#4.15.4

[lesmisletters]

October 25th

Today was the end of Volume 4!

298 chapters read, 67 chapters left

81.64% thru the brick!

[centrifuge-politics]

Brick Club 4.15.2, 4.15.3, 4.15.4

Valjean, opening other people’s mail is a federal crime…

The number of fortuitous occurrences that have to happen in this scene alone to ensure the letter ends up in Valjean’s hands…untenable.

The symbolism of Gavroche breaking lamps on a bourgeoisie street is either symbolism so blatantly obvious that I don’t really need to say anything or so complexly layered that I don’t even want to try.

“In violent emotions, we do not read, we prostrate the paper which we hold…we run to the end, we leap to the beginning; the attention has a fever…it seizes a point, and all the rest disappears.” This is me reading all the barricade scenes even thought I know what happens. I can and will strangle this brick.

“I only have to let things take their course. That man cannot escape. If he is not dead yet, it is certain he will die. What happiness!” The spectre of Champmathieu rises again. Would you have an innocent man die for your own security, Valjean?

This is the French 19th century version of Mambo No. 5. Wilbour is a coward because he tries to abridge the repeating lyrics of the song for formatting purposes. Like we’re really concerned about page economy at this point!

“His face, an inexhaustible repertory of masks, made more convulsive and more fantastic grimaces than the mouths of a torn cloth in a heavy wind.” This is an absolutely ghastly image that reminds me of a favorite painting of mine by Léon Cogniet. The savage, transformative glory of revolution.

Tune in this week for Gavroche’s devastating roast of a National Guard. I need to find a decent translation of his song posthaste because I’m sensing a rather abrupt political turn in its last verses. “Gavroche’s adventure...is one of the most terrible reminiscences of the old bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memory: Nocturnal attack on the post of the Imprimerie Royal.” He indeed fights like twenty armies.

[fremedon]

Brickclub 4.15.4, “Gavroche Overzealous”

We’re in the final chapter of book 4, and it’s a bizarre place to end. Book 5 begins, not with a book-length digression, but with the final chapters of the barricade: “War Between Four Walls.” Which itself begins with a mini-digression, a single chapter on the barricades of 1848; but the book-length digression, the sewers, comes second.

Partly, Hugo is ending on Gavroche’s hijinks to baffle the censors, who would have noticed if he’d ended the volume on the apotheosis of the barricade fighters. But also, as @pilferingapples has pointed out, he’s broken the curse of fours and eights: Volumes 1-3 have eight chapters apiece; Volume 4 should have had sixteen--but now that the barricade has been built, things are changed: the final volume, in taking on the fatal sixteenth chapter of Volume 4, gets a ninth chapter. Which suggests that the ending is not the worst one possible, which. I am going to need to hold very tight to that idea.

So now, to end the book on this moment of textual grace, where Marius and Cosette’s horrible ending is being somehow softened, is Gavroche. Who was swearing last chapter that Marius’s letter was not a love letter, and has now gone off... singing love songs. With, albeit, “a great deal of pantomime.”

His songs are cut short by his discovery of... a cart. Unlike the other carts we’ve seen standing in for society, this one is not designed to be drawn by horses at all--it’s a wheelbarrow, or some other sort of handcart, and its presumed owner, an Auvergnat porter, is asleep in it, drunk. “We take the cart for the Republic, and leave the Auvergnat to the monarchy,” thinks Gavroche, and signs a receipt for the cart in the name of the French Republic. (I love when Gavroche adopts the language of bureaucracy; he does it all the time and it’s always hilarious.)

So, if the horses, all this time, have been the wretched on whose labor the motion of society depends--the horses Laigle cut loose and set free when he hijacked the omnibus--what’s a cart without a horse?

This time, it’s nearly Gavroche’s undoing, and also his salvation: the National Guard post at the government printing office, already roused by Gavroche’s singing and breaking of streetlights, sends a sergeant out to investigate the racket of the cart on the pavement, which sounds to them like a whole gang of rioters: “it was clear that the Hydra of Anarchy was out of its box.”

