#lm 2.8.3

[les-mis-daily-doodles]

kids these days are so ignorant!! no one has had this experience before!

[cliozaur]

Fauchelevent and Mother Innocente.

The second illustration is by Petr Pinkisevich.

[secretmellowblog]

All the nun’s names during the Les Mis convent escape chapters are actually puns about their roles in the Grand Coffin Switcheroo heist! Nun Puns:

Mother Crucifixion— the one who dies like a grand martyr

Mother Ascension— the one who helps Fauchelevent lift up the altar stone

Mother Innocence— the guiltiest one who arranges the heist and lies to the cops

[lmchaptertitlebracket]

Round 1, Matchup 103: II.v.9 vs II.vii.3

Which chapter title do you prefer?

The Man with the Bell

Mother Innocent

Voting ended onMay 6, 2025

[empressofkashyr]

The Reverend Mother's speech to Fauchelevent is in today's chapter is definitive proof that Autism has always existed

[pureanonofficial]

LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - Mother Innocente, LM 2.8.3 (Les Miserables 1967)

“What else remains?”

“The empty coffin remains.”

This produced a pause. Fauchelevent meditated. The prioress meditated.

“What is to be done with that coffin, Father Fauvent?”

“It will be given to the earth.”

“Empty?”

Another silence. Fauchelevent made, with his left hand, that sort of a gesture which dismisses a troublesome subject.

“Reverend Mother, I am the one who is to nail up the coffin in the basement of the church, and no one can enter there but myself, and I will cover the coffin with the pall.”

“Yes, but the bearers, when they place it in the hearse and lower it into the grave, will be sure to feel that there is nothing in it.”

“Ah! the de—!” exclaimed Fauchelevent.

The prioress began to make the sign of the cross, and looked fixedly at the gardener. The vil stuck fast in his throat.

He made haste to improvise an expedient to make her forget the oath.

“I will put earth in the coffin, reverend Mother. That will produce the effect of a corpse.”

“You are right. Earth, that is the same thing as man. So you will manage the empty coffin?”

“I will make that my special business.”

[dolphin1812]

Fauchelevent continues to be so entertaining.

I love how he’s so adamant on slipping his “brother” into everything here. Mother Innocente is clearly absorbed in her own issues, but he’s doing all he can to promote him. Admittedly, the tropes he relies on to do this (patriarchal attitudes about women and racism) are repulsive, but it’s funny how Mother Innocente is easing him into doing something illegal for the convent while the entire time, Fauchelevent is saying: “you know who could do this better? My brother, who’s stronger than everyone here!” (He’s not exaggerating, but it’s hilarious). And he succeeds! Valjean and Cosette are now allowed to enter! He put his social deftness to great use here, even if he almost slipped up with the “more often.”

The political currents at play are fascinating as well. As a nun, it’s not surprising that Mother Innocente is likely a royalist (hence “Buonaparte” rather than “Bonaparte”). Yet Fauchelevent, as a peasant (albeit one with some education, since he was also a notary) not only has opinions on this matter (being a bit of a Bonapartist), but has enough familiarity with this discourse to alter his word choice to appeal to the nun. “Emperor” may be his first choice, but he knows to use “Buonaparte” here, suggesting that political allegiances were not only common across class boundaries, but that different political discourses were equally well-known. There may be limits to this (perhaps someone who was illiterate would not have so much knowledge of political language, for instance), but it still underscores the deep impacts France’s political turmoil had on multiple groups. 

We also see how changes in the bureaucracy have affected the convent with the turmoil over this burial. One of the convent’s privileges was to bury its nuns underneath it so that their bodies would bless it. Now, such a practice is illegal, with officials in sanitation and other public affairs scrutinizing how the convent buries its dead. Mother Innocente appeals to a higher spiritual authority (the state on earth cannot compete with God) and cites historical examples of such a conflict, stressing tradition and the centrality of the Divine. However, these figures didn’t face the exact same dilemma not because there were never conflicts over the role of the state and of God, but because these agencies were relatively new. Fauchelevent isn’t disagreeing with her, really (beyond saying that Valjean could do it better than he could), but the way her perspective reflects on politics is intriguing:

“By order of the king signifies to-day, by order of the revolution. One no longer knows what is due to the living or to the dead. A holy death is prohibited. Burial is a civil matter. This is horrible.”

She’s justified in pointing out that France’s social order has changed dramatically, leading to uncertainty over how people should be treated (that uncertainty can be productive - Hugo’s in favor of social change - but it is complicated nonetheless). No one knowing what “is due to the living” is, in a way, one of the central issues of this novel, with questions over how people should treat each other (the themes of compassion and love) appearing alongside the obligations people have to others as a society (how to help the misérables). The “dead” she mentions here is a nun, but Fantine’s burial demonstrated the same issue in a different way: no one knew what was “due” to her because she was poor, and without a powerful figure directly dictating how she should be buried, the process was no longer seen as important. 

