#lm 5.2.2

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Round 2, Matchup 26: I.v.1 vs V.ii.2

Which chapter title do you prefer?

A History of Progress in Black Glass Beads

The Ancient History of the Sewer

Voting ended onJun 10, 2025

[the-wraxall-illustrations]

[dolphin1812]

Hugo’s framing of the sewers as ancient and irrational, drawing both on facts – they date back to before the 19th century – and notions of Progress that contrast “modern” Europe with its past and “the Orient.” Such stereotypes play into Orientalism, as we’ve seen before with Hugo’s arguments about Progress, so this isn’t entirely new.

Much of this section takes me back to Patron Minette, with the idea of a darker, “unenlighted” Paris underneath the surface. This paragraph in particular wouldn’t have been out of place there:

“The sewer of Paris has been an ancient and formidable thing. It has been a sepulchre, it has served as an asylum. Crime, intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience, thought, theft, all that human laws persecute or have persecuted, is hidden in that hole; the maillotins in the fourteenth century, the tire-laine of the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, Morin’s illuminated in the seventeenth, the chauffeurs [brigands] in the eighteenth. A hundred years ago, the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged thence, the pickpocket in danger slipped thither; the forest had its cave, Paris had its sewer. Vagrancy, that Gallic picareria, accepted the sewer as the adjunct of the Cour des Miracles, and at evening, it returned thither, fierce and sly, through the Maubuée outlet, as into a bed-chamber.”

The sewer is a vector for crime, yet it’s also a vessel for change, thus containing a glimmer of hope not found in Patron Minette’s depths. The sewer is almost religiously framed in how truthful it is, with Hugo linking it to a “confession.” That term, though, also suggests that it’s honest about society’s sins, once again emphasizing that the sewer is a mirror to social ills like the waste of the poor. 

Also: “A sewer is a cynic. It tells everything.”

I can’t read “cynic” without thinking of Grantaire, especially as this section comes so soon after his death. In “telling everything,” the sewer may be as incomprehensible as Grantaire’s speeches, but it’s also not useless. Grantaire reached for change with his death, so the sewer can’t be dismissed, either.

I unfortunately don’t know all the historical references here, but they generally serve to confirm the tumultuous history of the sewers.

[cliozaur]

The one in which Hugo once again employs an oriental discourse and digs deeply into the material and moral essence of sewers. He compares the plan of Parisian sewers with “eccentric oriental alphabet” with “the misshapen letters.” Always exoticize what you cannot quite understand!

Here, the parallels drawn between sewers and mines, connected through their association with criminal elements, are vivid. My favourite piece is this: “here and there are breathing-holes, where Villon within converses with Rabelais without” – Villon, a poet and convicted criminal who could hide in sewers, and Rabelais, who just got his inspiration from some criminal elements, and thus he is positioned “without” but still in communication with such figures like Villon.

In the part about “the sincerity of foulness,” Hugo refers to what I would call excremental archaeology. When one encounters someone's excrement, there's little else that person can hide. On the other hand, sewers, the receptacles of all filth, serve as the perfect haven for murderers to conceal trace of their crimes, and to which dirty water “in which bloody hands have been washed flows,” but once all these things end up there, it reveals the truth about what transpired.

[fremedon]

Brickclub 5.2.2, “The Ancient History of the Sewer”

This really is a weird chapter, and the book seems to know that--it orients us in the same way it’s introduced all our other grand and horrific setpieces (Waterloo, the convent, the barricade): by inviting us to consider the shape of a letter of the alphabet:

You will form a more accurate picture of this strange geometrical plan if you suppose that you are looking at some bizarre oriental alphabet, lying flat on a dark background, all jumbled up, and the misshaped letters welded together in apparent confusion and as if hapahazardly, sometimes end to end, sometimes at angles to each other.

Except this alphabet is illegible. (And also racist, but it’s not just a foreign alphabet, it’s an alphabet stripped of all sense even to people who know the language.)

The other letter-locations were grotesque, and sometimes sublime, but fundamentally comprehensible in a way this place is not--even while Hugo appears to be changing his argumentative strategy to an appeal to economics, he’s telling us this isn’t going to make a neat narrative.

@everyonewasabird‘s writeup points out how odd it is that Hugo is appealing to truth here, and praising the sewer as a final arbiter of truth, in a book that’s always been very pro-lying. I don’t think I fully have a handle on what Hugo’s doing, but I think this passage is doing some heavy lifting:

The sewer is the city’s conscience. Everything converges here and is brought face to face here. In this ghastly place there are shadows but there are no more secrets. Each thing has its true form, or at least its definitive form.

That’s a nice distinction but I think a very useful one: the sewer may reveal secrets--but that’s not necessarily the same thing as Truth (as Valjean’s confession will make painfully clear).

Hugo continues:

The pile of filth has this in its favour: it does not lie. ... This farrago is a confession. No more false appearances here, no possibly plastering-over; filth takes off its shirt; stark nakedness, all illusions and mirages dispelled, nothing other than what is, showing the ugly face of what is finished with. ... This is more than fraternity, this is intimacy. Everything that used to pretty itself is now besmirched. The last veil is torn off. A sewer is a cynic: It tells all.

