#corinthe

[lesmisscraper]

So, what they're throwing at National Guards in here are the bottles of aquafortis, right?

[thepigeonsart]

Corinthe wine shop lesbians coworkers

[philoursmars]

L'Année du Cheval s'annonce et avec elle, une très longue série équine de photos (sur plusieurs jours) !

Ici des chevaux archéologiques grecs (bon, certains sont des Pégases )

Louvre-Lens - expo "Homère" - cratère avec "prothésis" '= (exposition du mort) - Athènes, 750 av. J-C.

idem - Trépied à cuve - Olympie, 750 av. J-C.

Louvre-Lens - expo "Animaux fantastiques" - cratère mycénien avec guerriers et chars - Ugarit, Syrie, 1200 av. J-C.

Louvre-Lens - expo "'Les Tables du Pouvoir" - cratère à colonnettes - Corinthe, 580 av. J-C.

Marseille, Vieille Charité, Musée d'Archéologie Méditerranéenne - expo "Pentathlons" - kylix "de Siana" - Attique, 530 av. J-C.

[cliozaur]

We are back to Marius. He is “mad with grief,” suicidal, and determined to seek death at the barricade. His journey seems quite long, and that is why I was looking for a map of Les Mis locations in Paris (and found it!) Indeed, it is a substantial walk from Rue Plumet to the fictional Corinthe near Les Halles. Thanks to Marius’ journey, we get to experience what is going on in Paris. Although Hugo mentioned that this time Paris was responding differently—with people getting anxious and doors being locked etc.—his description here seems to contradict that.

As Marius walks closer to Les Halles, Rue de Rivoli appears to be bustling with life: women shopping, people enjoying desserts, and gas lamps illuminating the arcades. It's as if this part of Paris is oblivious to the turmoil. Further along the way, shops are closed, but everything else appears normal, with lit streets and people going about their business. Continuing on, Marius encounters a group of working-class men, easily identifiable by their attire. Here, the windows are dark, and the street lanterns resemble “large red stars.”

Finally, Marius enters the realm of darkness, silence, and emptiness. It’s so ominous and eerie. At some point, it’s so dark that Marius has to find his way by touch. Unexpectedly, fucking white horses appear in front of him, the same horses that Bossuet had freed in the morning. Poor beasts have returned close to the barricade.

Throughout this chapter, there are so many descriptions of different types of light, and the whole journey feels remarkably cinematic. Towards the end, it even takes on a resemblance to Buñuel’s films!

Marius' journey:

[darthfar]

Earlier (much earlier!) this year, @oilan and I decided to do another Les Miserables lineswap collaboration, where we’d colour in one another’s lineart. .... I am so, so very sorry this took half a year to complete... >.< -- But anyway, this one’s lines by Oilan and colours by me: Joly, Bossuet and Grantaire sharing a meal together. Presumably at the Corinthe, and presumably on 5th June 1832. (And even if Oilan hadn’t meant it to be, well, it is now.... LOL). So... Preliminary Gayeties. Y’know, before everything goes the way of violence and death and a flood of tears. ;) [Oilan, it’s always doing collabs with you, and I hope to do more at some point in the future - assuming you haven’t been scared off by my deplorable ability to procrastinate...]

[vapaus-ystavyys-tasaarvo]

Wineshop Corinthe (in Minecraft)

With my obsessions combined: a (mostly) historically accurate and (mostly) accurate scale Rue de la Chanvrerie, Rue Mondétour and the wineshop Corinthe, in Minecraft.

Some progress pictures under the cut:

As you might know, I’ve been doing quite a lot of research into canon era Paris and I used pretty much all of it on this lol.

Obviously some stuff is made up because there’s just never going to be enough visual reference to make a fully accurate recreation of a whole neighbourhood 200 years ago, also Minecraft has some serious limitations. But it’s been fun anyway and it should be fairly accurate? I think. Of course Corinthe itself is fictional.

Oh I should point out that yeah the post inside Corinthe should probably be painted blue (I mean the text is really ambiguous if there even is a real post or if it’s a post in a sign but I went with a real post) but Minecraft only has a limited variety of building blocks and sometimes there’s just nothing that’s both the right shape and the right colour, so I went with the original pink instead.

[theblackparadeisalive]

The Corinthe

'The Parisians who nowadays on entering on the Rue Rambuteau at the end near the Halles, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondetour, a basket-maker's shop (...) [They] have no suspicion of the terrible scenes which this very spot witnessed hardly thirty years ago.

A room on the ground floor, where the bar was situated, one on the first floor containing a billiard-table, a wooden spiral staircase piercing the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, candles in broad daylight, this was the style of this cabaret.'

- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, Volume IV - Book Twelfth Corinthe, Chapter I. History of Corinthe from its Foundation

[pilferingapples]

Cats on the Barricade!

This one’s for @lawisnotmocked ! A Further Elaboration of Hugo’s linking of cats and revolutionaries!

For this I did a word search on the Hapgood for any mention of “cat” or “cats”, “kitten”, “kittens”, “tom” and “feline”.  There may have been a couple cat mentions I missed with that method, but I caught quite a few! And they make for a pretty consistent metaphor, too!  Between me and Hugo, this is a long  post, so under the cut for length!

