess that it’s a criticism of School for Wives and the follow-up La critique de l’École des femmes (that sassy one-act play). Although apparently later Visé and Molière buried the hatchet and ended up working together on several shows. Aw, a happy ending. Anyway, Zélinde didn’t really survive the test of time, but School of Wives absolutely did. There have been so many English retellings of this play that I was familiar with the name before I even did the research for this booklist. And omg look Phillipa Soo was Agnès in this 2014 version of the play in New Jersey a year before Hamilton (link), that’s fun.
The Works of Shakespear by Alexander Pope (1725) (English)
“‘Caesar,’ said Combeferre, ‘was justly brought down. Cicero was harshly critical of Caesar, and he was right to be. That harshness is no diatribe. When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière, when Pope insults Shakespeare, when Fréron insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy and hatred that is being observed. Genius attracts insult, great men are always more or less subject to carping.” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
Pope both loved and insulted Shakespeare throughout his career. He published a translation of the works of Shakespeare in 1725, but he edited the plays to make them “more appealing” to a contemporary reader. He explained this decision and some of his changes in the preface of the first edition (link) but the reception of this adaptation was contentious. One guy in particular, Lewis Theobold, really came for Pope and published a scathing pamphlet called Shakespeare Restored that catalogued all of the changes and perceived errors in Pope’s translation (link). You may hear “pamphlet” and think this is a short criticism, but it’s like 200 pages. Savage. It pissed off Pope so much he went on to make Theobald a major character in his The Dunciad, a poem about mediocre people who bring stupidity and tastelessness to Britain. He’s so messy!
L’Année Littéraire by Elie Fréron
Candide by Voltaire (English)
L’Ecossaise (The Scotch Woman) by Voltaire (French, English)
Le Pauvre Diable (The Poor Devils) by Voltaire (French)
“‘Caesar,’ said Combeferre, ‘was justly brought down. Cicero was harshly critical of Caesar, and he was right to be. That harshness is no diatribe. When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière, when Pope insults Shakespeare, when Fréron insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy and hatred that is being observed. Genius attracts insult, great men are always more or less subject to carping.” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
Elie-Catherine Fréron used his popular review journal, L’Annee Litteraire, to publish anti-Enlightenment criticism, including many, many shots at Voltaire. Hating Voltaire has basically become Fréron’s entire legacy. He simply can’t shut up about the guy. For his part, Voltaire hated Fréron right back and wrote so much nasty stuff about him. Voltaire is notoriously a messy bitch, so there’s a lot of content that came out of this feud. Just to narrow it down, I opted to only include his actual book-length works that made fun of Fréron for the booklist, but Voltaire also published a bunch of mean poems too. I kept running into this one epigram, roughly translated as: “The other day, beside the lake / Jean Fréron got bit by a snake. / What do you think happened then? / It was the snake that met its end!” (link, link). Sometimes I see things from historical people and I just know they would’ve had the craziest twitter. Alas. Anyway, Fréron cameos in Voltaire’s most famous novel Candide. The theater critic in Chapter 22 (link) is referred to as a Fréron: “"He is a bad character," answered the Abbé, "who gains his livelihood by saying evil of all plays and of all books. He hates whatever succeeds, as the eunuchs hate those who enjoy; he is one of the serpents of literature who nourish themselves on dirt and spite; he is a folliculaire." / "What is a folliculaire?" said Candide. / "It is," said the Abbé, "a pamphleteer—a Fréron."” Brutal.
After this, Fréron wrote mean things about Candide (go figure), so Voltaire made him a character in his comedy play L’Ecossaise (French, English) or “The Scotch Woman,” a satire of Scottish and English aristocracy. Fréron (oh I’m sorry, Frélon, an obviously different man) is a rascally writer who intervenes and whose name has been changed to literally mean “wasp.” Get it? Because he buzzes around being annoying? In the opening of the play, a character straight up asks him if he deliberately tries to be so universally hated because Voltaire has no chill. He also appears in Le Pauvre Diable (French) or “The Poor Devils,” a satire about a struggling writer with an equally unflattering portrayal. There’s so much more, but I have to stop. These two guys just loathed each other.
Hugo himself described Voltaire as he “who must always be fought against and fought for” in his William Shakespeare, because Voltaire is such a hater and constantly picking fights with other writers. The literary infighting is a never-ending circle. I have to stop making this same joke over and over again, but RIP Combeferre, you would’ve loved booktok drama.
Summary of Roman History by Eutropius (English)
“[Combeferre:] ‘Caesar, violator of the Rubicon, bestowing as it they derived from him the dignities that derived from the people, not rising for the Senate, acted, as Eutropius says, like a king and almost like a tyrant, regia ac poene tyrannica. He was a great man. Too bad. Or so much the better - the lesson is all the more edifying.’” (Les Mis 5.1.2)
And, finally, we have Combeferre’s last allusion in the novel. This line he quotes is from the end of book 6 of Eutropius’s Brevarium Historiae Romanae, which covers the death of Caesar. The chapter is a condensed version of several books in Livy’s super long History of Rome and is, as the title suggests, a brief summary of the events covered. I’m not surprised that Combeferre is quoting the version that is more accessible. He’s true to his mission for equitable access to education until the very end.
As for the quote itself, the Latin is just a translation of the phrase Combeferre says immediately before comparing kings and tyrants. The original quote was specifically calling out Caesar, who Combeferre has mentioned before, and the conclusion Combeferre is making is that no matter if Caesar is a “good man,” his actions as a king are akin to a tyrant. Regency is inherently tyrannical. There are no good kings. Victor Hugo also talks at length in Les Mis about how Louis-Phillipe was a “good man,” and the parallel is hard to miss. As Combeferre says here, even if a “good man” is a king, it is still tyranny and the people should still oppose it. Much of what Combeferre talks about on the barricade deals with the legacy of revolutionary actions, and he continues to dwell on that here. Combeferre is aware of their doom, but he’s still looking forward and contemplating what truths about their current situation the people will learn from their sacrifice. It’s so fitting that the last thing Combeferre quotes is, he hopes, a lesson.
…And that’s it! As always, I’m not an expert so if you spot anything I missed, please hit me up! I’ve started compiling all the lists on a page (here) if you want to see the other ones and some more involved notes on where all these sources came from.
Thanks so much for all the nice comments on the Enjolras booklist! I'm going to be putting out all of the Les Amis booklists I've made over the next few weeks. (Or, trying, idk Grantaire might break the tumblr post character limit.) For now, here are all the allusions made by, about, or to Courfeyrac throughout Les Mis. The Courfeyrac book club!
Courfeyrac is one of the triumvirate at the heart of Les Amis and especially since he’s Marius’s bestie / roommate, he gets some of the most dialogue out of all the barricade boys. However, he doesn’t make that many literary allusions. Honestly, after Enjolras’s monster of a booklist, this was a bit of a relief. Thanks, Courf, you’re a real one.
At one point, Courfeyrac tells Marius he should read less books and talk to more ladies, and he absolutely follows his own advice. He demonstrably prefers plays and other social activities to reading, but he does canonically have a bookshelf! Courfeyrac is literally the only member of Les Amis whose bookshelf is described on the page, even though Victor Hugo doesn’t say the names of any books on it, smh. We’ll get into that later.
TLDR: Courfeyrac loves gossip! He doesn’t seem to read for fun, he seeks out mostly political and biographical non-fiction. He loves to have juicy fun facts and witty critiques ready to go for when he's hanging out with his boys. When he does reference something that's fiction, it’s always a play. He'd rather go out on the town than sit at home reading a book. Love that for him.
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (English)
“Courfeyrac took his arm. ‘Take note. This is Rue Platreire, now called Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, on account of an unusual couple that lived here sixty years ago. They were Jean-Jacques and Therese. From time to time there were little ones born here. Therese brought them into the world, Jean-Jacques brought them to the foundling hospital.’” (Les Mis 3.4.3)
Courfeyrac is one of the only members of Les Amis that doesn’t get a signature literary reference during his introduction. The first allusion he makes is actually a few scenes later, when he’s out walking with Marius and Enjolras and he decides to share some juicy gossip about Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Enjolras’s bias) with Marius, which pisses off Enjolras. It’s extremely messy and extremely funny. I love this scene.
