May 4, 2025
Round 1, Matchup 131: III.i.10 vs IV.iii.6
Which chapter title do you prefer?
Ecce Paris, Ecce Homo
The Battle Commences
Voting ended onMay 11, 2025
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Round 1, Matchup 131: III.i.10 vs IV.iii.6
Which chapter title do you prefer?
Ecce Paris, Ecce Homo
The Battle Commences
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but find Cosette’s thoughts on her attraction to Marius funny in the context of his thoughts on why he might be appealing. When she finds that he looks intelligent, all I can think of is how he thought that she would respect him if she knew he’d written something that’d been published and had simply been denied credit for it.
Hugo’s justification of the “coup de foudre” (love at first sight, but literally including lightning) is funny, too. His idea of romantic love feels limiting here, but it just seems like someone told him the trope was overdone and he got offended.
The gendered aspect of this section is uncomfortable, but at least Cosette enters this on her own terms? She doesn’t know what love is (I find it funny that the convent replaced the word), but she’s trying to understand in her own way? Which is better than all of this revolving around Marius alone.
War metaphors in writing about love affairs are so out of place! (I’m saying this as a person affected by war.) Especially when we are talking about relations between Cosette and Marius (mostly unfolding in their fantasy). But let’s chalk this up to Hugo’s peculiarities.
We already know the details of Marius falling in love with Cosette, and now we get an idea of what it was like for Cosette. It’s curious that at first, it was again about looks and appearance. Marius became interested in Cosette ONLY when she became pretty, and Cosette quite early found Marius handsome. But unlike him, Cosette went further and noticed other attractive aspects of his personality: “he did not appear to be at all stupid, that his whole person was noble, gentle, simple, proud, and that, in short, though he seemed to be poor, yet his air was fine.”
And then Hugo comes up with his further misjudgements about women, comparing their beauty to a weapon, probably hinting at the possibility of using it to manipulate men, which can ultimately backfire: “Women play with their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themselves.” Oh, no...
There is an opinion among cultural and social historians that the concept of romantic love (especially as a prerequisite for a happy marriage) is a modern invention of the eighteenth century, the outcome of sentimental novels’ influence on passionate readers, especially women. It seems that Hugo is delving into this topic, exploring whether romantic love is natural or artificial, and whether it is possible to be romantically in love when you have never heard or read about it. And he portrays after-convent Cosette as an innocent and ignorant creature (the passage about censorial changes of amour to tambour or parndour in the convent are really amusing) who has no idea of what love is, not even its name. And here Hugo again stretches the situation to the extreme: in his convent digression, he himself claimed that those walls were not impenetrable, and young girls were dreaming of romantic adventures, gossiping, and secretly read forbidden books (about boys’ sins). And it is also hard to believe that Jean Valjean was censoring the books she read, not allowing her to take hold of books where romantic love was mentioned (although, we really have no idea what Cosette was reading, perhaps she only had devotional literature). As a result of this thought experiment, Hugo concludes that romantic love was natural, and therefore Cosette could “love ignorantly,” without knowing the concept of love.
After all, we learn that Marius’ and Cosette’s ideas of each other are very similar and elevated. For her as well, it was “a sort of admiration at a distance, a mute contemplation, the deification of a stranger,” and she “set herself to adoring Marius as something charming, luminous, and impossible.” They are worth each other, aren’t they?
And then Hugo introduces the topic of Cosette’s extreme coquetry and undermines the charm of the picture he had just created.
Brickclub 4.3.6, “The Battle Begins”
Yet another chapter where most of Hugo’s observations are absolutely realistic and well-observed when applied to the specific characters involved, and make me want to fight him when he generalizes them. Cosette isn’t instinctively good at opsec because she’s a young girl—she’s good at it because she’s Jean Valjean’s daughter, and she’s grown up watching what he struggles to do and internalized it.
And, also, because she has grown up instinctively hiding her fears and sorrows from Valjean, because he wants so badly for her to be happy and she wants so badly to not disappoint him. And so now, Cosette hides her and Marius’s silent flirtation because she knows it will distress Valjean. They’ve never been able to talk about things like this, to the extent that he has stopped talking to her about Fantine because he doesn’t know how to approach her story.
This chapter does have one of the few positive instances of that thing where Hugo gives a sweeping generalization with just a few, minor exceptions:
Marius still found Cosette plain when she had begun to find Marius handsome. But as he paid no attention to her, she was quite indifferent to this young man.
