#lm 2.6.1

[les-mis-daily-doodles]

so secretive!!

[maybeitsapineapple]

LM 2.6.1

chinese wallpaper was expensive, and, according to the v & a, sold in sets of 25 or 40 sheets. assuming a set of 25 since it’s a small room, that’s 18 francs 15 sous. unfortunately i have no idea what that means today

the stairs and parlour, despite the convent being generally described as sombre, funereal, sepulchral, like a tomb etc, seem quite alive in their descriptions. like, the paint is "following you with a peaceful tenacity". the flowers on the wallpaper are calm and orderly, and apparently have the capacity to be startled. the fixtures of the iron bars resemble closed fists. it’s unsettling. it continues the contrast between the smiling threshold and the praying, crying house, but also. the nuns aren’t alive but the building is

"the most walled of all" and he proceeds to tell us about the school they run. "storytellers have never seen" good thing all the women you spoke to about convent schools don’t count; that might undercut your drama

[lmchaptertitlebracket]

Round 1, Matchup 105: II.vi.1 vs IV.xii.7

Which chapter title do you prefer?

Petite Rue Picpus, No. 62.

The Man Recruited in the Rue des Billettes

Voting ended onMay 6, 2025

[cliozaur]

This chapter introduces the convent digression, which, while not my favourite, still intrigues me.

This convent serves as a refuge for the people seeking a second chance (Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean, and Cosette). Later, Hugo will explicitly compare the convent to galleys. But the contrast is also obvious. Galleys are a place of punishment, hard work, and violence. Convent is a place of silence; living there is akin to death for its inhabitants. Yet, in both the convent and the galleys, people rot away while still alive.

I remember how convent digression struck me with the way Hugo filled it with palpable materiality, which is something very opposite to what we expect from the description of a tomb or a highly spiritual place. Why is it important to know that the colour of the walls in the corridors is yellow and chocolate-hued, or the measurements of the chamber, or that the wallpapers have yellow flowers and cost 15 sous per roll? What are you trying to convey, Hugo?

However, the heart-wrenching scene of someone visiting a once-beloved who has become a nun conveys a clear message. The convent is portrayed as a gloomy, unnatural place, often likened to a tomb:

What you beheld was night, emptiness, shadows, a wintry mist mingled with a vapor from the tomb, a sort of terrible peace, a silence from which you could gather nothing, not even sighs, a gloom in which you could distinguish nothing, not even phantoms.

PS This is the book in the middle of which I joined les mis letters last year. So, quite soon I will stop writing daily reflections and switch to occasional ones when I have something new to add.

[the-wraxall-illustrations]

[dolphin1812]

This line is so intriguing:

“The threshold smiled; the house prayed and wept.”

I think it does a lot to convey the weirdness of this place, which is at once holy and haunted, a shelter and a prison. The “smiling” threshold is welcoming, and it aligns well with the religious spaces we’ve encountered throughout the novel. While religious authorities are often suspect (Valjean’s shock that the bishop could be kind and a figure in the church is telling), religious spaces have consistently been a refuge. As Madeleine, Valjean went to church regularly to pray and help others (by consoling the grieving, for instance). And of course, the threshold of the bishop’s house is the most memorable welcome in the novel. At the same time, 62 Petit-Picpus isn’t happy in the way the bishop’s house was, with its prayer seeming to include a focus on sorrow or suffering (from the “weeping”) rather than on shared joy. 

The descriptions of this place continue to be eerie, with Hugo including expressions like “if one dares” and emphasizing how empty and dark it is. Aside from the emotional barriers to passage, there are physical ones, like the grating and the shutters. On the one hand, the barriers inside challenge the welcoming image of the “threshold,” as if that welcome only extends so far. On the other, it makes this place even more menacing, since one can’t pass through it without constant monitoring and without a specific form of knowledge (like the passcode). The convent is obscure even to the narrator and to readers; it’s so isolated from the outside world that Hugo fears “transgressing” and trying to describe what “story-tellers have never seen.”

Even the light is uneven and ominous:

“The light which came from behind you was adjusted in such a manner that you saw her in the white, and she saw you in the black. This light was symbolical.”