The record of Jean-Jacques Rousseau abandoning all five of his children actually comes from Rousseau’s own autobiography. Honestly, the whole autobiography reads a lot like a Youtube apology video, idk how else to describe it. I really love this essay (link) by Paul De Man called “Excuses” that utterly rips into one particular passage in this autobiography as an example of how the whole thing is just full of performative guilt. For the record, it’s not even calling out the part about Rousseau abandoning his children, it’s laying into a totally different passage where Rousseau is confessing to a totally different problematic thing he did as a child. It’s truly a Youtube apology video through and through, and Enjolras is absolutely in the comments defending him.
Fun fact, the book is also the real origin of the phrase “let them eat cake.” Rousseau attributed the quote to some unspecified French princess but then, because Marie Antoinette was growing more and more unpopular at the time the book was published, it erroneously got credited to her. And now that’s how we all remember it. Fascinating! All this to say, this is a great first example of the kind of trendy stuff and messy gossip that Courfeyrac loves. He’s a social guy with a good sense of drama.
The French Charter of 1814 (English)
“The 1814 Charter was coming under criticism. Combeferre was weakly defending it, Courfeyrac was energetically attacking it. On the table was an offending copy of the famous Touqet Charter. Courfeyrac had seized it and was waving it, accompanying his arguments with the rustling of this sheet of paper.” (Les Mis 3.4.4)“‘No granting to the people by royal favour. In all such grants there is an Article 14. Alongside the hand that gives is the claw that takes back.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
The 1814 Charter was the basis for constitutional monarchy in France. Courfeyrac hates this thing, but he’s clearly read it so it makes the list! There’s not too much to say about it. Article 14 is specifically the part that gave the king executive power, and Courfeyrac calls it out in particular as evidence that the 1814 Charter is a bad deal for the people of France. This is incredibly prescient, because just a couple years later King Charles X would use Article 14 as his justification for suspending the liberty of the press and several other ordinances that resulted in the July Revolution of 1830. Then, at the end of his scathing review, Courfeyrac dramatically throws a copy into the fire for the vibes and everyone claps watches it burn.
The Age of Louis XIV by Voltaire (English)
“‘A king is a parasite. Kings don’t come free. Listen to this: the cost of kings. When Francois I died, France’s national debt was thirty thousand francs a year. By the time Louis XIV died, it was two thousand six hundred million at twenty-eight francs to the marc, which was equivalent in 1760, by Desmaret’s reckoning, to four thousand five hundred million, which today would be twelve thousand million.’” (Les Mis 3.4.4)
During his rant about the French Charter of 1814, Courfeyrac also makes some very specific claims about the national debt accrued by Louis XIV during his reign and the building of Versailles. This is apparently based on the figures found in Voltaire’s biography of Louis XIV, chapter 30. I love that Courfeyrac read this entire novel just to have receipts on Louis XIV, literally.
There’s actually an interesting podcast I listened to recently that also talks about Versailles and the economic impact of Louis XIV’s reign (Behind the Bastards, link, link). For the record, I fully believe that Courfeyrac would love podcasts. In my modern au, Courfeyrac would absolutely be the type of friend who’s always recommending you some new political podcast he’s found.
The French Civil Code of 1804 (English)
Penal Code of 1810 (English)
“While all this was going on [Marius] qualified as a lawyer. He was supposedly living in Courfeyrac’s room, which was respectable and where a certain number of law books, propped up and augmented by a few odd volumes of novels, represented the library required by the regulations.” (Les Mis 3.5.1)
Courfeyrac's bookshelf! So first things first, Victor Hugo is pissing me off telling me that Courfeyrac has a bookshelf but not telling me which “odd volumes of novels” are on it. He can tell me every excruciating detail about the Parisian sewer system but he can’t tell me what Courfeyrac’s favorite books are?? Sigh, whatever, I’ll just imagine the books on his shelf are the rest of the books on this booklist, I guess. Anyway, let’s talk about those law books.
We’re not told a lot of specifics about the “certain number of law books” on Courfeyrac’s shelf, but we can make a few educated guesses: 1, There are plural books. 2, There are not many of them. The books are propped up so they don't fill a shelf. 3, The books fulfilled the requirements to practice as a lawyer in Paris around the year 1831. And 4, Marius is not actually using these books to practice law. The books are just there to look aesthetically like a lawyer might read them while Marius is actually across town working his translation job that Courfeyrac also got him. Courfeyrac is such a good friend. So basically, for the several books in Courfeyrac’s fake law library, I’m looking for the absolute bare minimum: The Napoleonic Codes.
A bit of backstory. Before the French Revolution, the justice system in France was… bad. The law wasn’t consistent or properly written down and the legal process could be pretty inhumane. The revolutionary government knew it desperately needed an overhaul so in 1791 they created France’s very first written criminal code (link). Under the new code, you could only be accused of a written law, your trial had to be timely, you had the right to a lawyer, and several things that were previously considered crimes were no longer criminal, like homosexuality. Fun fact, France was actually the first European country to decriminalize homosexuality, due in large part to the changes pushed through by one cool guy: Louis-Michel le Peletier. He also advocated for women’s education and was one of the deciding votes to kill King Louis XVI, so of course he’s a villain you have to kill in Assassin’s Creed Unity. Don’t even get me started on that game smh, it consistently has the worst takes. Justice for the girls, the gays, and Louis-Michel.
Anyway, when Napoleon came back to power a few years after the Revolution, he commissioned a civil code, which would become the first of five codes known as the Napoleonic Codes: the Civil Code of 1804, the Code of Civil Procedure of 1806, the Commercial Code of 1807, the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1808, and the Penal Code of 1810. I’m not a law historian, but you can check out this webinar from the Library of Congress if you want more context (link).
Marius would have been going to law school during this era when the Napoleonic Codes were still relatively new and the curriculum apparently was mostly focused on covering the texts of the codes using rote memorization. This so-called Napoleonic method of teaching law, having students memorize the relevant codes instead of taking legal history or philosophy, would be criticized as early as 1819 but not changed until 1838 (link). And we even know one of his teachers, Hyacinthe Blondeau, aka the professor who almost marks Marius absent, was a real law professor at the Faculté de droit de Paris, teaching Roman Law. So, between the Napoleonic education with no focus on social context and Courfeyrac’s shelf including the bare minimum books required to constitute a library… I feel like I have a solid argument for just including the codes here and moving on with my life. The Civil Code is the biggest and most important text, so it definitely deserves a place on Courfeyrac’s shelf. And I threw in the Penal Code as well because whenever you’re looking for primary sources on how people felt about the Penal Code at the time, you almost invariably end up getting linked to Les Mis (see: the story of Jean Valjean’s entire life). The other codes are more specific, so even though they might be on the shelf I’m going to pull a Marius here and include only the absolute minimum.
So, uh, in conclusion… did Courfeyrac even read these books?? Who knows. But he does own them and they sit on a bookshelf in his apartment, so that’s good enough for me.
…I couldn’t find Audry de Puyraveau’s speech
“Over dessert [Marius] said to Courfeyrac. ‘Have you read the paper? What a fine speech Audry de Puyraveau gave!’” (Les Mis 3.6.6)
This is a reference that Marius makes to Courfeyrac after he makes eye contact with Cossette in the garden and starts a two-day manic episode where he talks really fast, spends a bunch of money, eats a surprising amount of food, and impulsively hugs a lot of people. Okay let’s be real, there’s no way that Victor Hugo, living in exile from France and with no internet, was accurately referencing one specific newspaper article about a speech that Audry de Puyraveau gave nearly 30 years prior in early July of 1831. I knew there was no way I’d ever find this specific speech in some particular paper... But I searched anyway. I really wanted to see if Marius was embarrassing himself with a bad take again, but I guess I’ll never know because I couldn’t find the speech. I honestly should have just cut this one from Courfeyrac’s list altogether since I couldn’t find it, it’s not really a book, and there’s no real proof Courfeyrac even read it — I’m just assuming he wouldn’t leave his bro hanging since Marius brought it up. But I had spent too much time researching and the sunk cost kicked in, so here you go.
