Discover Top Posts Tagged with #lm 3.1.2

Popping back to 3.1.1 and already getting a kick out of this:

He has no shirt on his back, no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head. He is like the flies in the air that have none of all that.

He has no clothes or home much like a fly, as flies also have no clothes or home. Top tier analogy skills.

3.1.2

‘You rascal, you just pinched my wife!’ ‘Search me, monsieur! I haven’t got her!’

LOL excellent work 👏

3.1.3

The more they're described, gamin sound like a bunch of little Peter Pans. So... kind of like fae, I guess. Tricky but humored, can pull through anything with nothing, just whimsical from head to toe no matter the circumstances.

3.1.5

Sometimes among these gangs of boys there are little girls

Yeah I was wondering about that. Was starting to think all kids were being referred to using a general "he", but I guess he is going to mention girls separately.

3.1.6

"Everywhere else a vagabond child becomes a doomed man, but Paris kids are built different, okay. Kids in Paris that are vagabonds always grow up fine because being in Paris is healing. Trust."

Yeah okay sure that sounds legit

Besides, the monarchy sometimes had need of children, and then it would ‘clean up’ the streets. Under Louis XIV, to go no further back, the king rightly wanted to create a fleet. A good idea. But let us consider how. . . . Galley ships were then to the navy what steamers are today. So galleys were necessary. But the galley moves only by virtue of the galley slave. So galley slaves were necessary. Colbert required the provincial commissioners and local parliaments to sentence to the galleys as many convicts as possible. The magistracy was very obliging in this matter. If a man kept his hat on when a procession went by – Huguenot behaviour – he was sent to the galleys. If you came across a child in the street – as long as he was fifteen years old and with nowhere to lay his head at night – you sent him to the galleys. Glorious reign, glorious century. Under Louis XV children disappeared in Paris. The police abducted them, who knows for what mysterious purpose. . . . It sometimes happened that the police, being short of children, took those who had fathers. These desperate fathers attacked the police. In such cases parliament intervened and they were hanged. Who? The police? No, the fathers.

🧍

Well dang. Not surprised, but well dang all the same.

3.1.7

Very different treatment of the guillotine here than it was back in 1.1, where it was described like a blood hungry monster vs silly nicknames given by children eager to watch people get decapitated.

3.1.10

The gamin embodies Paris and Paris embodies the world. For Paris is a summation. Paris is the greatest achievement of the human race. This whole marvellous city is a compendium of ways of life past and present. Anyone who sees Paris fancies that he is seeing what underlies all of history, with the heavens and constellations in between.

🤨

I am drowning in footnotes 💀 help me

3.1.13

Eight or nine years after the events related in Part Two of this story

Oops

I have not read that yet

Hopefully that's not too important

This child was well turned out in a pair of men’s trousers, but he had not got them from his father, and a woman’s jacket, but he had not got it from his mother. Somebody or other had clothed him in cast-offs, out of charity. Yet he did have a father and a mother. But his father gave no thought to him and his mother did not love him. He was one of those children, most deserving of all of pity, who have both father and mother and who are orphans.

Oh okay, back to sad hours

and arrive where? At that very same double number, 50–52, already known to the reader: at the Gorbeau tenement.

Uhhhhhhh yeah so I think I haven't gotten to that part yet? Don't mind me doing this in an absurd order (Hugo is rolling in his grave)

The ‘principal tenant’ of Jean Valjean’s day

Of whose day?? Am I supposed to know this name. He said it like I should know it

This latest old woman was called Madame Burgon, and there was nothing remarkable in her life except a dynasty of three parrots that successively ruled her heart.

That's incredibly remarkable actually, thank you for mentioning it.

This child lived in this absence of affection like those etiolated plants that grow in cellars. It was not something he minded, and he did not hold it against anybody. He did not actually know how a father and mother should be.

Deep deep sad sigh

The room the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau tenement was the one at the end of the corridor. The cell next door was occupied by a very poor young man called Monsieur Marius. Let us explain who this Monsieur Marius was.

Oh hey I know that guy HAHA very funny to only be reading that now

#les mis #les miserables #a brick to the head #les mis letters #the brick #LM 3.1.1 #LM 3.1.2 #LM 3.1.3 #LM 3.1.5 #LM 3.1.6 #LM 3.1.7 #LM 3.1.10 #LM 3.1.13 #Good grief that was a lot of chapter tags

woah he does so many things

#lm 3.1.2 #les mis #les mis fanart #les miserables #les mis letters #gamin #tw bugs #tw insects #victor does art?!

Round 1, Matchup 126: III.i.2 vs III.i.8

Which chapter title do you prefer?

Some of His Particular Characteristics

In Which Will Be Found a Charming Saying of the Late King

Voting ended onMay 10, 2025

#les miserables #lm chapter title bracket #round 1 #lm 3.1.2 #lm 3.1.8

Hugo continues to paint the collective image of the gamin in jolly colours. This street child is not a victim: he is funny, optimistic, and resourceful. I have a feeling that Hugo spent years collecting street jokes, expressions, noted funny scenes he witnessed in Paris to specifically use them for the image of the gamin (Gavroche).

Many metaphors and expressions in this chapter require footnotes and additional explanations. But I appreciated child’s games and mischiefs “whose foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois.”