Her issue, though, is specifically the shift of death from the domain of religion and the Church to the state (as a “civil matter”) as it tried to better organize lives and matters relating to health. Miasma was a popular medical theory back then, so it’s possible that they feared leaving bodies underneath the Church would expose people to bad odors and make them ill. As the Revolution and the growth of the state’s power brought the Church under scrutiny, this may have simply been one other domain where policy changed, with medical thought now taking precedence over the spiritual. 

It’s also interesting that this appears here given that cholera - a major public health crisis in the 19th century - will show up later on. We’re made to engage with this theme relatively early in the novel as a site of contention between different social orders (in this case, the Church and the state). It’ll be fascinating to see where it goes from here.

[halogenwarrior]

Getting to the first chapters of book 2.8 on my Les Mis Letters catchup (using a Fahnestock/MacAfee book so the quotes might. not be the same as the ones people are reading by email), and I find it interesting how Mother Innocent is on the one hand characterized as a conservative using her monologue to defend the old order, but there are hints of a more complicated picture than her just being an emblem of what Hugo doesn’t like and makes him think that convents should be abolished. Her frustration with religion no longer having a place in people’s lives compared to the secular sometimes extends to the exaltation of kings by royalists, not just the anti-religion sentiments of revolutionaries (”Others blaspheme as far as to compare the scaffold of Louis the Sixteenth with the cross of Jesus Christ. Louis the Sixteenth was only a king”). In addition, while Hugo criticizes the convent for being (like Javert) performative self-sacrifice in service of rules without concretely helping other people with that self-sacrifice, mother Innocent cites giving what one has to the poor, like Bishop Myriel, as the religious ideal, and her argument on why people now are being unfair to religion is that they tar the religious figures who actually help the poor with the same brush as those who are selfish and profane (”And then religion is attacked. Why? Because there have been bad priests, because Sagittaire, Bishop of Gap, was a brother of Salone, Bishop of Embrun, and both were followers of Mammon. What does that matter? Does that prevent Martin de Tours from being a saint and having given half his cloak to a poor man?”) And in her education, cleverness, and liveliness she distinguishes herself from how Hugo criticizes some convents for demanding so much of a rote, monotone life from nuns that they do not think and become something like mindlessly worshipping robots.

So what then, does Hugo see as being wrong with mother Innocent? I think the problem is, even if she in theory believes the Church should aspire to the right goals of helping the poor, she also assumes that the existence of people there who do the wrong things are just “bad apples” which the whole Church should not be condemned for rather than a systematic problem. We see the problem in this from the earlier Bishop Myriel chapters - he isn’t just one of many good bishops and a few bad ones that give the rest a bad reputation, but just about the only bishop who doesn’t use his position for personal gain, and even for him conservatism is so baked into the system that he reflexively assumes revolutionaries as the enemy and don’t have similar goals of helping the downtrodden until he’s forced to confront and question those views. Even if, like Bishop Myriel (but to a lesser extent; although she values helping the poor she is still the head of a convent that focuses more on self-punishment than concrete achievements, and cares more about the performative self-flagellation of the dead than the health of the living), she represents some of the more admirable parts of the Church system, and she is capable of criticizing “both sides”, the very fact she reflexively sees revolutionaries as the enemy shows that she isn’t a “good” part of the church fighting against “bad” outliers, but in some ways part of the problem herself. 

Reading book 2.7 “a parenthesis”, I thought it was odd how Hugo switched from emphasizing the Petit-Picpus convent as an outlier in terms of its strictness and isolation from the world, even featuring nuns like Sister Simplice who very much are helping people concretely - other convents are different and not nearly as horrible, but then makes a sudden turn to condemning all convents. His justifications largely seemed to be things that he had already established were far from universal (absurd levels of self-punishment, discouraging thought or taking action in the world), but perhaps what he was getting at is the idea that however noble some aspects of convents are, and despite how in earlier times they had been helpful to society when more conservative views are universal, in the 19th century they have become associated with a particular political conservatism that is impossible to extricate from them, such that it’s better to just destroy the whole system than try to make “convents but accepting of more revolutionary ideas”. Still, I find myself sympathizing a lot with convents in general even if this particular convent stands out for being over-the-top punishing - the corruption and classism of the church really isn’t the fault of nuns and monks who are taking vows of poverty and just vibing trying to get closer to God.

As another note on these chapters, I found it very odd and classist the way Fauchelevent is described as unusual for a peasant because he actually has conversations with other people, which he apparently learned from the education he got as a notary. I found this rather odd - I would assume that conversation is something that has been a universal human constant for anyone capable of language, not something that you need education to learn to do. I’m not an expert on the sociology of peasants in 19th century France so maybe less educated people really don’t talk to each other as much, I have no idea, but it sure reads like a rather bigoted and infantilizing assumption.