Brick Club 5.3.3, 5.3.4
To Spin a Thief. How admirable of the attentive and hard-working police of Paris can still find it in themselves to chase down petty thieves even while the military guns down civilians in the streets. Ah, civil war. I’d say I was surprised Javert is back on the case, like, an hour after getting off the barricade except I’m super not. It is kind of amusing that he gave up the call to extraordinary duty so readily and went right back to ordinary duty. And because this is Hugo’s Land of Grand Coincidence, he’s on the scent of Thenardier again. “The reader would perhaps recognise these two men, if he saw them nearer.” Perhaps I would.
“Total eclipse of the man in the blouse.” Victor Hugo was a known fan of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and we can see him paying tribute to yet another poetic luminary with this allusion. Do you think there’s anything to the fact that Thenardier escapes Javert in the same way Valjean escapes the National Guard? This must be an intensely frustrating couple of days for Javert. “The man folded his arms and looked at the grating reproachfully. This look not sufficing, he tried to push it; he shook it, it resisted firmly.” Man vs. nature at its most intense and griping. Javert cannot catch a fucking break, he loses the barricade, Valjean, Thenardier, and now against sewer grating. We are approaching the man vs. self singularity.
We come back to this, “and this place, like the sea, is one full of water where you cannot drink.” I made this reference before oh so long ago but “Water, water everywhere…” The albatross is…Marius? He Too Bears His (Albat)cross. I don’t think I can make this metaphor map. Valjean certainly hates him like one.
Speaking of maps, we spend a dense chunk of paragraphs tracking Valjean’s exact progress through the sewers and I’m pretty sure Hugo just did all this research and just couldn’t bear to leave a single bit out. Relatable—I literally spent hours researching eight pound cannons and artillery physics for the last book.
He mentions “the Abattoir” and I’m trying to figure out if that was a literal abattoir in Paris proper emptying into the sewers—because that’s a horrifying image—or if this is just a localism. Because it’s not bad enough traipsing through your average ordinary everyday sewer, we have to throw in an abattoir. Honestly, we might call the barricades themselves abattoirs—a quintessential shot of any Les Mis adaptation is rivers of blood running through cobblestones…and emptying into the sewers. (I did not find an actual abattoir in Paris, but there is a Café des Abattoirs which isn’t maybe the most appealing name, but I also ate at Les Deux Magots so).