There are so many insects! (As insectophobe) I don’t know why Hugo is fixed on drawing connections between children and insects. I still remember the four houses of the convent.

And thank you, Hugo for "the deaf thing" monster - it will come to me in my nightmares!

I will not comment on the use of “street Arabs” as a synonym of the gamin. It’s just an old English translation problem, I checked - there’s nothing like this in the French original. That’s why people make new translations! But if we agreed to read the old one, we should put up with the style and worldview of the time when the translation was made.

#les mis letters #lm 3.1.2 #les miserables #the deaf thing #gavroche

The depiction of the gamin continues to be pretty idealized, even as Hugo acknowledges how little these children live with (“he prefers the street, because there he finds liberty” seems like an odd thing to say about a child living, not just playing, on the streets). It seems that the gamin has a better understanding of Paris than most, working in ways that demand an extensive knowledge of the city (in transit, for instance). Within Paris, they’re their own class: they have their own forms of entertainment, their own way of speaking, and even their own currency. “The deaf thing” suggests that they even have their own myths (assuming that, since no one has ever seen it, there’s a good chance it’s more important as a story than as a creature).

Although the gamin has an excellent knowledge of Paris, they also see Paris differently:

“Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.”

All of these areas are best known for grander structures, but to the gamins, the creatures there are more memorable. In part, this may be because the buildings there are not accessible to gamins, highlighting how class shapes one’s perspective of different spaces. It could also be because the gamins are children. Playing with millepedes is generally more fun to children than staring at the architecture of the Pantheon, so for them, the bugs found there would be a better characteristic than the Pantheon itself. These creatures are small and often overlooked as well, much like the gamins themselves. As a Parisian underclass, they love what’s literally “under” Paris: the insects found by overturning the stones of its streets.

We also get examples of their humor now! I personally found the doctor one easiest to understand. It’s harsh (saying that a doctor caused his patient’s death at a funeral), but it’s intended to shock, and there’s an implicit skepticism of socially respected positions there (the distrust of the doctor).

The other term used for gamin in this chapter is pretty offensive, and I’m curious if it’s as offensive in the original French or if the English translation is the one with racist language here. I’m almost positive I’ve read this term in Sherlock Holmes stories as well, underscoring that the phenomenon of children living on city streets without adults to care for them was fairly widespread in 19th-century Europe.

#Les mis letters #lm 3.1.2 #Gamins

Brickclub 3.1.2 ‘A few of his distinguishing marks’

Last chapter Hugo said God wills that all childhood be innocent. In this chapter he details what that looks like--how even in this objective tragedy of homeless children, kids are still kids. And he’s right--these annecdotes are adorable and very kid-like.

Is this belying the gravity of the Preface’s “wasting of the child through darkness”? I don’t know.

Hugo’s admiration of these children seems to lessen the severity of what is obviously horrific circumstances. It also allows them personality and agency--and childhood--in a way that clearly feels important to him. It’s a very different handling than the way he approached sex work with Fantine as unremitting tragedy. I feel like I have different pros and cons and objections about each method.

And, of course, this isn’t the end of what he has to say about the gamin.

“His range goes merrily from high comedy to farce.”

..Ouch. That may be Gavroche’s range as a performer, but his overall story is absolutely neither of those.

#brickclub #lm 3.1.2

Brickclub 3.1.2, “Some of His Distinguishing Marks,” 3.1.3, “He Is Agreeable,” and 3.1.4, “He Can Be Useful”

Donougher continues to be useful for the notes--and for a fresh perspective on the text--but the very plain prose that’s been more or less workable for most of the book up till now just cannot cope with these chapters. I’ve been rereading everything in FMA or Wilbour.

Taking three chapters together today, since they’re very short and I don’t have a lot of observations:

--@everyonewasabird and @pilferingapples had a really good exchange here about “Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.”

--“Paris begins with the gawper and ends with the gamin, two beings no other city achieves.” The word variously translated as “gawper” or “idly curious” is baudad, a type which is to the flâneur what the glutton is to the gourmet.

--Shades of the convent refectory in the gamin’s pastime of looking for woodlice, millipedes, and daddy long-legs. Kids are gonna be kids.

--I do like Donougher’s translation of the line about gamins as proto-Romantics: “His natural inclination, and we say this with all due regret, would not be for the classical style.” Where all due regret = none whatsoever.

--Donougher also explains a possible source for the Mlle. Muche thing: Mlle. Mars was a brunette, and there is a kind of fly (mouche) called the March brown, or brune de mars.

--The gamin--as a type, in the lump--gets the ecco homo treatment in 3.1.4: “What clay is he made of? Ordinary mud. A handful of common soil, a breath, and behold, Adam! A God merely has to pass by. A God has always passed by the gamin. Fortune works on this little creature. By this word ‘fortune’ we mean, to some degree, chance.” Or Providence, one might say.

#brickclub #lm 3.1.2 #lm 3.1.3 #lm 3.1.4

III.i.2 Quelques-uns de ses signes particuliers

Which is your favorite translation of this chapter title?

Some of His Private Marks

Some Of His Particular Characteristics

Some of His Characteristics

Some of His Distinguishing Marks

A Few of His Distinguishing Marks

Voting ended onDec 24, 2024

Wraxall follows up specifying again with “The Gamin's Characteristics”

#les miserables #lm chapter title bracket #6 translations #translations of shame #lm 3.1 #lm 3.1.2