Brick Club 5.8.1, 5.8.2
I truly don’t understand how Valjean still looks Cosette in the face. She is giving him every opportunity, every sign and all without being allowed to know what is going on. I genuinely can’t imagine what she might be feeling and how confused she must be. It’s really obvious how hurt she is! I could tolerate this all a lot more if there was any real indication that the supposed danger Valjean poses wasn’t entirely hypothetical. I just watched a video about ‘perpetual war’ and it seems like Valjean is stuck in his own internal perpetual war. The cost he pays is always steeper than the unclear but definitely forthcoming benefit and no matter how circumstances change, he always perceives a threat that is just close enough to worry about, whether it arrives or not.
And, just as in perpetual war, he isn’t the only one to suffer the effects. “You do not stir. I see it. You act guilty. But it is all the same, I forgive you,” she says and then asks, “What have I done to you. I declare am confounded. You owe me amends.” He at least owes her an explanation, which doesn’t pose any material threat to her at all! And we already know she accepted the fact that he wasn’t her real father, she deserves the truth. “I have no need of a father! To things like that which have no common sense, one really doesn’t know what to say!” She (rightfully) gets angry, “Since yesterday, you all make me rage. Everybody spites me. I don’t understand. You don’t defend me against Marius. Marius doesn’t uphold me against you, I am all alone.” I like this in Hapgood slightly more actually as she says this “with supreme grace” while in Wilbour she speaks “with a bewitching sauciness.” I think the former gives her distress the validity and weight it deserves.
This is really an awful thing to do to a girl who already has issues with abandonment, to have a mother and a father leave her, for her own good perhaps, but it leads her to this: “So you don’t like it that I am happy?” To her, everyone is abruptly pulling away from her, keeping secrets, quickly ending conversations when she walks in the room and she can’t understand why. Cosette is a very empathetic person, she wants the people around her to actually be happy, not just to make her happy. She is not being treated well, I’m salty.
Another translation note, Wilbour skips both exchanges where Valjean calls Cosette tu and then catches himself, only including him calling her ‘madame’ rather than Cosette. In Hapgood the word lubies is translated as ‘freaks,’ which I very much dislike, which Wilbour much more palatably translates to ‘whims.’
“Many men have thus a secret monster, a disease which they feed, a dragon which gnaws them, a despair which inhabits their night. Such a man resembles other people, goes, comes. Nobody knows that he has within him a fearful parasitic pain, with a thousand teeth, which lives in the miserable man, who is dying of it.” A rather aggressive analogy for depression run rampant. Valjean has always been this way, even from the little we hear of his life in Faverolles. Many things about this characterization also ring true for Marius, despite the two coming from vastly different backgrounds and circumstances. I think the difference is these feelings surface in Marius much more often. Valjean is every bit “still waters run deep,” he hides away while Marius gets propelled to reaction.
I’m really fuming that Hugo is portraying Valjean’s, let’s be honest, abandonment of Cosette as a seamless transition that Cosette becomes almost complicit in. Obviously, their relationship has changed, Cosette isn’t a child, she has her own life separate from Valjean and there are new people in it, but there’s no reason that would lead to her losing affection for Valjean, her father. The gradual divergence of their lives together is completely reasonable and even healthy if Valjean didn’t have ulterior motive to push her away, but every new step back is presented as being a result of Cosette’s growing detachment. Plus, such a divergence is eventually intended to stop at a point Valjean has already pushed past. When I moved out of my parents’ house, obviously I stopped seeing them as much, but I didn’t also start calling them by their first names and they didn’t insist I should try and forget them.