Any outsider is shrouded in darkness and automatically condemned (”dark” = “bad” is a recurring image, especially when the light is connected to holiness). Hugo even tells us the light is symbolic (a funny aside, given how often his symbolism is very obvious, but also a clarification that this contrast between the “sinful” and “dark” outside world and the “holy, light” inside of the convent is intentional). 

[pilferingapples]

Retrobricking : 2.6.1, 2.6.2

Yesss Convent Digression tiiiime 

2.6.1

I know it's Hugo we're talking about here, but it's striking how much he leans into the tomb imagery right off--and the life-in-death-in-life thing.   This is really an *incredibly* ambiguous place of safety for Valjean and Cosette. Both of them are symbolically entering an afterlife or at least other-life here, invisible to the living.  That the only safe place for the two of them--including Cosette, who's completely innocent even to the law, but would be destroyed by its consequences anyway-- is , metaphorically, for them to die, is saying a lot about just how dangerous the outside world is for them. 

This time around I'm really noticing how *every* digression ties into the barricade. Waterloo is obvious-- the layouts, the battles, the Last Man Standing who triumphs by saying the right words in defiance of death and defeat-- but the convent is part of the barricade too. Specifically, it's the Tomb Flooded With Dawn--the forbidding, closed-off space full of willing martyrs, dying for the salvation of people who mostly don't even know they exist. This Light Is Symbolic, and the darkness you have to pass through to even glimpse it is symbolic, and in both places they're symbolic of the same thing-- an ideal state that can only be reached by the free surrender of life.

...though. The barricade is about making that light available to everyone, in a here-on-earth kind of way. And I do feel like that is very relevant to some points Hugo tries to make in the next section! but i'll deal with that when I get there :P 

(every digression leads right to the barricade, except the one that leads away--something impossible to know on a first read but so clear on rereads. The growing sense of resonance is so power and it's why the book is always compelling to me no matter how much I reread it. ) 

2.6.2

--It's definitely 1824!!!  Good to know!! (yes I know it Should Be 1824, but well. That's never any guarantee it WILL be in this here narrative.)

-I wonder how accurate or familiar Hugo's description of all these convents would have seemed at the time? Was there a reasonable expectation that a lot of people would read these names and associations and go "oh yeah, That"? 

- lmao of course Hugo's Super Weird Convent is  Spanish somehow  .  1862 and he's still the author of Les Orientales...

- It's interesting that Hugo very casually mentions the split-sleep thing! The nuns wake from their "first sleep" to pray, and Hugo of all people feels no need to explain what a "first sleep" is, or specify that the nuns will go back for a second one. I really wonder when that shifted in Western Europe...

- “between 1825 and 1830, three went mad” -- ok so that’s almost exactly during Cosette’s time in the convent. Cosette knew these nuns who went mad; Valjean would have known about it, though he never saw them. That’s...a lot, for them to have in their shared past!!

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 2.6.1 ‘Number 62 Rue Petit-Picpus’

I had other things to say about this chapter, but then Hugo ended with “something storytellers have never seen, and consequently never related” and.

Goddammit, Hugo, women attended convent schools and some of them grew up and told stories and you know this because they were your sources.

Anyway.

The nature of this place as a tomb is loud and clear in this chapter as well, but we get to it gradually. From this approach, the place looks like a middle class drawing room crossed with the bagne. Only when we get all the way in do we see the quiet death inside, different in tone from the kind of death the bagne was.

Hugo invokes second person here: you are going through this hall, you now notice this door, you now see someone you love. And he’s right to, I think; surely it’s true of everybody’s experience that sometimes your loved ones go off and join organizations/religions/marriages/whatever that you don’t know anything about, and your only glimpse into how their situation is treating them is how they seem when you see them again.

And from the demeanor of the nun, this is full red alert, klaxons blaring, this is a bad place, take steps to give her the option of getting the fuck out of there if you possibly can.

But that’s not really an option here, even if she wanted it.

I feel like there’s a fable here, too, about how organizations work--governments, businesses, what have you: that the fact that there are nice people having pleasant interactions in one quadrant of the place doesn’t mean anything about what the rest of it may be doing.

We’re going to try to overthrow a government later, and this section feels like an opportunity to get to know how they work in miniature.