For context, Audry de Puyraveau was a major figure in the July Revolution of 1830 and one of the people who put Louis-Phillipe on the throne as part of the Paris Municipal Commission (which he served on as a Constitutional Republican). Puyraveau was re-elected to a public office a year later, in July of 1831, which is exactly the right time frame for this Les Mis quote so I thought for sure I’d be able to find some kind of political speech relating to the elections… but no dice. I actually couldn’t find a transcript of any speech from this man’s entire life anywhere. I found a fair number of articles (and some art) about him and his role in the July Revolution, which were actually really funny because everyone on the left thinks he’s way too conservative for pussying out of the July Revolution by putting a king in charge again. And everyone on the right thinks he’s way too liberal for helping to instigate the July Revolution and suggesting that there should be any sort of elective government. So you get these wildly conflicting accounts of this guy who’s honestly just center left. Kind of a perfect guy for Marius to look up to. Like if a modern Marius was super obsessed with Joe Biden.
The best lead I found was in this book from 1844, The History of Ten Years 1830-1840, that says, on page 514, that Puyraveau is one of the people who gave a speech in opposition to hereditary peerage in 1831 (link). But the speech is from September, so it can’t be the one Marius is talking about. I also found another book from 1850, The History of Secret Societies and of the Republican Party of France From 1830 to 1848, that calls the man thoroughly mediocre, which I think is hysterical considering how excited Marius is about him (link).
Anyway, in conclusion, I do not know if this speech was as fine as Marius said or if Courfeyrac liked it. Oh well.
L’Auberge des Adrets by Benjamin Antier, Saint-Amand and Paulyanthe (English, French)
“They went to Porte-St-Martin to see Frédérick in L’Auberge des Adrets. Marius enjoyed himself enormously.” (Les Mis 3.6.6)
Frédérick Lemaître was an actor who made a name for himself while appearing in several plays in the early 1800’s (including Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas in 1838). The play in question here, L’Auberge des Adrets, was one of his first break-out roles as the character Robert Macaire. As the story goes, apparently the play was supposed to be a serious melodrama, but Frédérick and his other leading co-star decided to play their characters as comic figures instead. This idea of making a criminal into a silly character was pretty scandalous at the time and ended up being massively popular. It inspired a bunch of spin-offs and an eventual sequel, but that all came later.
Anyway, I have no idea what Courfeyrac thought of this play, Victor Hugo doesn’t tell us. He invited Marius to brunch after this and seemed amused, so signs point to him having at least a decent time. It’s also exactly the kind of new, daring, sort of scandalous thing that would usually appeal to Courfeyrac.
Héraclius by Pierre Corneille (English, French)
“Anyone entering the restaurant room would read the following line chalked on the door by Courfeyrac: ‘Enjoy if you can and eat if you dare.’” (Les Mis 4.12.1)
This quote that Courfeyrac has written on the door of the Corinthe is an allusion to Corneille’s historical tragedy Héraclius (act 4, sc iv). Corneille is one of the big three classic French dramatists, and we are told Jean Prouvaire also loves him. This play is considered one of Corneille’s masterpieces, though it’s not one of his most well-known or most-performed plays. Reportedly, it’s known as one of his most complex works (link), and deals largely with themes of identity and uncertainty. Basically, before the events of the play, the royal governess Léontine switched the emperor’s son Heraclius with Phocas’s son Martian, and has kept the secret of their true identities such a secret throughout the play that even they doubt who they really are. In act 4, she dares Phocas to pick which one of the two he thinks is his son by saying “Devine, si tu peux, et choisis, si tu l'oses.” or, in English: “Guess if you can, and choose if you dare.”So, basically, Courfeyrac is riffing off of this quote to jokingly emphasize the weighty choice you must make to dare eating at this bar. I think you can get the joke pretty readily without knowing the plot of Héraclius, but it does add a certain amount of wit and gravitas to the silly graffiti. Characteristically, it’s also a play and not a book. Courfeyrac likes things that are cerebral and relatively niche, but he still prefers going to the theater to reading!
...And that's it! Again, I’m not an expert on French history or literature, so it's definitely possible there are references I missed. If you notice one, please let me know. In the meantime, thanks for reading!!
…Well anyway, here’s the Enjolras booklist no one asked for
So this isn’t my usual content at all, but for the past year or so I’ve actually been consumed by a bizarre research project and figured I’d post a bit of it to tumblr on barricade day. Just in case any of you are Les Mis fans who’ve ever wondered if anyone had ever tried to put together a list of all the books Enjolras has canonically read based on all of the references he makes in the book. Because I have. That's been the research project. Behold my Enjolras book club booklist of all the references made by, about, or to Enjolras throughout Les Mis.
These are the sort of books the boys are reading and talking about in the Cafe Musain! It’s Enjolras’s book club! It’s fun! (Idk, I’m a librarian, this is just how my brain works.)
I tried to find a copy of all the referenced books and plays available for free online. Obviously the versions Enjolras would be reading are in their original French, but unfortunately I don’t speak French so most of the ones I’ve linked are English translations. C’est la vie! I should also preface that some of these books are absolutely 100% the things being referenced, but sometimes when the quote was vague I just had to make my best guess about what the most plausible source might be.
The TLDR: Enjolras is mostly compared to people famed for their beauty, chastity, and/or violent rebellion against tyranny. These are his three main personality traits, so that tracks. Most of his own confirmed reading habits are historical or political nonfiction by French orators/writers and ancient Greco-Roman ones. Also no surprise there. Enjolras loves France and he loves democracy, and all the allusions he makes reflect that! He will occasionally make references to Greco-Roman mythology, but generally he prefers history over fantasy.
But if you're interested in the whole list, and all the historical context and literary analysis that goes along with it, the rest is below the cut...
Roman History by Cassius Dio (link)
“Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
This comparison to Antinous is one of the very first things we learn about Enjolras and it immediately implies several key things about him: Enjolras is young, beautiful, and the impact of his untimely death will eclipse all other details about his life. So, even before he appears on the page, we are being told that Enjolras is doomed to die (and, of course, he’s super hot).
In short, Antinous was the Ancient Greek Emperor Hadrian’s lover who died pretty young and then was deified post-mortem. There’s not really that much contemporary writing about Antinous. I’ve chosen one of the longest descriptions of him written within a few decades of his death and it’s still only a single page. He’s way more famous for his looks because there were so many statues made of him. (Here’s one that was in the Louvre at the time!) Just statistically, if there’s talk about a Greek marble statue of a beautiful man, especially one with downcast eyes, there’s a decent chance it’s a reference to Antinous. And, not coincidentally, Enjolras is continuously compared to a Greek statue or marble throughout the book. It’s also worth noting that Antinous was a bit of a gay icon in the 19th century because of his relationship with Emperor Hadrian, see "The Most Famous Fairy in History" by Sarah Waters (link) for more info. And very soon after Victor Hugo makes this comparison, we’ll learn that Enjolras, like Antinous, is also uninterested in women and the subject of the cult-like fascination of another man. Hmmm. But more on that later.
