#lm 5.2.4

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Round 1, Matchup 18: I.ii.4 vs V.ii.4

Which chapter title do you prefer?

Details Concerning the Cheese-Dairies of Pontarlier

Details Ignored

Voting ended onApr 19, 2025

[dolphin1812]

“a man disappeared suddenly”

The sewers are terrifying! 

Disease is not a new metaphor for social problems in general or within the context of this novel, nor are elements of horror. But I do feel like the sewers are particularly well-suited to this, partly because they are literally so closely tied to disease (especially cholera) and because they’re suspenseful in a different way? Hugo’s playing on the unknown aspect, of course, but I do think the un-thought-of dangers of the sewers - like fungi, falling in, and other problems - are especially scary.

Social commentary is also present: it’s no surprise that the sewer is tied to prison, given all that we’ve learned about the horrors of French prison. The animal also gives a sense that the sewer is for the “lost,” literally in this case, but also metaphorically for those cast out from society.

I don’t know a lot about Marat, but I would love any additions!

I think it’s important to note that these explorations were firmly Napoleonic. They were centralized, reflecting the expansion of the state’s power, but they also touched on something that affected ordinary people, highlighting the aftereffects of the French Revolution. The Napoleonic structure couldn’t have reformed this system, but it was a start, just as Hugo doesn’t want to completely abandon what he respects about the Napoleonic era even if he doesn’t want a Napoleon.

Spoilers below:

I’d be remiss not to point out that explaining Bruneseau’s tactics to explore the sewers will help us understand Jean Valjean’s later on. As funny as digressions are, this one not only serves a thematic purpose, but a plot one. Knowing the structures of the sewers and the challenges in moving through them just a few decades earlier gives us a good sense of what Valjean is facing.

[cliozaur]

This section is truly captivating! It reads more engagingly than an exotic travelogue. And believe it or not, Bruneseau and his team's sewer adventures are more thrilling than Livingstone's exploits in Africa. Their seven-year exploration of sewers was an ingenious plan because this way these guys avoided the massacre of the Napoleonic wars. Not that this expedition was any less perilous: just think about people fainting in the foul air and nearly drowning in excrement. Yet, amidst the dangers, they discovered both fascinating and appalling things! Appalling, like in-pace, and unexpected, such as finding an orangutan's skeleton. Additionally, they stumbled upon valuable treasures like precious stones, gold, and silver. It's intriguing to learn that parts of the fifteenth-century sewers are more resilient than more recent constructions. The party’s greatest accomplishment was cleaning, disinfecting, and organizing the sewers.

The final paragraph, vividly describing the horrid state of the sewers before the inspection, serves as a perfect metaphor for the ancien régime. Hugo implies that this era has been left behind, which is good news for Valjean and Marius.

[pilferingapples]

Les Miserables Daily: 5.2.4, Details Ignored

Today in the chronological read-through of Les Miserables,we’re finishing up with Bruneseau’s adventures in 1805!  Be sure to join us for the next chapter in 2032, when we’ll meet Bishop Myriel!

The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle against pestilence and suffocation. It was, at the same time, a voyage of discovery. One of the survivors of this expedition, an intelligent workingman, who was very young at the time, related curious details with regard to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought himself obliged to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as unworthy of official style. The processes of disinfection were, at that epoch, extremely rudimentary. Hardly had Bruneseau crossed the first articulations of that subterranean network, when eight laborers out of the twenty refused to go any further. The operation was complicated; the visit entailed the necessity of cleaning; hence it was necessary to cleanse and at the same time, to proceed; to note the entrances of water, to count the gratings and the vents, to lay out in detail the branches, to indicate the currents at the point where they parted, to define the respective bounds of the divers basins, to sound the small sewers grafted on the principal sewer, to measure the height under the key-stone of each drain, and the width, at the spring of the vaults as well as at the bottom, in order to determine the arrangements with regard to the level of each water-entrance, either of the bottom of the arch, or on the soil of the street. They advanced with toil. The lanterns pined away in the foul atmosphere. From time to time, a fainting sewerman was carried out. At certain points, there were precipices. The soil had given away, the pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a bottomless well; they found nothing solid; a man disappeared suddenly; they had great difficulty in getting him out again. On the advice of Fourcroy, they lighted large cages filled with tow steeped in resin, from time to time, in spots which had been sufficiently disinfected. In some places, the wall was covered with misshapen fungi,--one would have said tumors; the very stone seemed diseased within this unbreathable atmosphere.

Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down hill. At the point of separation of the two water-conduits of the Grand-Hurleur, he deciphered upon a projecting stone the date of 1550; this stone indicated the limits where Philibert Delorme, charged by Henri II. with visiting the subterranean drains of Paris, had halted. This stone was the mark of the sixteenth century on the sewer; Bruneseau found the handiwork of the seventeenth century once more in the Ponceau drain of the old Rue Vielle-du-Temple, vaulted between 1600 and 1650; and the handiwork of the eighteenth in the western section of the collecting canal, walled and vaulted in 1740. These two vaults, especially the less ancient, that of 1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt sewer, which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh water of Menilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the Grand Sewer of Paris, an advancement analogous to that of a peasant who should become first valet de chambre to the King; something like Gros-Jean transformed into Lebel.

Here and there, particularly beneath the Court-House, they thought they recognized the hollows of ancient dungeons, excavated in the very sewer itself. Hideous in-pace. An iron neck-collar was hanging in one of these cells. They walled them all up. Some of their finds were singular; among others, the skeleton of an ourang-outan, who had disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with the famous and indisputable apparition of the devil in the Rue des Bernardins, in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil had ended by drowning himself in the sewer.

