#lm 4.6.2

[cliozaur]

I have a small collection of illustrations for today’s chapter—lots of little Gavroches with Momes and elephants. They are the best!

[kim-the-miserable-rat]

AND WHAT IF I SAID THAT MAYBE IF GAVROCHE HAD TRAINED THOSE RATS THAT LIVED IN THE ELEPHANT OF BASTILE TO FIGHT IN THE BARRICADES THE JUNE REBELLION MIGHT HAVE SUCCEEDED???

[lmchaptertitlebracket]

Round 1, Matchup 70: II.i.7 vs IV.vi.2

Which chapter title do you prefer?

Napoleon in Good Humor

In Which Little Gavroche Takes Advantage of the Great Napoleon

Voting ended onApr 29, 2025

[gavroche-le-moineau]

So much fun language stuff in this chapter! There's way too much for me to get into in full but I wanted to highlight one thing.

I love how some of Gavroche's dialogue is written out phonetically so we can hear what he sounds like. Examples include:

“Keksekça?” = Qu’est-ce que c’est que cela? An English approximation might be: "Whassat?" = What is that?

“Kekçaa?” = Qu’est-ce que cela a? "Whaddaboutit?" = What about it? / What does it matter?

“Gniena plein un magasin.” = Il y en a plein un magasin. " 'Sa shop full of 'em" = There's a shop full of them

“Gnia qu’à monter par-dessus un mur,” = Il n’y a qu'à monter par-dessus un mur "Y'only gotta climb over a wall" = You only have to climb over a wall

“Me v'là, dit-il.” = Me voilà, dit-il. I couldn't really think of an English approximation for shortening this but Hapgood's translation is "I'm with you" (basically, "I'm here / I'm ready").

I would love to get into all the argot/slang words Gavroche is throwing out this entire chapter... and teaching his younger brothers! But that will have to wait for another time.

[entropicbunny]

gets me every time & i had to draw it

[dolphin1812]

The weather that Hugo describes feels very indicative of the mood in Paris, with the winds of cholera brewing a storm of popular anger. With respect to Gavroche, though, this is immediately relevant in that it makes him cold (and Magnon’s children are freezing, too). The cold is especially bad since, like his sister, he often goes several days without eating and wears rags.

Watching Gavroche take charge is so cute! He tries to seem so confident in front of the younger kids (saying that having nowhere to sleep isn't a big problem, for instance) even though he’s also suffering. As we saw with Mabeuf earlier, he’s genuinely generous, too. Not only is he helping these children, but he gives his scarf to a poorly clothed girl, demonstrating his general kindness and good nature. The girl’s lack of a response reminds me of the line from before about the Thénardier children not noticing their new siblings because they were too impoverished to be aware of their surroundings. It’s a sad parallel, but it reflects well on Gavroche’s character. And his kindness and confidence work! The kids are soon happier! They’re all still in a horrible situation, but he’s lifted their spirits.

His exchange with Montparnasse is hilarious. He has no respect for him whatsoever. On the one hand, that lack of respect is one of the many gamin traits Hugo listed that Gavroche embodies. On the other, though, it shows his casual familiarity with crime. Montparnasse isn’t scary to Gavroche because he already knows his world, using the same slang and recognizing the people Montparnasse talks about. As for Montparnasse, his ease around Gavroche is a reminder of where he came from. He was a gamin, too, so Gavroche is equally familiar to him. It’s funny to read, but it does indicate that Montparnasse’s life is one of the most likely options for Gavroche’s future if he manages to age out of being a gamin. That Montparnasse seems cool to the young children probably isn’t a good sign for gamins more broadly, either, as he may seem appealing to children with so few options even though he’s horrible.

(And he’s not even that good at crime!)

I love how he warns Gavroche about the officer, though! It’s a kind gesture, and it’s clever! According to Donougher, in the French, there’s assonance with the syllable “deeg” in everything he says (“je te dis,” “ma digue,” “si vous me prodiguez dix gros sous,” “d’y goupiner,” “mardi gras”). 

And we’ve reached the heavily symbolic elephant! Gavroche literally lives in the ruins of empire. Hugo says we can’t know what it means, so in that sense, we should be careful not to overestimate how clear its meanings are, but that he explicitly states that it’s difficult to know also pushes us to search for symbols in it. And it’s not all bad! It’s grand and majestic (maybe even “great!”), like Napoleon I was to Hugo. But it’s also a carcass that’s being worn away by time, and it’s unpleasant to look at for “respectable” people in particular (much like its gamin inhabitants are ignored and looked down on). 