On the Principles of Political Morality by Maximilien Robespierre (English)
Discours sur l’organisation des Gardes nationales by Maximilien Robespierre (French)
Virtue and Terror speeches by Maximilien Robespierre, translated by Slavoj Žižek (English, English)
“Enjolras gave expression to its [the Revolution’s] divine right and Combeferre its natural right. The former aligned himself with Robespierre, the latter stood close to Condorcet.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘I’ll talk to them about Robespierre, of course! And about Danton. About principles.’" (Les Mis 4.1.6)
“[Grantaire] had gone home to put on a Robespierre-style waistcoat. ‘Red,’ he said as he came in, gazing intently at Enjolras.” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
“[Enjolras:] ‘This sovereignty of the self over the self is called Liberty. (...) This uniformity of the concession each individual makes to all is called Equality. (...) This protection of all over each individual is called Fraternity.’” (Les Mis 5.1.5)
“As for the direct means to achieve it [progress], given a violent situation, [Enjolras] chose violence. In that, he never varied. And he was still of that epic and fearsome school encapsulated in this word: ‘ninety-three’.” (Les Mis 5.1.5)
Another one of the first things we learn about Enjolras, still before we’ve actually met the guy, is that he really, really likes Robespierre. Enjolras is frequently compared by Hugo and other characters to Robespierre. Enjolras also quotes Robespierre and describes himself as part of Robespierre’s school of thought. Grantaire tries to impress Enjolras twice by referencing Robespierre to him - he even runs home to dress up in his Robespierre-style waistcoat to look cool in front of Enjolras. (We’ll circle back to that.) Basically, Enjolras idolizes Robespierre and Victor Hugo wants to make absolutely sure you know it.
This comparison gives us an early heads up about Enjolras’s character that we’ll see as time goes on. Both Enjolras and Robespierre have politics that are really radical and uncompromising. Robespierre is referenced by many other characters as being emblematic of The Reign of Terror and extreme devotion to the Republic, which is totally Enjolras’s vibe too. He is characterized by a willingness to do acts of violence out of love for his country and, much like Robespierre, he’s going to die for it.
Robespierre gave and wrote hundreds of speeches, many of which he transcribed and sent out to be published in the papers or distributed as pamphlets, so there’s a lot to choose from. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a proper oeuvre published until after Enjolras died and we’re not given too many specific references in Les Mis to help us narrow down which particular speeches Enjolras loved the most. In the end, I did my best and just picked two speeches that got sort of indirectly referenced during the barricade segment of the book. First, we’ve got On the Principles of Public Morality, Robespierre’s 1794 speech in defense of the Reign of Terror. We’re told pretty explicitly that Enjolras is “of that epic and fearsome school encapsulated in this word: ‘ninety-three’” (aka The Terror) and doesn’t hesitate to use violence as an answer to problems, so I think Robespierre’s speech about terror as a tool for revolutionary politics is pretty apt. This speech was officially published by the National Convention and distributed to societies to be read aloud, so it was a pretty big deal and wouldn’t be that hard to find. Second, there’s a reference that Enjolras makes to a phrase that was originally popularized by Robespierre. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” is the official motto of France now, but it wasn’t technically adopted until after the revolution of 1848. In the years preceding, there were many different versions of the phrase floating around, most including liberty and equality but not necessarily fraternity. This final version, and the version that Enjolras quotes on the barricade in 1832, was supposedly popularized by our good friend Robespierre in a 1790 speech to the Convention, Discours sur l’organisation des Gardes nationales, though he admittedly wasn’t the first one to say it. Robespierre later had the phrase “Liberté, Equality, Fraternité ou la mort” inscribed on public buildings in the city during the Reign of Terror, but I guess the “or death” part didn’t really catch on. I’m actually surprised Enjolras doesn’t quote that version, but he shows some uncharacteristic restraint here re:bloodthirstiness. Good for him.
If you’re looking for a good English translation of more Robespierre speeches, I’d recommend checking out Slavoj Žižek’s collection in translation Virtue and Terror because it was really good and appropriately pro-Robespierre for Enjolras.
The French Constitution of 1793 (English)
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793 (English)
Fragments sur les institutions républicaines (Republican Institutes) excerpts by Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (English)
Convention debate over the fate of Louis XVI in 1792 speeches by Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (English, English)
“in the Convention, he would have been Saint-Just.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
“Enjolras had within him the plenitude of the revolution. He was incomplete, however, in so far as the absolute can be. He was too much like Saint-Just, and not enough like Anacharsis Cloots.” (Les Mis 5.1.5)
Similar to Robespierre, comparing Enjolras to Saint-Just serves to emphasize the violent righteousness of Enjolras’s revolutionary ideals and his admiration of the politics behind The Terror. Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, known as the “Archangel of Terror,” was a radical leftist and one of Robespierre’s close friends. Known for being bold, ruthless, and young - he died in his 20’s for his uncompromising political beliefs, much like a certain someone else we know. Saint-Just has so many funny quotes about being cursed by his own youth during such a pivotal moment in French history, what a mood. He also wrote a lot before he got involved with the Revolution, including some poetry he published when he was 20 that got attention for its pornographic passages. The title of this 8,000 line poem is Organt and it’s so extremely self-indulgent and there’s a bunch of characters who are political allegories but also a bunch that are just his friends inserted into the plot. (RIP Saint-Just, you would have loved ao3.) His preface to it was literally “I'm twenty; I've done badly; I could do better.” Anyway, this isn’t relevant to Enjolras, but it’s honestly iconic so I wanted to mention it.
Both references to Saint-Just point to his time in the French National Convention, so I wanted to find some of his work from that era for the booklist. He gave so, so many speeches in the Convention and was one of the primary forces behind writing the French Constitution of 1793 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793, so I’ve included a sample of those here! Unfortunately, no proper collections of Saint-Just’s speeches would be published until after the 1830’s, so most of what would have been available to Enjolras would be the transcripts of his speeches published in old editions of Le Moniteur or old pamphlets. Since that kind of ephemera is a little harder to track down, I did my best to just include some of the highlights here. I included some translated excerpts from his first big speech in the National Convention in 1792, where he encouraged the Convention to condemn Louis XVI. He argued that there’s no such thing as an innocent monarch because their very existence compromises the rights of the people and compared the king to Julius Caesar from Voltaire’s version of that play. There’s another speech by Saint-Just that people make reference to a lot where he purportedly says that “the vessel of the Revolution can arrive in port only on a sea reddened with torrents of blood” but I’m going to be real I was having a really hard time hunting that speech down and the source that everyone keeps pointing to (Stanley Loomis) is highly sus to me because the author really, really hates Saint-Just and is obviously keen to paint him in the worst light possible. So if anyone has the origin of that quote, please let me know.
And, like many other references, this one is working double-time because it’s also telling us (once again) that Enjolras is really hot in a really feminine way, just like Saint-Just. So, people who actually knew Saint-Just mostly described him as a young, moderately attractive guy with good fashion sense, but over time accounts of his effeminate, ethereal beauty started to gain popularity, which is mostly how he’s remembered now. Bernard Vinot’s biography has some pretty good stuff on this shift (French link) and there’s a really good tumblr post by @obscurehistoricalinterests that translates some excerpts on the subject (link). Several pretty big historians (including Victor Hugo’s friends) really go all out describing Saint-Just in very similar ways to how Victor Hugo describes Enjolras’s androgynous beauty, so I feel like this is an intentional comparison. The funny, meta thing to me about comparing Enjolras to Saint-Just is that, from his writing, Saint-Just seems like a guy who really wanted to be remembered for his politics and yet people keep writing about how pretty he was instead. That’s so Enjolras.
What is the Third Estate? by Emmanuel Sieyès (1789) (English)
Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791) (English)
Considerations on the French Revolution by Germaine de Staël (1818) (English)
History of the French Revolution by François Mignet (1824) (English)
The History of the French Revolution by Adolph Thiers (1823-27) (English)
“Seeing the pensiveness reflected in his gaze, you would have thought he had already lived through the revolutionary apocalypse in some previous existence. That tradition was part of him, as of someone who had experienced it. He knew every little detail about that great cataclysm.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
“‘Who goes there?’ (...) Enjolras replied in a haughty and vibrating tone:— ‘The French Revolution!’” (Les Mis 4.14.1)
“‘What men those regicides were!’ said Enjolras.” (Les Mis 4.14.2)
Enjolras loves the French Revolution! We are told he knows every little detail about it, he speaks very highly of the regicides, and he has that silly knock-knock joke in LM 4.14.1 about it. Since he wasn’t alive for it, he probably had to do a fair amount of reading on the subject to get this level of knowledge, so I figured it qualified for the booklist.
