#les mis letter

[bobafish]

its finally silver candlestick day! Time to watch this wolfy animatic

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Les Misérables 1.2.6 - Jean Valjean

A few things stood out to me that I hadn’t noticed on previous reads.

Firstly, the way the narration shifts when it describes the theft of the bread. Before and after that, the perspective is focused on Valjean. For that moment, though, it switches to:

One Sunday night, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on Place de l’Eglise, in Faverolles, was just going to bed when he heard a violent blow against the barred window of his shop. He got down in time to see an arm thrust through the aperture made by the blow of a fist on the glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and took it out. Isabeau rushed out; the thief used his legs valiantly; Isabeau pursued him and caught him. The thief had thrown away the bread, but his arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.

There’s an unusual level of detail - not that detail is unusual for Hugo, but we get the full name and address of the baker, which we don’t get for any of Valjean’s nieces or nephews. There’s also a kind of depersonalization of Valjean: first with the description as a disembodied body part, “the arm”, then as “the thief”. Only after that identity is established is his name given. It feels, in the detailed narration of events from the baker’s perspective, like the testimony given at a trial - the gist of the testimony, perhaps, that Isabeau did give to the tribunal. It conveys how everything about Valjean as a person, and his reasons, and his family, is dismissed, with these isolated facts being what the trial considers relevant and important.

Secondly, Napoleon come up again.

On the 22nd of April, 1796, there was announced in Paris the victory of Montenotte, achieved by the commanding-general of the army of Italy, whom the message of the Directory, to the Five Hundred, of the 2nd Floréal, year IV, called Buonaparte; that same day a great chain was riveted at the Bicêtre. Jean Valjean was part of this chain.

The combination of this with the mentions in the first section of this chapter makes me more convinced that Hugo’s focus is a contrast in what society values (as with the ‘good man’ and the ‘great man’ in Myriel’s comment). The question Hugo is evoking is: what makes a nation great? What speaks to its identity? What should it take pride in? What should it aspire to? The achievements of a ‘great man’ like Napoleon, or the way it treats the least and lowest in its society? Combeferre responding to Marius’ Bonapartist rant - What could be greater than this? - with “To be free” is the answer to this central thematic question.

Thirdly, Valjean only hears of his sister’s family once, when he learns that she is in Paris, in severe poverty, with only one child, the youngest, a boy of six who is left outside in the cold on winter mornings before his school opens. He learns this, the narrator says, “I think, at the end of his fourth year of confinement” (purposefully vague, since the author/narrator could know whatever precision he chose to). Right after this, we move to Valjean’s first escape attempt, “near the end of this fourth year”. This suggests strongly to me that Valjean’s first attempt to escape was due to this news, out of a desire to go to his sister and help her, which makes everything even more tragic.

[jelepermets]

More light and shadow stuff in 1.2.12 "The Bishop at Work" and 1.2.13 "Petit-Gervais". I am never letting go of this motif:

"'Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!'"

"The child turned his back to the sun, which made his hair like threads of gold and flushed the savage face of Jean Valjean with a lurid glow." [This one seems especially notable, since Petit Gervais is the incident that truly changes Valjean, truly brings him to the light so to speak]

"In a few minutes the boy was gone.

The sun had set.

The shadows were deepening around Jean Valjean." [Again, this push and pull for Valjean's soul/goodness. Him going after Petit Gervais - following the light - is crucial to his character.]

"The countryside was desolate and gloomy. There were vast open stretches on all sides, nothing around him but a shadow in which his gaze was lost and a silence in which his voice was lost."

"He was just out of that monstrous, somber place called prison and the bishop had hurt his soul, as too vivid a light would have hurt his eyes on coming out of the dark. [...] Like an owl seeing the sun suddenly rise, the convict had been dazzled and blinded by virtue."

"However that may be, this last offense had a decisive effect upon him; it rushed across the chaos of his intellect and dissipated it, set the light on one side and the dark clouds on the other, and acted on his soul, in the state it was in [...]"

