Brick Club 4.5.1, 4.5.2
“Was the fire dying out entirely? or was it merely becoming a bed of embers?” The bonfire of young love has died down, but there’s still the question of whether Marius was an infatuation that has entirely left Cosette’s system, or if she, entirely independent of outside influence, managed to mediate her desires into something more sustainable. Hugo doesn’t offer an answer and it’s pretty much impossible to judge while Cosette and Marius still haven’t met. While Cosette takes notice of the lancer passing by her garden daily, she doesn’t seem to have much more interest beyond observing how regularly he visits. I’m more inclined to chalk this up to being the daughter of noted paranoiac Jean Valjean rather than another infatuation, despite Hugo’s half-hearted attempts to convince me otherwise.
“Marius was of that temperament which sinks into grief, and remains there; Cosette was of that which plunges in, and comes out again.” Cosette lives in the moment, she’s remarkably aware of her own reality, something she never gets credit for outside of the book. Her ability to process and look out for her own sense of self is too often confused with self-absorption and ignorance when it’s probably the thing that has kept her alive. Unlike Marius, she hasn’t always been afforded the space to allow herself to be swallowed by grief.
Cosette may bond fast, true, “the heart of an isolated young girl resembles the tendrils of a vine,” but she’s also shown herself to be rather critical and calculated about the nature of attention she receives or gives out. I have no doubt that Cosette has a highly developed warning system to alert her of any “misalliances,” given her past. Hugo skirts awfully close to making a “girls only date assholes” complaint, using the justification that Cosette is at heart an orphan still desperate for any scrap of human connection, but if there’s anyone I would trust to know what was best for herself, it’s Cosette Fauchelevent. Besides, Cosette has literally never spoken to either Marius or this ~mysterious lancer~ so any assumption about her reaction to nice guys or bad boys is still entirely speculation. She hasn’t been given anything resembling a choice yet! All she’s doing is living the life she’s been given.
So this is what is “perhaps the finest piece in all music.” It’s pretty good, a little adagio for the style maybe and I can’t speak to the libretto. More amusingly, this is a really weird piece for Cosette to default to. It’s entirely sung by a tenor/bass chorus and is accompanied by trumpets, not piano. This has no bearing on the rest of the chapter, but it’s so self-indulgent on the part of Hugo I had to mention it.
Cosette hears footsteps in the garden and sees the shadow of a man lurking about the gated plot and her reaction is exactly that I would expect from Jean Valjean’s daughter, “What! two days in succession? One hallucination may pass, but two hallucinations? What made her most anxious was that the shadow was certainly not a phantom. Phantoms never wear round hats.” This is stupendous logic. Cosette isn’t afraid of phantoms, she’s afraid of what definitely isn’t a phantom. Just as with Theodule the lancer passing by, she makes specific note of the pattern of visits.
Also phantoms don’t wear round hats. Those fashion backwards specters are still sporting bicornes. Cosette invented the Elle Woods defense.
I like that Jean Valjean validates Cosette’s concerns. I know he’s paranoid and would act on any odd occurrence regardless of Cosette’s input, but it’s also the fact that he takes her fear seriously enough to offer her a viable explanation instead of simply dismissing her fears. He wants her to feel safe, but he also wants her to know that the things she sees are real. Good move, because now she’ll keep coming to him with her serious worries and not keep them secret from him.