There’s no specific allusion made for this one, so I’ve just included a few significant documents from the Revolution and a handful of published accounts from just after the Revolution that were apparently popular in Paris during the 1820’s. Contemporary writings on the Revolution weren’t even trying to be impartial; they were very divided between conservative and liberal historians condemning or praising it. I picked the ones that were reportedly more trendy with young Parisian liberals (aka, Enjolras and the boys), but to be honest they’d probably also enjoy ripping apart more conservative takes like Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France too. These sources are also mostly narrative histories of people’s own experiences during the Revolution because it wasn't until the mid-1800’s that more comprehensive, scholarly histories began to appear. But, unfortunately, Enjolras wouldn’t be alive to read those.
“Gaius Gracchus” Parallel Lives by Plutarch (English)
History of the Roman Republic by Jules Michelet (English)
“On the Aventine Hill he would have been Gracchus” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Gaius Gracchus was a radical reformist Roman politician who made a stand against his political rivals at the Temple of Diana on Aventine Hill and was ultimately killed. He had a brother (Tiberius Gracchus) who also did political reform, but Victor Hugo has specifically compared Enjolras to the Gracchus who died in a violent political clash. Enjolras is all about violent, direct action, and Victor Hugo draws attention to that every chance he can get.
It seems like the Gracchus brothers were pretty topical in revolutionary France because there was a radical revolutionary journalist in the 1790’s, François-Noël Babeuf, who was popularly known as Gracchus Babeuf because of his proto-anarchist/communist/socialist politics (link). He was reportedly barred from the Jacobin Club for being too bloodthirsty about class war, which is saying something because the Jacobins are best known for their Reign of Terror. He’s not the Gracchus in question here, but I feel like Enjolras would absolutely love him too, tbh.
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (English)
“Evadne’s bare breast would have moved him no more than it would have moved Aristogeiton. For him, as for Harmodius, the only thing flowers were good for was to conceal the sword.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Harmodius and Aristogeiton were two lovers known as the Tyrannicides who assassinated the brother of the Athenian tyrant Hippias in one of the founding myths of Athenian democracy. They were subsequently killed because of this act of rebellion, much like Enjolras will be after his own attempt to free his country from an oppressive government, so the foreshadowing of death continues. But this tyrannicide is all just flavor, because Victor Hugo is primarily making this comparison to tell us that Enjolras is as interested in romancing women as these two famous gay icons - that is, not at all. It’s truly so Enjolras that every conjecture about his sexuality is also secretly about radical revolutionary politics.
The Bible, Book of Ezekiel (English)
“If any grisette from Place Cambrai or the Rue St-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that truant-schoolboy face, that pageboy neck, those long fair eyelashes, those blue eyes, that wind-tousled hair, those rosy cheeks, fresh lips, perfect teeth, had hankered after all this youthfulness in its prime and come to try her charms on Enjolras, a shocking, dreadful glance would have abruptly revealed the abyss to her and taught her not to confuse Ezekiel’s awesome cherub with Beaumarchais’s gallant Cherubino.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
“Enjolras was standing on the cobblestone staircase, with one of his elbows resting on the barrel of his gun. He was thinking. He shuddered, as if at passing emanations; places of death have these oracular effects. In that inward-turned gaze was smouldering fires. All at once he raised his head; with his blond hair swept back like that of the angel on the dark chariot of stars, it had the look of a lion’s mane fanned out in a flaming aureole.” (Les Mis 5.1.5)
Victor Hugo doubles down in the same paragraph as his joke about the Tyrranicides with a pun comparing the Marriage of Figaro to the Bible, emphasizing again just how little Enjolras cares about love or sex. Enjolras talks a fair amount about Satan and divinity throughout Les Mis, so it’s safe to assume he’s generally familiar with the Bible. However, Victor Hugo tends to be very intentional about which parts of the Bible he’s referencing. For Enjolras, that’s specifically the Book of Ezekiel. In fact, most of the members of Les Amis have one particular book from the Bible they always refer to that’s used to characterize them. A lot of the specific meaning of those references were lost on me, so I phoned a friend who went to Catholic school to give me a more detailed rundown of the Victor Hugo-assigned Bible passages. (Thanks Jared!) Basically, the Book of Ezekiel is a pretty violent Biblical passage. It’s all fire and brimstone, with God as the punisher and salvation being achieved through blood. This aligns pretty perfectly with everything else we’ve been told about Enjolras and his love of The Terror and political violence. Enjolras is angry and righteous above all other things.The Book of Ezekiel is also one of the main sources of what people refer to as “biblically accurate angels.” When they show up to Ezekiel in chapters 1 and 10, there is a lot of flame imagery, a chariot made of heavenly beings, and a description that one of the heads of the angels is that of a lion. Which is, coincidentally, the same exact way that Victor Hugo describes Enjolras in LM 5.1.5, as Enjolras is processing the failure of his revolution and his upcoming death. In the Book of Ezekiel, their appearance heralds Ezekiel getting a vision from God, and in Les Mis, this moment precedes Enjolras telling everyone about his utopian visions for the twentieth century. He is, like Ezekiel, relaying a divine vision. Even though the people of Paris didn’t show up to the barricade, he and his friends can still save/inspire them by dying here and heralding a happier future.
The Marriage of Figaro (La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro) by Pierre Beaumarchais (English)
“If any grisette from Place Cambrai or the Rue St-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that truant-schoolboy face, that pageboy neck, those long fair eyelashes, those blue eyes, that wind-tousled hair, those rosy cheeks, fresh lips, perfect teeth, had hankered after all this youthfulness in its prime and come to try her charms on Enjolras, a shocking, dreadful glance would have abruptly revealed the abyss to her and taught her not to confuse Ezekiel’s awesome cherub with Beaumarchais’s gallant Cherubino.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
Here’s the other half of the pun! Specifically Victor Hugo is referring to the original French stage play, which is more political than Mozart’s opera of the same name. Usually I only include the references that Enjolras is likened to, not the ones he’s said to be unlike. But fun fact, The Marriage of Figaro was banned at Versailles in 1783 because it mocked the aristocracy. Reportedly, upon banning it, King Louis XVI said: “La représentation ne pourrait qu'être une inconséquence fâcheuse, sauf si la Bastille était détruite.” or “The performance can’t be more than a nuisance as long as the Bastille isn’t destroyed.” as a sick burn to call the play’s criticism unimportant because nothing would ever happen to the Bastille... But you’ll never guess what happened just a few years later, oops!
Enjolras definitely wouldn’t care at all about the romantic intrigue in this one, but I think it’s telling that even when Victor Hugo is just making a silly little reference to tell you how much Enjolras doesn’t care about something, he still chooses to reference a politically bent work that makes fun of the aristocracy and pisses off the king so bad he bans it. It’s basically impossible to separate Enjolras from his political ideals.
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (English)
"And Enjolras rebuked Courfeyrac. ‘Not a word against Jean-Jacques! He’s a man I admire. Even if he did disown his children, he adopted the people as his own.’" (Les Mis 3.4.3)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘Yes, me. But I’m not being given the credit I deserve. When I put my mind to it, I’m terrific. I’ve read Prudhomme, I’m familiar with the Social Contract, I know by heart my constitution of the year II.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
“[Enjolras:] ‘Hence what is called “the social bond”. Some say “social contract”, which is the same thing, the word “contract” being etymologically formed from the notion of binding.’” (Les Mis 5.1.5)
Rousseau is a huge influence on the politics of Les Amis and is referenced several times throughout their chapters. Mostly by Enjolras. Rousseau was the guy who coined the term “eat the rich” during the French Revolution, so it’s no surprise that Enjolras especially goes to bat for this guy and says a hilarious line defending him against the haters (Courfeyrac) in LM 3.4.3. He even talks as if he’s on first name basis with Jean-Jacques. This scene absolutely kills me. It’s no wonder Grantaire tries to impress him by referencing the Social Contract a few chapters later. Then, on the barricade, Enjolras literally stops everything and gives a spontaneous The Social Contract 101 lecture. So I think it’s safe to say he loves Rousseau. A lot.
