Continuing the metaphor of love and womanhood as an affliction or a poison, Marius falls under the effect of ‘une grande maladie.’
Marius is performing an act known as “peacocking” except he’s very bad at it. A major part of him is still trying to throw off the effects of this illness.
He makes the utterly baffling claim that, “I was the real author of the dissertation on Marcos Obregon de la Ronda, which Francois de Neufchateau has put, as his own, at the beginning of his edition of Gil Blas!” Hmm...a couple of things here. Considering that Neufchateau published his edition of Gil Blas in 1820, when Marius would have been about ten years old, this seems unlikely. Additionally, Marius is a law student and I doubt he’s spending his time writing dissertations about 16th century Spanish poets.
However, while Marius is clearly mistaken, a certain young author and intellectual named Victor Hugo is credited with writing Neufchateau’s Gil Blas preface. In case you needed more evidence that Marius is a young Hugo. This raises more questions than Hugo is willing to answer, all for the sake of a throwaway boast. Does Marius actually believe he wrote that dissertation? In the universe of Les Mis, did he actually write it? At age ten? How much of Victor Hugo himself is diegetic in this world? We know he is narrating this story because of his asides to the reader, but where does that begin and end? In our world, Les Miserables was written by Victor Hugo, but, in the fictional world of Les Mis, could Marius himself have written the novel post-barricade? Answer me, Hugo!
Will Courfeyrac hold nothing sacred? This terrible fellow...
If Marius is spending every day in the Luxembourg, is he no longer going to school or work? Subsisting entirely on the radiant aura of burgeoning attraction?
Cosette is making a name for herself as a manic pixie dream girl, she’s beautiful, but there’s something sad and wild about her. I really want Hugo to lean more into this contradiction Cosette has. She’s still the same girl who endured an unbearable childhood and escaped the city climbing over walls in the middle of the night. She’s a survivor! And understanding her through that lens is much more interesting than the naive pretty girl trope she’s often forced into.
