Jul 13
it was love at first sight!!
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from Peru
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Türkiye
seen from Brazil
seen from Croatia
it was love at first sight!!
Round 1, Matchup 151: III.vi.6 vs V.iii.4
Which chapter title do you prefer?
Taken Prisoner
He Too Bears His Cross
Poor Marius. In addition to thinking that the sparrows are mocking him, he now thinks that "M Leblanc" is angry with him and that "Mlle Lanoire" is judging his dusty shoes. We have no insight into what these characters are thinking at the moment, but Marius' insecurities lead him to assume that they're displeased with him.
But he's also so happy that he's spending time with a friend! He sees Courfeyrac two days in a row! And he meets with Courfeyrac's friends, too, as Jean Prouvaire is there and he embraces someone from the provinces. It's probably disorienting for Courfeyrac (his normally withdrawn friend is now inviting him out, extending the outing, and then being super friendly to strangers the next day), but it's good that Marius is interacting with others.
Another brief political reference:
At dessert, he said to Courfeyrac. “Have you read the paper? What a fine discourse Audry de Puyraveau delivered!”"
Audry de Puyraveau was a central figure in the July Revolution and a left-wing politician. Marius, then, is being much more politically expressive than he has been in a while, combining his "sympathies" for the less fortunate with praise of someone who is actually involved in politics.
I'm not a fan of how love and attraction are discussed here (not just Courfeyrac and his "collection," but also the trap metaphor), but I do think it's kind of funny how dramatic it is? "It was all over with him" is a very over-the-top way of acknowledging that Marius is in love.
- At last, Marius is no longer depressed and melancholic! In fact, he is exhibiting quite bipolar behaviour in these chapters. His melancholy has vanished, and now he is filled with life and joy. In previous chapters, he would constantly forget to eat, but now he has a wonderful appetite and invites his friends to cafes and restaurants! And he even has the mood for entertainment and takes Courfeyrac to see a play at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin (which, at that time, was no longer the home for the Paris Opera). His joyous demeanour is the result of a sign of a certain reciprocity on behalf of Cosette who simply passed by Marius and glanced at him.
- As an utterly inexperienced lover, and a typical Marius, he is acting quite foolishly! It’s such a chaos in his head! I find it so amusing! And just a little bit pathetic. Just look at him: “Marius closed his book, then opened it again, then forced himself to read”. And his thoughts! What a wonderful mess: “Ah! good Heavens!” thought he, “I shall not have time to strike an attitude.” And what he wishes for! “He was utterly upset, he would have liked to be very handsome, he would have liked to own the cross.” So pathetic! And so typical for Marius! Another thing that bothers him amidst his happiness is the dust on his boots (he definitely has a fixed idea about clean boots!): “At the same time, he was horribly vexed because there was dust on his boots.”
- Even though Marius is making a fool of himself and acting silly, I actually like him this way! It`s probably the first time we witness this guy being happy, joyful, chatty, and genuinely enjoying the company of his friends for several days.
Brickclub 3.6.6 ‘Taken prisoner’
Love-giddy Marius switches from eating nothing to eating everything in sight, and he takes Courfeyrac and friends to see Frédérick in L’Auberge des Adrets. Here’s a picture of Pierre Brasseur in Children of Paradise playing Frédérick Lemaître playing Robert Macaire.
I’m so jealous.
The chapter title is an odd echo of what’s to come a long time from now, in the post-barricade chapter “Prisoner,” which will declare Marius a prisoner of Jean Valjean when he’s taken into the sewers.
They’re the same paradoxically positive use of the word “prisoner”--a loaded word in this text--where Marius is helpless before the actions someone else has decided to take regarding him, and he’s carried along in the current. The second time will be a much more literal current--this time, it’s the hilariously prosaic circumstance of Cosette having decided to walk towards him.
But it’s enough. He transforms from being proud, stiff, uptight, and bristling at all fun poked at him to helplessly gregarious, pleased and amused by everything, and a fool for serious reasons--which Courfeyrac can’t grasp, but Prouvaire can. Marius has skipped right past Courfeyrac’s understanding of women--casual sex--to Prouvaire’s domain of romantic love.
It’s interesting that the best things that happen to Marius come when he lets go of his pride and stiffness. He makes a fool of himself here, and the text makes it perfectly clear he’s ridiculous. But it’s for sublime reasons, and it’s among the most important steps he takes in his life.
He’s been avoiding love up to this point because he didn’t understand it. He still doesn’t understand it, but it’s got hold of him anyway.
III.vi.6 Fait prisonnier
Which is your favorite translation of this chapter title?