"He saw himself then, so to speak, face to face, and at the same time through that hallucination he saw, at a mysterious distance, a sort of light, which he took at first to be a torch. Looking more closely at this light dawning on his conscience, he recognized it had a human form, that it was the bishop. [Again the motif of conscience as light that we saw when Valjean was going to steal the silver]

[...] He filled the whole soul of this miserable man with a magnificent radiance. [...] While he wept, the light grew brighter and brighter in his mind - an extraordinary light, a light at once entrancing and terrible [..] all returned and appeared to him, clearly, but in a light had never seen before. He could see his life, and it seemed horrible; his soul, and it seemed frightful. There was, however, a gentler light shining on that life and soul. It seemed to him that he was looking at Satan by the light of Paradise."

[hamletteprinceofdenmark]

[queen-of-spoilers-zvonchy]

Oh, you wanna be shut in as the pearl in the oyster? You want your life to be empty? Then disregard my dogma, you doubter! 😤😤🤬

[queen-of-spoilers-zvonchy]

Monseigneur Bienvenu was a philosopher! But he also admits that he took a shortcut and avoided living the life he wanted. I think he wished to be a man of musing, but ended up as a man of gospel.

However that may be, there are on earth men who—are they men?—perceive distinctly at the verge of the horizons of reverie the heights of the absolute, and who have the terrible vision of the infinite mountain. Monseigneur Bienvenu was one of these men; Monseigneur Bienvenu was not a genius. He would have feared those sublimities whence some very great men even, like Swedenborg and Pascal, have slipped into insanity. Certainly, these powerful reveries have their moral utility, and by these arduous paths one approaches to ideal perfection. As for him, he took the path which shortens,—the Gospel’s.

[queen-of-spoilers-zvonchy]

Bishop's sister, scared: OMG! Spider! 😨🤯😵‍💫😨😳🕷️🕸️

Bishop Myriel: OMG! Spider! 🤩🤩🥰😍🥰🥳🤩🤗🤗

[queen-of-spoilers-zvonchy]

Les Mis said don't confuse the mud with the stars, the appearance with the reality!

Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men. For the masses, success has almost the same profile as supremacy. Success, that Menæchmus of talent, has one dupe,—history. Juvenal and Tacitus alone grumble at it. In our day, a philosophy which is almost official has entered into its service, wears the livery of success, and performs the service of its antechamber. Succeed: theory. Prosperity argues capacity. Win in the lottery, and behold! you are a clever man. He who triumphs is venerated. Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth! everything lies in that. Be lucky, and you will have all the rest; be happy, and people will think you great. Outside of five or six immense exceptions, which compose the splendor of a century, contemporary admiration is nothing but short-sightedness. Gilding is gold. It does no harm to be the first arrival by pure chance, so long as you do arrive. The common herd is an old Narcissus who adores himself, and who applauds the vulgar herd. That enormous ability by virtue of which one is Moses, Æschylus, Dante, Michael Angelo, or Napoleon, the multitude awards on the spot, and by acclamation, to whomsoever attains his object, in whatsoever it may consist. Let a notary transfigure himself into a deputy: let a false Corneille compose Tiridate; let a eunuch come to possess a harem; let a military Prudhomme accidentally win the decisive battle of an epoch; let an apothecary invent cardboard shoe-soles for the army of the Sambre-and-Meuse, and construct for himself, out of this cardboard, sold as leather, four hundred thousand francs of income; let a pork-packer espouse usury, and cause it to bring forth seven or eight millions, of which he is the father and of which it is the mother; let a preacher become a bishop by force of his nasal drawl; let the steward of a fine family be so rich on retiring from service that he is made minister of finances,—and men call that Genius, just as they call the face of Mousqueton Beauty, and the mien of Claude Majesty. With the constellations of space they confound the stars of the abyss which are made in the soft mire of the puddle by the feet of ducks.