Bird points out that the modern, post-Napoleonic sewer is basically Javert: yet another best instantiation of a bad system; so effective and efficient at consigning people to oblivion that the bourgeoisie never needs to be troubled by them.

But this is still the ancient ancient sewer--and it’s a cynic, a pile of filth that, whatever its other issues, at least doesn’t lie.

That’s Grantaire. That’s the cynicism that looks at the worst of humanity and thinks that a lack of comforting fictions is the same as truth.

In Hugo’s historical scheme, where the ancient sewer is the ancien regime, I think this is the view that crime and misery happen because some people are Just Bad, and the only reason to look deeper into them is for the thrill of horror; while the modern sewer is the society that understands that these things have reasons and causes and still would rather sweep them out of sight than address them.

And I think--I hope--we are meant to understand that this isn’t a wholly accurate view, and that the revelation of secret shames and sins doesn’t actually permit the kind of magical reconstruction the last paragraphs describe, from the last sentence:

In what remains, it finds what has been--good, evil, falsehood, truth, the bloodstain from the law courts, the ink-blot from the cavern, the drop of candle grease from the brothel, ordeals suffered, temptations welcomed, orgies spewed up, the kink that characters have acquired in abasing themselves, the trace of prostitution in souls whose coarseness made them capable of it, and in the jerkins of Rome’s street porters the imprint of Messalina’s elbow.

We know what makes a person capable of prostitution in this book, and it’s not coarseness of soul. Whatever secrets are revealed here--in the lowest mine, among the people society wants to throw away and forget--may seem, to someone looking in from above, like they’re telling their full stories. But we’ve seen those stories, and seen what little trace they leave; and we know that’s not true.

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 5.2.2 “The Ancient History of the Sewer”

...Huh. I’m not totally sure what to make of this one.

We learn that people, usually criminals, really do inhabit and hide in the sewers. The mines and miners are a literal presence.

Hugo describes the sewer as the place where all the traces of the things people do in secret on the surface and then lie about come together and tell the truth. ..Which is fascinating, because it might be the first time this novel has actually cared about people telling the truth? It’s a very pro-lying novel!

I definitely feel the looming of Napoleon III’s dictatorship in all this: Hugo talks particularly about political murders and bad political actors of the past showing their truth in the sewers, and I suspect he’s pointing that idea at a much more present example. I also see why, in the face of dictatorial euphemisms and doublespeak concealing horrors, he might fantasize about a place where the truth is unconcealed and unconcealable.

It’s also strange though, because in a literal sense, none of this description is true? I’m sure you find odd and suspicious things in the sewer! But he’s postulating a kind of archaeological omniscience that just isn’t true of archaeology, in the sewers or otherwise. Sure, you find a rotting rag, or the evidence of a crime. But it’s not really within human capability to trace it to some particular person or event, any more than you can do that with evidence you find on the surface. There’s something morbidly compelling about all the things people tried to hide rolling together in the dark, but it’s not actually a source of information for actual humans.

In many ways, this chapter most resembles the last stages of Fantine’s descent, when all the illusions were stripped away and there was only bitter survival left. Most of all it resembles her grave, with it’s “promiscuity of dust.” There, Hugo assures us that God will not be thrown by the jumbled bones and knows how to find the soul. And something similar may be true here, where God knows what everything is comprised of and where it came from.

But, we’ve been assured, the God of Hugo’s universe sees all that happens on the surface and in men’s hearts anyway. So who does the sewer inform, and of what, if not man and not God?

But maybe that’s exactly the wrong question. This isn’t a police-procedural novel, it’s fundamentally a gleefully anti-police-procedural novel. If the sewer actually informed anyone of its secrets, that would be a terrible thing and the novel would condemn it. It would be no better than another Gorbeau house.

So the value here isn’t about telling secrets, it’s about being in a place where one no longer has to keep them, because one’s only companions are other people’s equally dark secrets.

Which will certainly inform Valjean’s interaction with Thenardier in a few chapters.

But I wonder if there’s any relief or absolution for Valjean here, in coming through a place where he can be free of regarding himself as the worst thing. I wanted that for him on the barricade, where everyone else was a criminal by definition, but he didn’t find that there, or look for it. But maybe there’s something like that for him here. His first thought on entering the sewer was that it was just like the convent, a place where he felt a sense of relief because everyone was punishing themselves to expiate sins, the way he always felt he needed to.

If nothing else, he doesn’t have to mask anything about himself here. The novel doesn’t care about telling the truth, but Valjean does--as we’ll see later when he “confesses” to Marius. (His idea of the truth is very biased.) He really does seem very tired of lying.

I don’t know whether it’s good for him or bad for him yet, but I am starting to see evidence he may be part of the kinship of secret and buried things that Hugo is describing.

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Round 3, Matchup 42: IV.i.5 vs V.ii.2

Which chapter title do you prefer?

Facts from Which History Springs, and Which History Ignores

The Ancient History of the Sewer

Voting ended onJul 28, 2025

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Round 1, Matchup 189: IV.x.4 vs V.ii.2

Which chapter title do you prefer?

The Disturbances of the Past

The Ancient History of the Sewer

Voting ended onMay 23, 2025