Still, she could not help telling herself that he had a fine head of hair, fine eyes, fine teeth, a delightful tone of voice when she heard him conversing with his comrades, that admittedly he walked with a slouch but with a gracefulness of his own, that he seemed not at all stupid, that everything about his appearance was noble, gentle, and proud; in short, he looked poor but distinguished.
But eventually, they make eye contact—and Marius’s glance infatuates Cosette, as much as hers does him. Hugo says “the first symptom of a true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl, it is boldness. This is surprising, and yet nothing is more natural. It is the two sexes tending towards each other and taking on each other’s characteristics.”
This is bollocks, and for once it’s not even true of Marius and Cosette specifically—he does become more timid and she does become bolder, but for each of them this is an intensifying of how they usually relate to the world and to other people. What changes for each of them is their emotional state and affect: Marius, as we saw, became elated, confident, and even gregarious. “The first thing Cosette felt was a deep and obscure sadness. It seemed to her that from one day to the next her soul had turned black. She no longer recognized it.”
This does not seem as inexplicable to me as it does to Hugo. Even leaving aside any mixed feelings she probably has about growing up and about Valjean’s reaction, Cosette has been lonely without quite realizing it or knowing what she is missing. Now she’s become aware that there is at least something lacking, though her convent education still leaves her unable to name it.
Hugo assures us that, of all the obscure reasons Cosette hides her feelings, shame is not one of them—she is too innocent to feel ashamed, and though she still doesn’t know just what her feelings are, she knows they are natural. And she’s right, and she’s right not to be ashamed, even though her innocence is dangerous, and could, under other circumstances, make her terribly vulnerable.
Her crush on Marius is all the stronger because it’s impossible—she’s not (yet) planning on speaking to him or thinking any further ahead than seeing him in the Luxembourg and being happy that he’s there and he’s noticed her. And honestly this is a very valid sort of crush to have, and very age-appropriate.
It also strikes me how urban an experience it is, on both sides—knowing someone only as a part of the landscape, without knowing their name or any more about them than you can guess from their appearance, but still seeing them often enough and regularly enough to look forward to seeing them and miss them when you don’t. Cosette, despite her convent upbringing, is habituated to city life in a way Valjean has never achieved.
Brickclub 4.3.6 ‘The Battle Begins’
Genuinely not sure what to say about this one. Hugo makes some of his most sweeping generalizations about love and gender, and I don’t have a lot to say about his sweeping generalizations about love and gender.
It’s cute that Cosette is bold when Marius is terrified; it’s less cute that Hugo presents this as a universal step in this or characterizes it as each sex taking on the characteristics of the other.
The idea that Cosette knows nothing about earthly love is fascinating.. and in practice I’m having trouble picturing how it works. Do people never use the word in front of her? What about in the years before the convent? Does she not read novels where it’s mentioned, or fairy tales, or whatever it is she reads? I suppose I don’t know what kinds of books she has access to, or what kinds of conversations she participates in or overhears going about her days.
Hugo is building up an idea of her being terrifyingly sheltered, but he’s also building up the absolute Romanticism of someone encountering Love in its purest form. He seems aware, though he’d phrase it differently, that there’s something extremely socially constructed about romantic love. He wants to strip all that away and see Cosette grappling with the Thing Itself, unmediated by cultural expectation.
You can’t, obviously, do that. You can’t drill down to the pure, unmediated form of a social construct--they don’t have pure, unmediated forms. Believe me, I’m a trans person, I’ve thought about this.
But I think that’s what this is about--if you took all the artificialities away (and the Rue Plumet is all about the artificialities of love being conquered by the truth of love) what would there be? Whatever that is, it’s what Cosette is encountering.
We continue the battle metaphor from last chapter, which is odd in a book with plenty of actual battles. It’s interesting, but it’s also frustrating, because the battle is all on Cosette’s side, and it’s giving me the feeling that women’s battle is love whereas men’s battle is.... battle. Wish that were less how this book worked.
All in all, if Hugo could cut down all the theorizing about people in general and just talk about the ones we’re looking at I would have an easier time getting into the genuinely interesting parts of this section.
IV.iii.6 La Bataille Commence
Which is your favorite translation of this chapter title?
The Battle Commences
The Battle Begins
The Battle Begun