Fables by Jean de La Fontaine (English)
“The Heifer, Goat, Sheep, and Lion” by Phaedrus (English)
“Enjolras, whose blue gaze was not fixed on anyone and who seemed to be staring into space, without glancing at Marius replied, ‘France needs no Corsica to be great. France is great by virtue of being France. Quia nominor leo.’” (Les Mis 3.4.5)
“There’ll be no reason then to fear, as we do today, conquest, invasion, usurpation, rivalry between armed nations, civilization interrupted by a marriage of kings, a birth within the hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by congress, dismemberment brought about by the collapse of a dynasty, a conflict between two religions coming up against each other like two goats of darkness on the bridge of infinity.” (Les Mis 5.1.5)
During Marius’s cringe Napoleon stan rant in LM 3.4.5, Enjolras makes a reference to the fable “The Heifer, Goat, Sheep, and Lion” by quoting a line in Latin that means “because my name is a lion.” While he’s literally using the quote to reiterate his point that France is great because it’s France, due to the subject matter of the fable he might also be sneaking in a sick burn about Marius’s problematic Napoleon beliefs by making a comparison to the lion in the story. Like, if you align yourself with strongmen they will betray you just because they can. At least, that’s how I interpret it.
Enjolras is quoting the original Roman version by Phaedrus, because of course he is, but La Fontaine’s Fables were (and continue to be) super prevalent in France, and likely where he would have first heard the story. Enjolras makes another reference to La Fontaine’s Fables later. Specifically, “The Two Goats,” a story about two goats that meet each other on a narrow bridge and neither will move, so they both get stuck there and eventually fall to their deaths. Tbh, there are probably more that I’m not as good at catching, but I think it’s safe to say Enjolras has read La Fontaine’s Fables.
Speeches of Georges Jacques Danton (English)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘I’ll talk to them about Robespierre, of course! And about Danton. About principles.’" (Les Mis 4.1.6)
Enjolras doesn’t reference Danton directly, but Grantaire thinks Enjolras likes him and I’m tempted to agree. In LM 4.1.6, Grantaire lists a bunch of politicians and publications to Enjolras that he claims to be familiar with in an attempt to impress Enjolras, and I’m opting to include those here on Enjolras’s booklist because I think it’s less informative about Grantaire’s own taste than what he thinks of Enjolras’s. Case in point, literally the first thing we learn about Grantaire is a list of philosophies and people that he thinks are stupid, and lots of those are ones he lists to Enjolras here! He’s absolutely trying to look cool to Enjolras by flexing his knowledge of things he thinks Enjolras likes. I fully believe he even bought that Robespierre-style waistcoat just to impress Enjolras because Grantaire is specifically described as thinking Robespierre (or at least his brother) is stupid. Then he runs home to put it on, runs back to the Cafe for no reason just to make intense eye contact with Enjolras while he tries to draw attention to the waistcoat, and then leaves again immediately?? There’s no other reason for him to do all that. How embarrassing. But I’m getting off topic.
Danton is another one of the main revolutionaries associated with Robespierre and The Terror. This is a bit of an easy guess for Grantaire, because everyone knows Enjolras likes The Terror. I do think it’s fun that when Enjolras mentions The Terror he talks about the scholarly, beautiful, bloodthirsty guy involved with Robespierre and when Grantaire mentions The Terror he talks about the brash, personable, kind of ugly guy involved with Robespierre. Unlike Robespierre and Saint-Just, Danton never gave manuscripts to journalists and most of his speeches were extemporaneous, so despite being very present for so much of history during this era, he doesn’t have as much published work to point to for this reference. Because of that and because this is such a minor reference, I decided not to look too hard and just included a collection of speeches compiled in 1910. Obviously that’s way after Enjolras and Grantaire would be dead, but the same speeches would’ve been available in their time, just printed in various other places like Le Moniteur or whatever. Speaking of anachronistic Danton references, there’s a whole Hark! A Vagrant episode (321) about Danton, and in the description Kate Beaton also laments how the guy didn’t write anything down. You and me both, queen.
Révolutions de Paris edited by Louis-Marie Prudhomme - Several articles in translation (English)
"On the Influence of the Revolution on Women" by Louis-Marie Prudhomme (English)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘Yes, me. But I’m not being given the credit I deserve. When I put my mind to it, I’m terrific. I’ve read Prudhomme, I’m familiar with the Social Contract, I know by heart my constitution of the year II.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
This is another one that Grantaire thinks Enjolras likes. Prudhomme ran one of the best-known revolutionary newspapers and a few books about the revolutionary period and The Terror. This is most likely the Prudhomme that Victor Hugo references several times throughout Les Mis. He’s got some good takes, but he’s notably really sexist. I feel like I need to call him out for this because Enjolras also doesn’t include women in his revolution. Love him, but he is not a feminist so he needs to be shamed a little.
Le Père Duchesne edited by Jacques René Hébert - Several articles in translation (English)
“The Père Duchesne Supports the Terror,” Le Père Duchesne, no. 234 (English)
“[Graintaire, trying to impress Enjolras:] ‘The rights of man, the sovereignty of the people, for God’s sake! I am even a bit of a Hébertist. I can keep coming out with some wonderful things, watch in hand, for a whole six hours by the clock.’” (Les Mis 4.1.6)
This one is an absolute delight to read and hysterical if this is the kind of rhetoric that Grantaire thinks will impress Enjolras. Genuinely lmao. The Hébertists were a political group associated with journalist Jacques René Hébert, the founder and editor of the irreverent radical newspaper Le Père Duchesne. They were proponents of extreme revolutionary ideas during the Reign of Terror, but their leadership was ultimately executed in 1794. Yet again, we have no concrete proof that Enjolras actually read Hébertist literature, but Grantaire certainly thinks this is the kind of thing that would be impressive to Enjolras.
Histories by Herodotus (English)
Leonidas, A Poem by Richard Glover (English)
“The Isles of Greece” by Lord Byron (English)
Le Passage de Thermopyles by Pierre Villiers
Léonidas by Michel Pichat
Le Songe, ou les Thermopyles by Élisa Mercoeur (English)
“As we know, there was something of the Spartan and the Puritan in Enjolras. He would have perished at Thermopylae with Leonidas and burned down Drogheda with Cromwell.” (Les Mis 4.12.3)
“[Enjolras:] ‘The amphictyons held two sittings a year, one at Delphi, site of the gods, the other at Thermopylae, site of heroes.’” (Les Mis 5.1.5)
“Enjolras ruled over it [the barricade] gravely, in the attitude of a young Spartan dedicating his naked sword to the sombre spirit of Epidotes.” (Les Mis 5.1.17)
“And if need be, they will die like the three hundred Spartans. They think not of Don Quixote, but of Leonidas. And they forge on, and once committed there is no going back, and they press forward, heads down, in hope of an unprecedented victory, the fulfilment of the revolution, progress once again set free, the advancement of the human race, universal deliverance, and if the worse comes to worst, Thermopylae.” (Les Mis 5.1.20)
There are lots of comparisons between the Spartan 300 and the students of the June Rebellion through the book. Enjolras, especially, is repeatedly described as Spartan in nature, and he references Thermopylae himself during a speech at the barricades, calling it a “site of heroes.” RIP Enjolras, you would have loved Zack Snyder’s 300.
There are also lots of potential sources for this story that were popular at the time. One of the principal classical sources covering the battle is Herodotus’ Histories, which portrays the Greco-Persian War as a battle between slavery and freedom. That’s definitely the vibe that Victor Hugo is channeling as well. Centuries later, in Lord Byron’s Don Juan, he wrote a poem called “The Isles of Greece” which celebrates Thermopylae as a symbol of Greek resistance. Victor Hugo definitely loved it because he mentioned it specifically in his obituary for Lord Byron (link): “He has proved to Europe that the poets of the new school, although they no longer adore the gods of pagan Greece, always admire its heroes; and that, if they have deserted Olympus, they have at least never said adieu to Thermopylae.” Glover’s epic poem Leonidas was also massively popular throughout the 18th century, including its French translation, and would inspire a bunch of contemporary interest in the subject.