The--explicitly suburban--sergeant repeatedly demands to know where Gavroche is going; Gavroche insults his bourgeois status, his lack of humor, his lack of hair, and his age, before finally answering the last demand with “General, I’m going to fetch a doctor for my wife who’s in labor.” The sergeant calls his men to arms, and Gavroche lets the cart fly, knocks him down, and escapes while the Guardsmen shoot at each other for fifteen minutes. “Several panes of glass paid the price.”

Gavroche heads back to the barricade, singing a new and explicitly political set of verses to his love song--about tearing down the Bastilles which still stand, knocking over the old world like a set of skittles, wielding crutches against the Louvre, and storming the gates of Charles X, who finally lost his grip.

The wheelbarrow, meanwhile, is seized, and the Auvergnat, who has snored through the whole thing, is tried as an accessory to the “nighttime attack on the government printing works.”

A cart without a horse--a society without immiseration or compelled labor--might be the republic, or the insurrection, or the barricade itself: to the bourgeois imagination, a threat far beyond its actual stature, and requiring reprisals against the poor and the workers--regardless of who was actually making the noise.

[garbagecann24601]

Gavroche’s Excess of Zeal

Gavroche sings loudly and dramatically as he makes his way back towards the barricade. 

He spies a drunk man sleeping on a cart. He drags the man off the cart, writes a receipt, sticks it in the sleeping man’s pocket, and takes the cart to add to the barricade.

The guard hears him coming and stops him. The guard who stops him repeatedly calls him names like rascal and wretch. Gavroche tells him that he’s going to find a doctor for his wife who’s gone into labor. Then he pushes the cart at the guard and runs away in the confusion that ensues. Once he regains his bearings, he starts running towards the barricades.

The cart is seized and the drunk man is arrested.

[akallabeth-joie]

Brickclub Les Mis 4.15.4

Gavroche: 3, Maintainers of Order: 0.

I feel bad for the drunken carter, having his property stolen and then getting arrested for something that he has no knowledge of. Except for those ethical qualms, I sort of love Gavroche’s antics. There’s the style of writing a f*ing receipt for the cart, the mouthing off to the guard, the improvised weaponry to escape again. And Hugo’s mocking the guards and the bourgeois neighbors all the while: last chapter’s “It’s ‘93!” panic over a song and some broken glass; this chapter having a whole unit turn out against one (1) unarmed child, and in the process do even more property damage than he had.

[Mind, that child is Gavroche, so he’s clearly more than equal to the challenge.]

Gavroche uses ‘vous’ to the officer, who addresses him with ‘tu’.  Yes, even when Gavroche’s calling him bald and snarking up a storm.

[akallabeth-joie]

Brickclub 4.15.4

Gavroche is a delight. As usual, I can't pick a single favorite part, but the receipt for the stolen cart is a contender. And all the snark towards the officer. And the way Gav just starts singing again. And Hugo's wry treatment of the bourgeois over-reacting to what is ultimately a singing kid and two broken lamps. 

This was sort of exactly what I needed as a break from the Barricade Day angst, and also not because Gavroche's days/chapters are numbered. 

[Gav's note to the carter uses the informal; the officer gets 'vous' from Gav and give him 'tu' in return.]

[pilferingapples]

Brick!club 01/20/14 Les Miserables 4.15.4 The Excesses of Gavroche's Zeal

Sweet Hopping John, it's the last happy chapter. I mean....no, I mean that. This is the last time before positively EVERYONE falls under the shadow of death, and then there's horrible misunderstanding, and, welp. There's moral redemption and lots of drama and everything, the rest of the book is Great, but this is the last time someone's Happy. And OF COURSE it's Gavroche, whose happiness is a kind of attack, who laughs when he's not carefree because he is FREE. I can't think of any way to go into how great he's being here without basically quoting every line, and that would be redundant. But I do want to focus on the grim grinning sarcasm of this whole chapter, because wow, when Funny Lines From The Brick are getting passed around this chapter NEVER gets mentioned, and it is HILARIOUS, and not because of Gavroche's  dialogue-- which is great, with his whole "baby gonna cry?" attitude to the officer-- but because of the focus on this ludicrously incompetent keeper of public order. I mean these guys are Pirates of Penzance level law enforcement, falling on their actual butts and firing at nothing and generally having a panic over OH NO A SMALL BOY WITH AN ENTIRE CART. 