And it’s also been replaced. Hugo frames it as an inevitable change like that of classes, drawing on 19th-century theories of the “natural development” of societies to explain why the elephant’s era ended. The emphasis on ideas over power feels like an indirect criticism of the Napoleons, with the idea of a republic being the progress that their dictatorial power can’t counter. 

That aspect, in general, feels the most significant. Napoleon did some good; his elephant is now a shelter for Gavroche, and his rule inspired many in France by giving them hope that they, too, could advance socially and that their country would be influential. But this is a hollow sort of “good.” The elephant is a shelter, but only because there are homeless children who need it (and, as Hugo points out, it was a real need; the fiction here is based on a real case). France’s empire couldn’t last because it was against republican principles in France and across Europe. If the elephant was in such a bad state so soon after Napoleon I, then, imagine how much worse it would be to bring its idea back with Napoleon III! 

Hugo even says that the good of the elephant came from God, not Napoleon!

Another note: the elephant is for someone that other doors are closed to, once again illustrating the importance of open doors. Gavroche wouldn’t need the elephant if he weren’t a social outcast. His poverty would not be this desperate if people respected him and helped him.

His use of the wire is very creative! But that it’s all from animal enclosures in the Jardin des Plantes drives home that animals have more than he does (and are given more by society). It’s worse than Valjean not having a place to stay when the dog had a house, in a way, because at least the dog was tied to a family in some way, either as a pet or a work animal; the animals of the Jardin des Plantes are there as a spectacle alone, and it’s for that spectacle that they’re given good quality things. His narration is hilarious, but it’s heartbreaking, too.

[fremedon]

Brickclub 4.6.2, “In Which Little Gavroche Takes Advantage of the Great Napoleon”

Extremely slapdash catchup continues:

@everyonewasabird makes some good points about Gavroche and the bishop being aligned as trickster figures; that alignment is flagged specifically with the two mômes following him “as they would have followed an archbishop.”

He’s also bishop-aligned in his code-switching--one of the only characters who both can and does address everyone in either the mode they understand or the one that’s funniest. (Often, in this chapter, that’s a very bourgeois and specifically bureaucratic register, which he employs for deadpan humor--declaring that he can’t accept complaints because the office is closed, or that if the rain keeps up he will cancel his subscription.) Here, he passes on as much argot as he can to the two mômes; bhen he meets Bahorel in a few chapters, he’ll borrow his slang--the atom of Paris is Unimpressed by Enjolras; it’s the Romantic flâneur he wants to be like.

But for now, we meet Montparnasse again, who we saw in Gavroche’s last chapter--another reminder not just at how bleak Gavroche’s future looks, but at how young Montparnasse still is. He shows off his knife, and then, when Gavroche asks him if he expects a run-in with the cops, realizes he’s said too much:

“You never know,” Montparnasse replied, as if he did not care. “It’s always good to have a blade on you.”

Gavroche pressed him. “So what’re you doing tonight?”

Montparnasse came over all serious again and mumbled, “Things.”

...you know, in case we’d forgotten he’s a teenager.

(I still don’t know everything the text is doing with Marius and Montparnasse, but it’s teasing very hard the ideas both that Marius is capable of murder and that Montparnasse is capable of change.)

I’m going to point to Bird’s writeup of the second half of this chapter for good commentary on the Elephant itself, technology, and Great Men. I do like his one-sentence summation of his life advice to the mômes (and honestly of the book itself): “We go over walls and we don’t give a damn about the government. That’s all.”

I’m also wondering, in light of Gavroche’s later admiration for Bahorel, if there’s any line to be drawn between the eggs argument and his description of the thunder: “Winter’s a fool. It’s wasting its reserves, it’s wasting its time, it can’t wet us, and that’s making it grumble, the silly old water-carrier.” I can’t quite make it hold together, but there’s an argument through all these chapters--one thread of the larger meta-argument about Progress--about what forces are limited and must be husbanded (the insurgents’ ammunition, Enjolras’s anger) and which ones are effectively inexhaustible (the soldiers’ ammunition, Bahorel’s anger). I don’t know what it means that Gavroche puts Winter in the first category rather than the second.