Additionally, there was a whole wave of poetry and plays about Thermopylae in France during the Revolutionary era. There are truly an overwhelming number of them. It’s like the isekai genre of Revolutionary era France. Check out “Loyalty and Liberty: Thermopylae in the Western Imagination” by Emma Clough (link) for more info. Enjolras and his boys wouldn’t have been alive early enough to catch a lot of these shows, but don’t worry because after the release of Jacques Louis David’s painting Leonidas at Thermopylae in 1815 (link), there were was another wave of MORE PLAYS about these doomed Spartans. Pierre Villiers’ Le Passage de Thermopyles was inspired by the painting and released in 1823 and Michel Pichat’s Léonidas was released in 1825. Plus in 1827, Élisa Mercoeur released her poem: Le Songe, ou les Thermopyles. I could go on!
Lastly, this is not something that Enjolras would have been able to read himself, but the 25 April 1836 edition of the Gazette des Tribunaux compared the actual real republican insurrection of 1832 to the Spartan 300 at the Battle of Thermopylae as well! (French link, English translation of quote link) Just goes to show how topical Thermopylae was at the time.
Cromwell by Victor Hugo (English)
“As we know, there was something of the Spartan and the Puritan in Enjolras. He would have perished at Thermopylae with Leonidas and burned down Drogheda with Cromwell.” (Les Mis 4.12.3)
Oliver Cromwell comes up several times in Les Mis. Victor Hugo is obviously fascinated with this guy and the English Civil War, but he specifically calls out one of Cromwell’s most extreme and controversial moments of violence as a parallel to Enjolras. This is definitely part of a pattern for his characterization of Enjolras. (I personally don’t think Enjolras would like killing thousands of innocent Irish civilians, but idk maybe that’s just me.) In general, Cromwell is characterized by his ruthlessness and his role in beheading King Charles I, which are very on brand for Enjolras comparisons. And as a Puritan leader, Cromwell banned many forms of private and public entertainment, kind of like how Enjolras bans the men at the barricade from drinking alcohol.
Victor Hugo himself wrote a play about Oliver Cromwell in 1827, so I had to include it here even though it wasn’t actually performed until the 1950’s (due in part to its SEVEN HOUR runtime, jfc) and there was little chance Enjolras would have actually read it. But technically he could have! And Victor Hugo definitely did since he wrote the thing, so this is informative as to what he thinks of Cromwell when he makes that comparison to Enjolras anyway.
Multiple Sources
“Pale and disheveled, his throat bared, Enjolras, with his womanly face, had at that moment something of the ancient Themis about him. His flaring nostrils, his downcast eyes, gave to his implacable Greek profile that expression of wrath and that expression of chastity that for the ancient world are appropriate to justice.” (Les Mis 4.12.8)
Not too much to say about this one. It’s another allusion highlighting Enjolras’s feminine appearance, asexuality/virginity, and strong sense of justice. Themis is the Greek goddess of divine justice and, in some Greek myths, the originator of human political assemblies. That’s cool! She’s the Greek equivalent to Lady Justice, so there’s certainly a lot of statues invoking her imagery (holding scales, often blindfolded, stoic), but not one particular piece of iconic art as far as I know. She also doesn’t have one major myth to point to as an obvious reference here. Themis is mentioned briefly in several plays, including both the Iliad and the Odyssey plus a few of Aeschylus’ plays where she appears as a goddess of assemblies and justice. Notably, she is Prometheus’ mother in Prometheus Bound which Enjolras has definitely read and references later. It’s apt that Victor Hugo is basically saying “he’s like Prometheus if Prometheus was a girl.” Anyway, this is mostly just invoking the imagery of Justice so just pretend this is a footnote later when Prometheus Bound comes up in more detail.
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare (English)
Le Mort de César by Voltaire (French)
"'The face of an old buffer and the courage of Brutus,' replied Enjolras.” (Les Mis 4.14.2)
Lots of the members of Les Amis make reference to Brutus. Grantaire and Combeferre are more hesitant to fully celebrate Brutus, but Enjolras will always stan a violent revolution against a tyrant so obviously he uncritically loves this guy. Enjolras even uses a comparison to Brutus as a compliment on the barricade. Information about Brutus appears in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (link) and Jules Michelet’s History of the Roman Republic (link) that were cited earlier, but I think the more significant source is the Shakespeare play. Shakespeare was a big influence on the Romantic movement, Victor Hugo makes a lot of references to Shakespeare throughout Les Mis, and Hugo even wrote a novella-length essay called William Shakespeare (which is kind of a misleading title because it’s only partially about Shakespeare). The very first translation of Shakespeare’s works into French was a version of Julius Caesar by Voltaire, La Mort de César, in 1731. This was not a direct translation, Voltaire takes some big liberties with the plot to make it fit the confines of French theater at the time and he openly thought that Shakespeare was kind of tasteless, which really influenced subsequent translations (link). In Voltaire’s version, he reveals a plot twist that Caesar is Brutus’s father to shift the focus of the story onto Brutus’s struggle between his patriotism as a republican and his loyalty to his family. The play also cuts almost everything after the assassination, so instead of showing Brutus’ slow decline he’s made into more of a martyr hero. I’ve seen a lot of articles say this wasn’t one of Voltaire’s more popular plays, but without even looking that hard I ran into multiple topical references to Voltaire’s version. In Charlotte Corday’s address explaining her assassination of Marat she likens herself to Brutus from La Mort de César (link) and Saint-Just references Brutus from La Mort de César as well. If nothing else, I think Enjolras would have more loyalty to the version from France so it’s worth putting on his book list.
Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus (English)
“[Enjolras:] ‘The day when this Promethean work is done and man has finally harnessed to his will the threefold chimera of antiquity — hydra, dragon, and griffin — he will be master of water, fire, and air, and he will be to the rest of living creation what the ancient gods once were to him.’” (Les Mis 5.1.5)
During the Romantic movement, Prometheus was widely adopted as a symbol of rebellion against institutional tyranny, so it’s no surprise he makes an appearance here. Victor Hugo references Prometheus as a revolutionary figure several times, and Enjolras himself describes their stand at the barricade as “Promethean” during one of his speeches. Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus is the best known classical source of the Prometheus myth, and it’s extremely popular with several of the characters in Les Mis as well. Aeschylus is one of Jean Prouvaire’s favorite poets and Marius also references Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound explicitly during his pre-barricade existential political breakthrough so I think there’s a solid chance that’s the version that Enjolras is also referencing. I think it’s also fitting for Enjolras to reference because it ends tragically, with Prometheus bringing the mortals fire only at great personal cost. It was supposed to be part of a greater trilogy by Aeschylus which would cover the time when Prometheus became unbound, but there is a nice mirror to Enjolras’s sacrifice within just the surviving play.
There are a few other versions I want to give a quick honorable mention here as well. Goethe’s epic poem Prometheus (link) is one of the first appearances of the Prometheus myth in the literary Romantic movement. And Prometheus Unbound by Percy Shelley (link) was directly inspired by the French Revolution, imagining a way that a revolution might break free of the cycle of creating new tyrants and exist in an anarchist utopia. Since they were written in 1785 and 1820, respectively, Enjolras technically could’ve read either of these as well! He doesn’t read a lot of fiction, but he does love a politically-motivated tale about righteous rebellion, so who can say.
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (French, French)
“[Enjolras:] ‘The amphictyons held two sittings a year, one at Delphi, site of the gods, the other at Thermopylae, site of heroes. Europe will have her amphictyons, the globe will have its amphictyons. France carries in its womb this sublime future. This is the gestation of the nineteenth century. What Greece began is worthy of being completed by France.’” (Les Mis 5.1.5)
Basically, an amphictyony was an association of neighboring tribes in Ancient Greece that would meet at common religious centers and vote on things. Enjolras loves the idea of people voting on things, so he makes a reference to the Delphic Amphictyony during a speech he gives at the barricade. Ancient sources with details about the Delphic Amphictyony are pretty limited, as far as I can tell. Herodotus’s Histories that I cited earlier mention the amphictyons in Thermopylae (link), and there is a tablet of the Amphictyonic Law of Delphi that’s now in the Louvre, though I’m unclear when it was added to the collection (link). Otherwise, the best source I could find that would’ve been widely accessible in Enjolras’s time was the Encyclopédie entry about amphictyons. It’s not the most riveting book on this list and it’s kind of a stretch, but the encyclopedia represented a big project to democratize information in France at the time, and it’s something Combeferre is noted to be passionate about, so Enjolras has probably referenced it at some point.
