Aug 22, 2023
One day, her butcher, who had caught a glimpse of Jean Valjean, said to her: “That’s a queer fish.” She replied: “He’s a saint.”
Jean Valjean:
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One day, her butcher, who had caught a glimpse of Jean Valjean, said to her: “That’s a queer fish.” She replied: “He’s a saint.”
Jean Valjean:
Round 2, Matchup 51: II.iii.11 vs IV.iii.2
Which chapter title do you prefer?
No. 9430 Reappears, and Cosette Wins It in the Lottery
National Guardsman Jean Valjean
- “Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she regulated their expenditure, which was very modest.” That’s cool thing to be able to do when you are not even sixteen! (And that’s the skill that Thénardier obviously lacks, for he consistently squanders family’s fortune whenever he comes into his a substantial sum of money.) But on the other hand, Valjean’s reluctance to take charge as the “master of the house” and have a say in housekeeping matters is somewhat disturbing. He considers himself unworthy and shifts the responsibility onto Cosette. Which is a bit too much. While she is the mistress of the house, he is, well… the father—whatever it means. Valjean is aware that Cosette was raised and educated as a bourgeois girl in the convent, and now he’s creating an environment for her to continue feeling like one. It is so amusing to imagine him engaged in interior design of her rooms! How he was searching for and bringing into the house all those Persian rugs, canopied beds, silver-gilt dressing-case etc. While reading the description of Cosette’s rooms, I had a feeling that we have returned to the old Gillenormand’s house!
- Jean Valjean himself assumes the façade of a respectful bourgeois: he pays taxes and is even a member of the national guard (that’s how he obtains a national guard uniform to infiltrate the barricade and then to pass it along)! However, he conceals his true identity and date of birth from authorities. This dual life—appearing as a bourgeois during the day and as a working-class man at night (as Marius accurately guessed when he saw him disguised as a labourer)—shows the complexity of his existence.
- “Jean Valjean had left the garden uncultivated, in order not to attract attention.” It’s so bizarre that a man who had been tending gardens for many years, had to refrain from taking care of his own garden once he finally had one. Although, he hardly regards it as “his own” garden.
LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - Jean Valjean as a National Guard, LM 4.3.2 (Les Miserables 1967)
Cosette and the servant occupied the pavilion; she had the big sleeping-room with the painted pier-glasses, the boudoir with the gilded fillets, the justice’s drawing-room furnished with tapestries and vast armchairs; she had the garden. Jean Valjean had a canopied bed of antique damask in three colors and a beautiful Persian rug purchased in the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul at Mother Gaucher’s, put into Cosette’s chamber, and, in order to redeem the severity of these magnificent old things, he had amalgamated with this bric-à-brac all the gay and graceful little pieces of furniture suitable to young girls, an étagère, a bookcase filled with gilt-edged books, an inkstand, a blotting-book, paper, a work-table incrusted with mother of pearl, a silver-gilt dressing-case, a toilet service in Japanese porcelain. Long damask curtains with a red foundation and three colors, like those on the bed, hung at the windows of the first floor. On the ground floor, the curtains were of tapestry.
The difference between what Jean Valjean offers to Cosette and what he keeps for himself is so telling. On the one hand, it’s nice that he provides her with so many comforts and offers her agency over her life as “mistress” of the house, even when patriarchal norms would typically give him that kind of power. On the other, the way he deprives himself of such comforts is always sad, and why does there need to be a “master” or “mistress” in the first place? Cosette is respected, but Valjean doesn’t respect himself, and he, therefore, tries to maintain hierarchies in their relationship that may not be beneficial.
I also have such mixed feelings about his work with the National Guard. I feel a lot of sympathy for why he enjoys it so much:
“ He had no civil status, hid his name, his identity, his age, everything, and, as we just said, he was a willing National Guard,—all his ambition was to resemble the first-comer who pays taxes. The ideal of this man was internally an angel, externally a bourgeois.”
Having been an outcast for most (if not all) of his life, it’s understandable that he’d relish the opportunity to be around others. This position actually lets him be around people, even if he still refrains from really interacting with them. It also allows for a sense of being part of society. The first sentence here (”He had no . . . “) stresses how much he’s excluded; he lacks all of the typical markers for a person when he serves. But he still can serve, letting him gain that sense of inclusion that he lacks (the fact that Valjean can serve in the National Guard while lacking all of these things seems like another abuse, but that’s a separate issue). The tie between being in the Guard and his “bourgeois” ideal speaks to the fantasy of comfort as well, of a life where he not only can afford material stability (which he largely has) but social stability, which he’s lacked at least since he left prison (and which he arguably has never had).