Animal symbolism watch: Gavroche had a cat, but the rats ate it. This looks like the lower mine undermining the upper one, and is much more in keeping with the usual cat references in the text than when Gavroche will say “the mice have caught the cat” about Javert’s capture. 

(Speaking of argot--in the French text, Gavroche responds to the older boy’s “Mama is a lady who lives with Mam’selle Miss” with “Tanflûte.” FMA gives this as “Indeed”; Donougher gives “Whats-her-name,” Rose gives “I’ll be blowed,” and Hapgood and Wilbour don’t translate it at all. Do we know if it means anything?)

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 4.6.2 “In Which Little Gavroche Takes Advantage of Napoleon The Great” Part 2

This book doesn’t like or agree with the idea of the Great Man, but it can’t help being fascinated by him.

In that open and deserted corner of the Square, the broad front of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his size, his enormous rump, his four feet like columns, produced at night, under the starry sky, a startling and terrible outline. One knew not what it meant. It was a sort of symbol of the force of the people. It was gloomy, enigmatic, and immense. It was a mysterious and mighty phantom, visibly standing by the side of the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

There’s so much symbolism around the elephant. It’s a small, huge work--a rough draft--by a great man, which nature is causing to decay, and which in its decay is both grand and tawdry. It upsets the bourgeois, but the thinker--a Romantic, presumably--appreciates it.

But “It was a sort of symbol of the force of the people“ kind of baffles me? I wouldn’t assume the people had much to do with Napoleon’s vanity project. I think the chapter maybe implies later that that’s what Napoleon conceived of it as a monument to? But I’m not sure.

There are three monuments in this small area, and it’s no wonder Hugo chose this spot. We have Napoleon’s decaying model elephant, the Bastille, and the currently-under-construction future July Column, a monument to the July Revolution two years earlier. The July Column is the most derided here, as a silly bourgeois stove-pipe. Hugo has real fondness for the elephant in its grand decay. Oddly, the Bastille itself doesn’t get much mention.

Hugo on the July Column:

It is only natural that a stove be the symbol of an era whose power is contained in a cooking pot. This era will pass, is already passing; we are beginning to understand that, if there may be some force in a boiler, there can only be power in a brain; in other words, that what leads and pulls the world along is not locomotives, it is ideas. Harness locomotives to ideas, by all means; but don’t mistake the cart for the horse.

This is a meditation on society and technology--Hugo seems to think the onrush of new technology is slowing, and we can move from sorting out the tech to sorting out our ideas about society to go with it. That’s.. not really how the decades after 1860 went.

BIG cart-and-horse allusion here, and for once he’s invoking it directly. The horses have always been overlooked workers, the carts they drag have, I believe, been society. Hugo, as far as I can tell, is hoping that once the technological flurry settles, we will at last be human-centered and humane in how we arrange society.

..No wonder he thought the twentieth century might be happy.

Hugo pauses to remind us that Gavroche could be arrested for vagrancy for sleeping in the elephant, because of course he could. It’s not an accident that this reminder of Gavroche’s constant illegality comes right before referring to him as “that little Providence in rags.”

And then, we get the incredibly beautiful paragraph about how the elephant, created in the vainglorious image of greatness, now decaying, was repurposed by God for goodness. As the ragged Gavroche saves the children, the ragged elephant saves Gavroche.

The emperor had had a dream of genius; in this titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, brandishing his trunk, bearing his tower, and making the joyous and vivifying waters gush out on all sides about him, he desired to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he lodged a child.

;_____;

And, as if we hadn’t had plenty of illustration of this point already, once inside, Gavroche explains how all his bedding was stolen from the animals at the zoo. Society was willing and able to house monkeys and giraffes; the reason it didn’t house children was because it couldn’t be bothered.

Gavroche teaches the boys how to be gamins, correcting their speech into argot, telling them of gamin entertainments. He’s rough with them, but kind, and he’s taken it on himself to parent them already. It’s not the bourgeois education Thenardier hoped Gillenormand’s money would buy them, but it’s what will keep them alive. Gavroche’s clasping of the younger boy’s hand echoes Valjean taking Cosette’s.

And then, Montparnasse calls Gavroche down from the elephant, and we begin to see where the life of the gamin borders that of the criminal adults whom he will most likely join the ranks of if he grows up, because the world hasn’t given him other options. He’s taking care of the children, but there’s no one to take care of him.