The main volume is titled The Villainous Pauper. I’m not sure the implication that poor = villain is a good one to make at this point. I get these chapters deal with the Thenardiers, but still it seems to imply that Eponine and Azelma’s poverty is bad because in these chapters we meet them again, compared to Marius’ noble poverty which made him a better person. There’s so many different confusing ways Hugo is talking about poverty.
Marius searches for Cosette but fails to find her, which is his fault in the first place so I’m really not feeling very charitable. I do find it interesting that Marius has both been compared to a stray dog (more animal symbolism) and also that ‘he fell into a dark dejection’ (more dark symbolism parallels)
All of this seems to be linked to Marius’ internal state. Marius fell from being an impassioned dreamer and man of resolve to someone who is pining after Cosette according to the narrative.
It feels once again as if the narrative and the reader are seeing different versions of Marius though. I did not think Marius acting like a stalker in the last few chapters was actually showing any resolve or boldness. He was never really a great thinker or an active resolute person even before, so I don’t really know what all the fuss is about. He is still the same dreamer he ever was.
But it’s interesting that Marius has fallen into these dark shadows, since colour symbolism is so prevalent in this book. He was chasing Mademoiselle Lenoir who was herself shining with the blue light of symbolism but now there is no Mademoiselle Lenoir and Marius loses the light symbolism that used to appear in his chapters.
Courfeyrac continues to be Marius’ only friend and Marius continues to keep things to himself. Marius goes with Courfeyrac, Grantaire and Bossuet to the ball at Sceaux but becomes even more pained and besotted with love and gets compared to a wolf in a trap, more animal imagery, which sort of solidifies the fact that Marius is maybe incomplete/in darkness without the ideal love.
Marius does find some glimmer of hope through spotting the white hair of Monsieur LeBlanc and I can’t help but think that it has to be more than coincidence that he sees some light symbolism while he has surrounded himself in darkness through his obsession (I can’t call it love because he’s still in love with the idea of Cosette and has yet to find anything meaningful about her). However, that light symbolism vanishes after a while since Valjean is spooked that Marius is looking at him and he disappears before Marius can track him.
Marius instead of noticing anyone is busy in his own world and that is shown by him completely ignoring Madame Bougon and her observations and he would have ignored the girls too if they hadn’t collided with him. It may have already been pointed out, but Marius is pretty annoying in this chapter in his attitude towards others.
He sees two girls dressed in rags talking about escaping the police and observes that it is better for a mother to have a dead child than one leading a bad life, which is a lot of levels of nope. I can forgive him for being preoccupied and not noticing things around him including his neighbours' poverty but to make this observation comparing a dead child without knowing anything about the situation, to two girls he has rarely glanced at and does not know anything about, is pretty bad from whichever angle you look at it. He could have shown some compassion towards the girls or even not making this observation would have been great.
It’s frustrating that he does not look at them in their own rights as people, as young girls but thinks of them as ghouls just because their destitution translates to them looking ugly, it is interesting because as @akallabeth-joie also pointed out, he has been looking at young girls either as angels or ghouls and not as real people. It’s pretty dehumanising of a young bourgeois kid like Marius to not think of Eponine and Azelma as more than ghouls.