Taken Prisoner
Made Prisoner
Made Captive
Captivated
Poor Marius is once again sad, even if this sadness promises to bear fruit. We return, though, to light:
“To stand between two religions, from one of which you have not as yet emerged, and another into which you have not yet entered, is intolerable; and twilight is pleasing only to bat-like souls. Marius was clear-eyed, and he required the true light. The half-lights of doubt pained him.”
From Marius’ introduction, it’s been stressed that he himself has “light.” Then, it was from his innocence as a child, but now, it’s one of righteous conviction. He still adheres to his Bonapartist beliefs, but he can’t avoid questioning them for long because he cannot tolerate “doubt;” the strength of his convictions demands that they be built upon certainty. “Clear-eyed” also implies that he sees exactly what Les Amis see and that his emotional attachment to Bonapartism is what keeps him from abandoning the ideology.
That being said, I feel a lot of sympathy for him here. Part of what he’d have to internalize to stop being a Bonapartist is that the idea of the “great man” shouldn’t be a guiding principle politically, and his thoughts surrounding that are bound up with his grief over his father. Unlearning one’s politics is hard, but processing loss is difficult, too, so doing both at once is a real challenge. Although his absence from the Musain is understandable, it also leaves him really isolated in a point of emotional and intellectual turmoil.
On top of that, Marius is poor (by his standards, at least). We don’t know how much Marius was given a month before he was kicked out of the Gillenormand household, but the 600 francs his aunt sends him are a considerable sum; Fantine made 9 sous a day, and Valjean made 15 sous with a day’s work on his way to Digne (Lm 1.5.10; LM 1.2.9). Even a workman without a criminal history would have only made 30 sous (about 45 francs per month, assuming he worked every day) (LM 1.2.9). Even Tholomyès, who was rich, only had 4000 francs a year, highlighting just how much the Gillenormands are offering him (LM 1.3.2). The workers we’ve seen were also outside of Paris, so it’s possible that the expenses of the city weigh more heavily on Marius (Tholomyès is not a good indicator of expenses, since he intentionally lived lavishly). It’s also likely that, given his family’s wealth, he doesn’t know how to save. Fantine, who was already lower class, went through that learning process after losing her job, so I can only imagine how difficult that would be for someone who’s never had to think about money. That being said, Marius is a man and a student (therefore, he has some education), so his “badly paid work” is probably a lot more than Fantine ever made.
I like how Hugo chooses to convert the 60 pistoles sent from the Gillenormands to francs here (600 of them). Since the majority of the money in this chapter is measured in francs, the conversion emphasizes the gulf between their wealth and that of a student without financial support. It demonstrates just how much Marius is rejecting as well, as all the money he gather doesn’t even add up to 100 francs, much less 600.
I also love the tiny details about spending here. It’s fascinating that rent was so, so expensive (it’s expensive today, too, but it still hurts to see in the context of Marius’ calculations), and clothes had a lot of value as well (seeing clothes as a sizeable fraction of rent is more shocking, given that they’re often a lot cheaper than rent today).
Brickclub 3.6.5, “Various Thunderbolts Fall on Ma’am Bougon,” and 3.6.6, “Taken Prisoner”
Using FMA’s chapter titles, as Donougher really falls down here, rendering 3.6.6 as “Captivated” and losing the parallel @everyonewasabird points out to the chapter “Prisoner,” when Marius has fallen into Valjean’s hands in the sewers.
Marius continues to be ridiculous, which is a vast improvement on how he has been. He sits on a bench for four hours watching sparrows hopping on the path, “which gave him the feeling they were making fun of him.” After two weeks of this, Cosette gets fed up and takes the initiative.
By...walking past him. But it’s enough. His look instantly becomes so dreamy all the nursemaids in the park think he’s gazing lovestruck at them--and Prouvaire, the Romantic, instantly knows what’s up.
We’re three chapters from the brief Mines and Miners digression, and we get a taste of it at the end of 3.6.6:
One look had achieved all this. When explosives have been laid in the mine, when the fire is ready to be lit, nothing is simpler. A look is a kindling spark.
The mine is a metaphor that Hugo’s going to keep coming back to, if often in very roundabout ways--but almost everywhere else in this book, it’s a metaphor for society, along with the related underground images of the sewer and the dungeon. And as far as I can tell from memory and a cursory text search, it’s used first here, of Marius’s psyche.
We’ve talked about the shift to greater interiority in the second half of the novel, and to characters’ problems being rooted much more in their personal histories and psychologies than their circumstances and social categories--and it’s hard to tell whether Marius shows that shift that so deeply just because we never met him in the first place, or whether he’s the first character sufficiently bourgeois to have the leisure to have problems not caused primarily by his social category. But it’s really striking that this seismic change to Marius’s psychology is described by the same image that in just a few pages is going to become a detailed metaphor for social change.
Is Marius so hopelessly bourgeois that inside he’s just...society?