A beautiful Cosette...I seriously doubt that bobs were in fashion around this time but she’s working it.
Ok, for the sake of the tone of these posts, I’m going to carefully lay aside my romantic misgivings and go ahead and jump into the freezing water. I’m on board now, I promise.
“The education which she had received had always spoken to her of the soul and never of love.” All agape and no eros (to wildly simplify). The nuns, and Valjean for that matter, are experts in a sort of all encompassing, saintly love that is more conceptual than actual and haven’t prepared Cosette for anything else. Valjean, at least, has graduated to being comfortable with familial love but there’s something in him that is wary of this new kind of love, to the point that seeing it in Cosette is frightening, “he would have shuddered before that luminous and unknown joy which flashed from her eyes.” It’s something he doesn’t understand. I’ll allow that Cosette pinpoints Marius’s substance with impressive accuracy, if a slightly romanticized bias. She’s a good judge of character. “It had been written with the foot in the grave and the finger in Heaven.” Yes, that’s an accurate depiction of Marius’s whole…life orientation currently.
It’s actually really, really charming to see that, just as Marius thinks of ‘Her’, Cosette has been carrying a torch for this nonpareil ‘He’, not extinguished in the slightest by the distraction of handsome military men (who, if we are to trust Theodule’s word, wasn’t interested anyway). Cosette really is the absolute best and I love her. “She could really conjecture nothing,” she tells herself, a pretty wild juxtaposition to Marius building entire fantasy lives in his head after glimpsing her once, yet “she would refuse herself nothing.” I want her to have everything and she deserves it.
The sacred and profane are one and the same again in this rekindling of young love, “this celestial chance, this intervention of angels, was that bullet of bread thrown by one robber to another robber.” Nothing is small and all works for all.
How fascinating to see Marius through these eyes. He’s like the love child of a brooding hero of some Gothic romance and an Edgar Alan Poe character. “He had, under a veil of incomparable sweetness, something of death and of night.” Not really my type, but I’d be a fool to underestimate the unexplainable magnetism Marius seems to exude. I also hold Cosette’s taste in very high esteem and I trust her judgement.
I would give…anything to see a scene of Marius listening to Cosette belt the tenor line of the Hunter’s Chorus from Euryanthe. Actually, I would give anything just to hear that myself. Their dynamic is just…still so good, I’m such a sucker. Marius: So…do you love me? Cosette: Shut up, of course I do.
I’m glad they talk! I genuinely think these two crazy kids are ridiculously compatible once they get into the nature of their beings. Beyond the parallel in their childhoods, I think they would really balance and support each other in a really unique way. Marius needs a positive, grounding influence and Cosette would absolutely benefit from a passionate, deeply emotional force in her life. Marius would help her start to engage with a deeper and darker side of herself that Valjean refuses to broach with her.