So OUCH. I take my earlier assessment BACK. This is a CHEERFUL chapter, it's a Laughing chapter, but it is NOT a Happy Chapter. This is GRIM-- and much more so because EXACTLY this sort of thing still goes on every day now. But then I'd guess that's WHY this chapter is important, why it has to go here, why we can't just go "and the Gavroche made it back to barricade on time, ta-da!"-- because this is a reminder of WHY he's going back, and of why the barricades are up in the first place. Because a song (in the right place) is more of a threat than a riot, because  soldiers will fire into homes against a threat they made up, because a child alone at night is not just a criminal in the eyes of the law but a target. Because the government has abandoned the actual people for the sake of Society.

...Okay, I'm ready to go back to the barricade now.

[amour-de-tous]

Brick!club 4.15.4 ~ The Excess of Gavroche's Zeal

There are things--many things--that strike me about this chapter. Not the least of which is the title. Because it's true, isn't it? Gavroche truly does have an excess of zeal. Perhaps if he had been just a touch more moderated...well, nevermind. 'Meanwhile, an adventure had just befallen Gavroche'. This is precisely how our favourite gamin would describe a run in with the National Guard. An adventure. First he is breaking lamps, then he is singing incendiary couplets, and then he comes face to face with a Guard and does what? Sasses him. I would love, so dearly, to know what Gacroche's pantomime to his verses was. It can only have been something unfit for mixed company, I am sure.  Both musingsbydrea and fizzygingr mentioned the fact that the street porter was an Auvergnat, but they didn't know if it held any significance. Auvergnat is an Occitan language, and an Auvergnat is someone from the Auvergne region of France. The only other thought I have is that, somehow, his next line of '"This," thought Gavroche, is what summer nights are good for. The Auvergnat is asleep in his cart. We take the cart for the Republic and we leave the Auvergnat to the monarchy", it must be...a pun? A play on some social thing I am missing? Was Auvergne particularly known for it's staunch monarchist beliefs or something?? Was it to illustrate the fact that neither Paris nor the rest of France was stirring, sleeping off the intoxication of Lamarque's funeral? I just don't know, but I need to examine this further. Ah. Gavroche carries with him a scrap of paper and a red pencil. I guess he could have had a note on his person, as well (see my prior Brick!club post about Marius writing the note for his Grandpapa). He wouldn't, of course, regardless. He thought himself invincible. 'Gavroche's astonishments were short and quickly thawed'. This kid is surprised by nothing; and even when he is, he recovers in the blink of an eye. Gavroche how are you REAL? (oh, wait...Right) THE SASS IS STRONG IN THIS ONE. I mean, LOOK at these, he is just ON FIRE. I feel like there is more going on here than the English translation allows for. Someone should look at it and tell me if I'm wrong. Some are obvious--"I haven't called you bourgeois yet", "sell all your teeth at a hundred francs apiece. That would give you give hundred francs"--but the one between that just...I feel like there is more going on there. "Yesterday you may have been a man of wit, but you were discharged this morning." Yes, he's saying the man is witless, but it feels more unpolished than Gavroche usually is. "Going after the doctor for my wife, who is put to bed" GAVROCHE, STOP. YOUR SASS IS KILLING ME. On your way to give birth to the Republic, yes, but THIS MAN HAS A GUN POINTED AT YOUR PRECOCIOUS HEAD. Gavroche never really did respect guns the way he ought. Especially when they were pointed at him. Barely escaping, he is concerned purely with getting back to the barricade in time. Because he has an EXCESS OF ZEAL, you rascal GET TO SOMEWHERE SAFE. AUGH. The closing paragraphs are an excellent depiction of the ridiculousness and utter abuse of the current justice system. The porter is made an example of, and Gavroche's encounter is made out to be an attack on the Post of the Imprimerie Royale. Are you kidding me? It was one kid with a cart and a song, guys. Overreaction. Of course, the monarchy was real good at playing up how *well* it took care of it's citizens.