At the same time, having his “ideal” be a “bourgeois” feels a bit sad and limiting? Most of the bourgeois characters in this novel have been apathetic toward others at best and flippantly cruel at worst, so it’s disheartening to see that that’s still his standard for a good life. The stability is certainly an understandable appeal, but it also highlights how Valjean isn’t thinking of changing what’s around him. He wants to live well within existing structures; he just can’t.
Brickclub 4.3.2 ‘Jean Valjean a National Guard’
Oh no, oh no, I don’t like this.
Remember the description of the poor garret in the Gorbeau house, where Cosette talked and sang all day and Valjean taught her to read and they became a family?
Yeah. We’re not there anymore.
When Valjean first adopted her, he regarded the two of them as being of the same social status, because they were. They were both lonely and downtrodden escapees from forced labor, with no legal names and no family but each other.
Now, Cosette’s home is a list of absurd luxuries that might be outdoing Gillenormand’s--and a lot of it is probably in the same style, since the furnishings are original to the house. And Valjean showers her in more fancy furniture on top of that, and he lives in a shed in the back and dines with her, but eats different bread. Because the convent separated her from him, both physically but also in education and implied social class, he seems to feel he has to maintain those distinctions.
But Cosette thought the garret in the Gorbeau house was the most beautiful place she’d ever seen, and we know that because we heard her say so. We don’t hear her say anything about this. She’s silent now in a way she never was back then.
Damn, it’s good this house has that garden, because it’s going to need that to redeem it.
And this exchange:
"Mademoiselle is the mistress of the house." "And you, m-monsieur?" replied Toussaint, astounded. "Me, I am much better than the master, I am the father."
I really, really don’t like it. It’s not clear what he understands by “father”--that he’s allowed to bask in being somewhere near her, I guess, or maybe in having some kind of symbolic ownership over her even as he lets her control the house. It all feels as dead and mummified as the “Inseparable,” which Cosette complains of feeling jealous of. Valjean is already clinging to death and he past, even though his kid is still right here in front of him, sometimes literally pleading with him to be present with her.
Valjean is running this house on very strange rules, and the only other people allowed to set foot inside, Cosette and Toussaint, don’t have enough knowledge or power to push back on the rules he makes. He’s only using those rules to punish himself--but that’s also bad!
And, if we needed more evidence that Valjean is on the wrong path, he’s now a national guard, a fact important enough that the chapter title highlights it. He’s still working towards sainthood undercover, but externally he’s fighting to be a bourgeois.
And this is in the section of the book where Hugo went off on the bourgeoisie as being the people delaying progress.
Valjean is out of step with the themes of the book. It feels similar to what the book’s narration on Marius has been for a while now--they both keep grievously missing the point, but the narrator never quite comes out and says it. Valjean is happy enough to sneak bourgeois society, and he and thinks little enough about politics these days not to see anything wrong with that.
He doesn’t think to ask himself how much being a national guard is like being police.
Brickclub 4.3.2, “National Guardsman Jean Valjean”; 4.3.3, “Foliis ac Frondibus”; 4.3.4, “The Convent Grille Replaced By Garden Railings”
I’m going to be jumping around these three chapters quite a lot.
The title of 4.3.2, as usual, underscores a detail Hugo wants us to remember: Jean Valjean is a National Guardsman now. “To be like anyone else who paid his taxes--that was his sole ambition. The ideal to which this man aspired was, inwardly, an angel, outwardly, a bourgeois.”
This is not a good thing, on several counts--the first being that that outward respectability is not morally neutral. We’re going to see the National Guard come down heavily on the side of repression and reaction, in this volume. We began the volume by seeing them side with revolution, in 1830--in the digression which upbraided the bourgeoisie at some length for stopping there and going no further. Being a bourgeois, being a National Guard, are not good aspirations within the framework of the book.
And they’re especially toxic for Valjean, who is aware that he is just playacting bourgeois respectability--but believes that Cosette is not, or shouldn’t be. Cosette’s convent upbringing has given her conditional entry into a class Valjean does not belong to, and he sees her now as being fundamentally distant and different from him. Cosette is the mistress of the house, and Valjean lives in the porter’s lodge in the back. Valjean has black bread and Cosette has white, until she threatens to eat only what he eats; Valjean has no fire in his room, so Cosette camps out there so he’ll have to have one for her sake. She manages this very skillfully, but she is A LITERAL CHILD, she is FOURTEEN she should not have to PARENT HER OWN FATHER this way.
Valjean turns the garden, neglected for decades, over to Cosette, and Cosette lets it continue to run wild. The garden is a metaphor for a lot of things: most saliently the neglect of Cosette’s worldly education, but also revolution, the convent/the bagne/the barricade, and sex. We even get all four in two sentences: “...as lonely as a tomb, as much a living thing as a crowd. During Floréal this huge wilderness, free behind its bars and within its four walls, went into rut, part of the secret process of universal germination...”