The first Cats of the Republic get a mention pretty early, during 1817, in Bombarda’s (1.3.5).  And it gets a lot  of Mention! (all bolding mine):

"It was a time of undisputed peace and profound royalist security; it was the epoch when a special and private report of Chief of Police Anglès to the King, on the subject of the suburbs of Paris, terminated with these lines:—

“Taking all things into consideration, Sire, there is nothing to be feared from these people. They are as heedless and as indolent as cats. The populace is restless in the provinces; it is not in Paris. (Non-Cat comments snipped) ...In short, it is an amiable rabble.”

Prefects of the police do not deem it possible that a cat can transform itself into a lion; that does happen, however, and in that lies the miracle wrought by the populace of Paris. Moreover, the cat so despised by Count Anglès possessed the esteem of the republics of old. In their eyes it was liberty incarnate; and as though to serve as pendant to the Minerva Aptera of the Piræus, there stood on the public square in Corinth the colossal bronze figure of a cat. The ingenuous police of the Restoration beheld the populace of Paris in too “rose-colored” a light; it is not so much of “an amiable rabble” as it is thought. The Parisian is to the Frenchman what the Athenian was to the Greek: no one sleeps more soundly than he, no one is more frankly frivolous and lazy than he, no one can better assume the air of forgetfulness; let him not be trusted nevertheless; he is ready for any sort of cool deed; but when there is glory at the end of it, he is worthy of admiration in every sort of fury... He is Napoleon’s stay and Danton’s resource. Is it a question of country, he enlists; is it a question of liberty, he tears up the pavements. Beware! his hair filled with wrath, is epic; his blouse drapes itself like the folds of a chlamys...It is thanks to the suburban man of Paris, that the Revolution, mixed with arms, conquers Europe. He sings; it is his delight. Proportion his song to his nature, and you will see! As long as he has for refrain nothing but la Carmagnole, he only overthrows Louis XVI.; make him sing the Marseillaise, and he will free the world.

I’ve included most of this long passage here because it ties into some pretty obvious other imagery later!

I’m not gonna try to myth- or history- check Hugo here because it’s not the point of this post; the point is, look at all this imagery and cat-association he’s giving us!  Cats the animal of Minerva, “the very image of liberty”!  The power of a Parisian’s song to  drive a revolution!  Epic rage hair!  The Parisian, says Hugo, is like the cat, it is “heedless”,“indolent” , “frivolous”,”lazy” -but it can transform into a lion, and even as a cat ,is a symbol of Liberty in a Republic. 

Then we move on , and our next Revolutionary Cat Mention of course shows up in 3.4.1, when one lands right in the center  of our actual revolutionaries:

Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may be called the beauté du diable of the mind. Later on, this disappears like the playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends, with the bourgeois, on two legs, and with the tomcat, on four paws.

Courfeyrac is a kitten! And he’ll grow up to be a  good Parisian Cat, no doubt, ready to turn into a lion at a moment’s notice. 

Oh, here’s a moment for a Fans of LM Animal Symbolism!  From 4.11.2, Gavroche On The March:

The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny busied themselves only with their own concerns. Three of them were portresses, and the fourth was a rag-picker with her basket on her back.

All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age, which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness...Things of this nature were said:—

“Ah, by the way, is your cat still cross?”

“Good gracious, cats are naturally the enemies of dogs, you know. It’s the dogs who complain.”

“And people also.”

“But the fleas from a cat don’t go after people.”

“That’s not the trouble, dogs are dangerous. I remember one year when there were so many dogs that it was necessary to put it in the newspapers. That was at the time when there were at the Tuileries great sheep that drew the little carriage of the King of Rome. 

The opinion on the street, from the poor women who really know things at this level:  dogs are dangerous, and cats are the enemies of dogs.  What a statement, given the most prominent dog in the book! 

And of course, in chapter 5.1.2,  the final solid Revolutionary Cat of the Republic, sighted at the Corinth, the very image , not of Liberty now, but of the evidence of God’s care in Creation!:

Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter (a cat in Corinth!), extracted philosophy from it.

“What is the cat?” he exclaimed. “It is a corrective. The good God, having made the mouse, said: ‘Hullo! I have committed a blunder.’ And so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected.”

These are our most obvious links, and they are very clear; the people of Paris--indecisive, fickle, and hedonistic-- are cats. But they are cats who are also lions, and lions and the revolution and the barricade in particular get linked a lot. Just a few mentions:   “(The army) gazed into the dark barricade as one would gaze into a lion’s den.” (4.14.4);  “The barricade once scaled had a mane of lightning flashes. The assault was so furious, that for one moment, it was inundated with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the lion shakes off the dogs” (5.1.21)

And, of course;

“All at once (Enjolras) threw back his head, his blond locks fell back like those of an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of an halo” 5.1.5

EPIC PARISIAN RAGE HAIR, in its true form as a lion’s mane!:P

I joke, but there really is a nice clear line of Paris As Cat/POTENTIAL REVOLUTIONARY WERELION running through the novel!  It’s about as consistent as Javert’s dog metaphors (and wow someone could probably right a paper on Javert/the cops as dogs and Paris As Cat in Les Mis). 

These are of course not the only mention of these animals in the novel-- Valjean gets compared to a lion a lot (...which , now that I think of it: of course  Hugo would make his symbolic Jesus Man an Honorary Parisian By Metaphorical Association:P) and getting into the lion/ cat dichotomy would make this post way longer than it already is.  And there’s another character who gets a lot of cat  imagery that I want to get into in another post. But the Cat Of Revolution is really consistent on its own, and deserves head scritches! er, and citation.