Iphigenia Among the Taurians by Euripides (English)
Iphigénie en Tauride by Christopher Willibald Gluck (English)
“You might just as well say O and P as Orestes and Pylades. A true satellite of Enjolras, Grantaire lived within this circle of young men. He dwelt among them, only with them was he happy, he followed them everywhere. His pleasure was to watch these figures come and go in a wine-induced haze. They put up with him because of his good humor. In his belief, Enjolras looked down on this sceptic; and in his sobriety, on this drunkard. He spared him a little lordly pity. Grantaire was an unwanted Pylades.” (Les Mis 3.4.1)
"Chapter 23: Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk" (Les Mis 5.1.23)
So, in his introduction, Grantaire is compared to a list of guys known for being a counterpart to another, the “reverse of Enjolras,” though in his case this bond is unreciprocated. For the most part, these characterize Grantaire more than Enjolras, and Enjolras isn’t explicitly compared to any of them… except one. But it’s a big one!
Grantaire’s character and his role as a foil to Enjolras is bookended by comparisons to Orestes and Pylades. In his introduction, Grantaire is “an unwanted Pylades,” and Enjolras pointedly does not fill the role of Orestes out of disdain for Grantaire and his lack of belief. But the chapter where they both die is named “Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk,” finally making the comparison to the both of them together. At a glance there’s not much that Enjolras has in common with the myth of Orestes. He’s not a matricide, he’s not haunted by Furies or driven to madness, he’s not on trial, and he’s specifically an only child. However, his death scene is a mirror to a particular scene in Iphigenia Among the Taurians and Iphigénie en Tauride. Tldr, Orestes and Pylades get stranded and caught on an island that sacrifices all outsiders and are sentenced to die, but Iphigenia offers them a deal that one of them can live if they agree to deliver a letter to her brother for her. Orestes offers up Pylades as the messenger so that his friend won’t die for his crimes. But Pylades wants Orestes to be the messenger so that he won’t have to live without him — “It would be shameful for me to go on living while you do not. I sailed with you and I must die with you.” — and so the two keep offering to die for each other or die together, which is only averted by Iphigenia’s discovery that Orestes is the brother she was trying to contact so they all plot to escape together. In Les Mis, Grantaire is unnoticed by the firing squad that’s about to kill Enjolras, and he could escape if he stays quiet but he chooses instead to announce his presence to them and asks Enjolras for permission to die with him. Now that he finally is willing to die for something, Enjolras accepts him. Grantaire is no longer an “unwanted Pylades,” he’s welcomed to die together as a duo with a smile.
I think it’s interesting that, of all the stories starring Orestes and Pylades, the reference here is not to the most famous version by Aeschylus. His Oresteia is one of the founding myths of democracy and fair public trials in Athens. It’s political, it glorifies democracy, it’s by an author Enjolras has already referenced, and Enjolras is friends with a bunch of lawyers. But in the end, as Enjolras is dying, the scene Hugo references is from the one play at the end of Orestes’ long tragic saga where he gets a surprise happy ending. One that focuses on companionship and healing over righteous violence at the end of the day. Even though our Orestes and Pylades die for real in the Les Mis version, there is a definite optimism in this send off. This story was so extremely popular in France at the time. You can’t dig through newspapers from the era for very long without finding some reference to these two, usually to imply some kind of epic friendship or partnership. And, honestly, if you’ve been on tumblr for any length of time, you too have probably heard of Orestes and Pylades. They’re the “it’s rotten work” guys from Anne Carson’s An Oresteia (link). Wow, Victor Hugo, truly a tumblrina before his time.
Eumenides by Aeschylus (English)
Apollo Belvedere (link)
"His beauty, at that moment enhanced by pride, was resplendent, and as if it were no more possible for him to be tired than to be wounded after the dreadful twenty-four hours that had just elapsed, he was pink and rosy. It might have been of him that the witness was speaking who later told the court martial, ‘There was one insurgent I heard referred to as Apollo.’” (Les Mis 5.1.23)
Last but not least, we’ve got this line comparing Enjolras’s beauty to Apollo. Very literally this is probably just a reference to the Apollo Belvedere and therefore not a literary reference per se, but bear with me.
First off, let’s cover the statue. The Apollo Belvedere was massively popular in the 18th/19th century, in large part due to the og art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann really hyping up how “the highest conception of ideal male beauty is especially expressed in the Apollo” (link) which made a big impact on neoclassicists. I didn’t read Winckelmann’s whole book, but the chapters I read were a good time. This guy isn’t even pretending to be impartial, he is stating as a fact which statues are beautiful and which aren’t. He also breaks it down by things like best feet, best boobs, etc. And he’s really openly gay about it. What an icon. Anyway, the other reason the Apollo Belvedere was really popping off in 18th/19th century France is because Napoleon stole it and took it back to France for a while. Napoleon looted a lot of art, but apparently he was particularly proud of stealing the Apollo Belvedere. There’s etchings of him showing it off (link), it was a whole thing. Apollo in general had been a really popular aspirational figure in France for a long time (I mean, look at Louis the Sun King) but in Napoleonic France, especially within the Romantic movement, the most celebrated iconography of Apollo would be the Belvedere. So, yeah, this quote is probably evoking the statue because Apollo is, in appearance, very similar to Enjolras. So, on the surface, most of what we’re getting out of this quote is one last reminder that he’s hot, he’s blond, and he’s god-like. But, wait, there’s more!
Apollo is also a significant character in the Orestes myths, and this reference is made during the chapter “Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk” so I think that’s very relevant. It puts Apollo into the context of this myth about violence, duty, and political process specifically. In the Oresteia, Apollo is the god who tasks Orestes with killing his mom and then shows up as a deus ex machina at the end to save him. He actually sort of bookends the entire last play, Eumenides, and Orestes’ story ends with a question to Apollo (“O bright Apollo, what shall be the end?”) before they depart so Athena can close out the play with a lecture on public trials and democracy. In the Euripides version, Apollo still gives Orestes the prophecy that sets his quest into motion and bails him out at the end, even though the characters are generally more critical of their government and the gods. There’s this big conversation happening in the background of Orestes about dissatisfaction with a country in turmoil that feels very relevant to Enjolras and his failed revolution. Anyway, all this to say that the Orestes story almost always ends with a deus ex machina by Apollo. And the last thing we hear about Enjolras in his Orestes chapter is a reference to Apollo. Even if it’s not intentional, this little parallel to the structure of Greek tragedy always ending with a deus ex machina (an appearance of some god) is so juicy. By dying, Enjolras has literally become part of a mythic story. Except in this version, he’s kind of also in the role of Apollo. Which also ties together a couple references that have been made earlier. Enjolras was also compared to the divine prophet Ezekiel, and you know who’s the god of prophecy? Apollo. One of the very first sentences about Enjolras told us that he was an Antinous, a man who was deified after his death, and then immediately after Enjolras dies he is referred to as a god. @motions1ckn3ss makes a case in her dissertation about classical allusion in Les Mis (link) that this whole chapter, and the Apollo line in particular, also draws a neat parallel to the concept of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Enjolras and Grantaire, which I don't have time to get into here. This throwaway quote doesn’t even happen while Enjolras is alive and technically doesn’t even confirm whether it’s really about Enjolras, but it ties together so much!
Plus, of course, Victor Hugo wants to spend one last moment telling the audience just how hot Enjolras was. RIP king.
...And that’s it! I’m not an expert on French history or literature, so if you happen to know any references that I missed, definitely hit me up and let me know. In the meantime, thanks for reading!!
the other day one of my students asked me if i was 'into musicals'. anyway here's a crop of a wip i've had sitting open in photoshop for a year and a half.
snowghoul
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
titsay
gummygunk
stormborns