The garden and house are located with reference to the Rue de Varennes, the Invalides, and the Chamber of Deputies--referencing, respectively, the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration--and to the omnibuses that pass through the neighborhood--horses and carts again!
The sex metaphors are much less subtle: “In winter the thicket was dark, wet, shaggy and shivering... Instead of blossom on the branches and dew on the blossom you saw the long silvery ribbon-trails of slugs on the cold thick carpet of yellow leaves.”
The second half of 4.3.3 is an extended meditation on history, destiny, and fatality, and the impossibility of tracking the influence of small things on great events. It’s a lovely piece of prose, tying Hugo’s theories of history to Nature:
Who, then can calculate a molecule’s destiny? How do we know the creation of worlds is not determined by falling grains of sand? Who, then, is conversant with the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the repercussions of causes in the abysses of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite matters. The small is great and the great is small. Everything is bound by necessity in equilibrium.
The garden was designed for the artifices of love, with a grotto and trees espaliered to the wall; it has returned to a wild and infinitely sexier state of nature. Within it, Cosette is preparing to discover a love which Hugo would like to believe is also in a state of nature, unmediated by artifice. This is, of course, impossible.
There are a lot of gross patriarchal generalizations in 4.3.4, though they are actually slightly less gross than I remembered them being: “She should be gently and discreetly enlightened, rather by the reflection of realities than by their direct, harsh glare” is a statement I could pick a lot of fights with out of context, but in context, it is clearly is Hugo for “someone should explain sex to girls before the wedding night,” and, yes, someone clearly should, and it is a problem that Valjean can’t:
As for Jean Valjean, he certainly had within him at one and the same time every fondness and every tender care, but he was only an old man who knew nothing at all. Now, in this educational enterprise, in this serious matter of preparing a woman for life, what knowledge is needed to combat that vast ignorance called innocence!
Hugo continues:
There is nothing like the convent for priming a young girl for passion. The convent directs the mind toward the unknown. Retreating into itself, the heart unable to reach out delves within, and unable to blossom digs deep. Hence fantasies, assumptions, conjectures, half-envisaged romances, hoped-for intrigues, fabulous constructs, edifices built wholly in the inner dark of the mind, somber and secret abodes where the passions, once through the gate and let inside, immediately take up residence. The convent is a repression that must be lifelong if if is to triumph over the human heart.
...I mean, yes, but also, we’ve seen the character this applies to and it’s not Cosette; it’s Marius. That’s all just...Marius.
At any rate. Cosette only dimly remembers her childhood. She doesn’t remember her mother at all. And Valjean can’t talk about her any more:
This silence of Jean Valjean’s shrouded Fantine in darkness. Was it caution? Was it respect? Was this a fear of surrendering that name to the vagaries of a memory other than his own?
So long as Cosette was a little girl, Jean Valjean had gladly talked to her about her mother. When she became a young woman, it was impossible for him to do so. It was as if he dared not any more. Was it because of Cosette? Was it because of Fantine? He felt a kind of religious horror at allowing that shadow to enter Cosette’s mind and at giving the dead woman a place in their life together. The more sacred this shadow was to him, the more formidable it seemed. He thought of Fantine and felt crushed by silence. He saw indistinctly something in the half-light that looked like a finger placed to someone’s lips. Had all the modesty that was in Fantine, and of which during her lifetime she had been violently bereft, returned, outraged, after her death to settle over her, to protect the peace of that dead woman and to guard her fiercely in her grace? Was Jean Valjean unknowingly influenced by this? We, who believe in death, are not among those who would reject this mysterious explanation. Hence the impossibility, even for Cosette’s sake, of uttering that name ‘Fantine.’
Wow that’s a lot to unpack. Valjean can’t talk to Cosette about sex; and so he can’t honestly tell her Fantine’s story. And, I think, Fantine is another casualty of the class divide Valjean now perceives between himself and Cosette: he can’t talk about Fantine’s poverty, either.
But also--Valjean has become jealous of sharing Cosette, even with her own dead mother: “At all these marks of affection, an affection so exclusive and so satisfied with him alone, Jean Valjean felt his spirit melt with delight... He told himself he had not really suffered enough to deserve such radiant bliss, and he thanked God in the depths of his soul for having allowed the miserable wretch that he was to be so loved by this innocent creature.”
...my margin notes on this paragraph are just the word NO fourteen times. OH JEAN VALJEAN NO.
Round 1, Matchup 173: IV.iii.2 vs IV.iii.8
Which chapter title do you prefer?
National Guardsman Jean Valjean
The Chain Gang