Beneath this long, arched drain which terminated at the Arche-Marion, a perfectly preserved rag-picker's basket excited the admiration of all connoisseurs. Everywhere, the mire, which the sewermen came to handle with intrepidity, abounded in precious objects, jewels of gold and silver, precious stones, coins. If a giant had filtered this cesspool, he would have had the riches of centuries in his lair. At the point where the two branches of the Rue du Temple and of the Rue Sainte-Avoye separate, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on one side the pig hooded with a cardinal's hat, and on the other, a wolf with a tiara on his head.

The most surprising rencounter was at the entrance to the Grand Sewer. This entrance had formerly been closed by a grating of which nothing but the hinges remained. From one of these hinges hung a dirty and shapeless rag which, arrested there in its passage, no doubt, had floated there in the darkness and finished its process of being torn apart. Bruneseau held his lantern close to this rag and examined it. It was of very fine batiste, and in one of the corners, less frayed than the rest, they made out a heraldic coronet and embroidered above these seven letters: LAVBESP. The crown was the coronet of a Marquis, and the seven letters signified Laubespine. They recognized the fact, that what they had before their eyes was a morsel of the shroud of Marat. Marat in his youth had had amorous intrigues. This was when he was a member of the household of the Comte d'Artois, in the capacity of physician to the Stables. From these love affairs, historically proved, with a great lady, he had retained this sheet. As a waif or a souvenir. At his death, as this was the only linen of any fineness which he had in his house, they buried him in it. Some old women had shrouded him for the tomb in that swaddling-band in which the tragic Friend of the people had enjoyed voluptuousness. Bruneseau passed on. They left that rag where it hung; they did not put the finishing touch to it. Did this arise from scorn or from respect? Marat deserved both. And then, destiny was there sufficiently stamped to make them hesitate to touch it. Besides, the things of the sepulchre must be left in the spot which they select. In short, the relic was a strange one. A Marquise had slept in it; Marat had rotted in it; it had traversed the Pantheon to end with the rats of the sewer. This chamber rag, of which Watteau would formerly have joyfully sketched every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the fixed gaze of Dante.

The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of Paris lasted seven years, from 1805 to 1812. As he proceeded, Bruneseau drew, directed, and completed considerable works; in 1808 he lowered the arch of the Ponceau, and, everywhere creating new lines, he pushed the sewer, in 1809, under the Rue Saint-Denis as far as the fountain of the Innocents; in 1810, under the Rue Froidmanteau and under the Salpetriere; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue du Mail, under the Rue de l'Echarpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812, under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussee d'Antin. At the same time, he had the whole net-work disinfected and rendered healthful. In the second year of his work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance of his son-in-law Nargaud.

It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient society cleansed its double bottom, and performed the toilet of its sewer. There was that much clean, at all events.

Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies, jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically, fetid, wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices on its pavements and scars on its walls, terrible,--such was, retrospectively viewed, the antique sewer of Paris. Ramifications in every direction, crossings, of trenches, branches, goose-feet, stars, as in military mines, coecum, blind alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre, pestiferous pools, scabby sweats, on the walls, drops dripping from the ceilings, darkness; nothing could equal the horror of this old, waste crypt, the digestive apparatus of Babylon, a cavern, ditch, gulf pierced with streets, a titanic mole-burrow, where the mind seems to behold that enormous blind mole, the past, prowling through the shadows, in the filth which has been splendor.

This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 5.2.4 “Unknown Details”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say no sewer explorers in 1805 ever came upon a piece of cloth and realized (definitively!) that it was the shroud of Marat. Nothing works like that.

So why is Hugo telling the story, which seems to come from a charming but hardly ironclad source, a workman who was present at the time?

Clearly we’re returning to Hugo’s notion that secrets surface down here, not necessarily to betray their long-deceased owners, but in a kind of sometimes-quaint museum of preservation.

And it’s so, so very like the convent? Marat’s alleged shroud with it’s alleged history of secret amours feels just like the old nun’s treasured secret bawdy plate, where little cupids are being chased by the cure for syphilis. And, of course, the darker side of the convent is here too: Hugo references again the in pace, medieval torture cells first described in connection to convents, and describes how Bruneseau’s party found evidence of them below the Palais du Justice. Sweet memories and horrible tragedies of the last centuries are right on the surface here. So is unbelievable wealth, gone to waste where it’s not much use to anyone. And some living beings come here to rot and die.

But instead of preserving a single specific part of the past the way the convent does, the sewer preserves the whole worldly past of the city.

I keep thinking about the convent passage about the corpse and the flower and the dead fish and so on, demanding to be appreciated as they were in life and calling their rejector an “ingrate”--Marius’s trigger word. The sewer seems in that respect much more benevolent than the convent: its relics aren’t demanding anything of anyone.

Still, it’s probably for the best that Marius is unconscious. For Valjean, this place may be a lot of fellow-secrets who no longer have to keep their masks on, but for Marius it sounds like an infinite menu of obligations to the greatness of the past, and he is uniquely bad at resisting that kind of thing.

Bruneseau is smart enough to leave Marat’s shroud where it is: he doesn’t disturb the tomb, he doesn’t try to preserve the past unduly, he doesn’t mess with the destiny that clings to things down here. Pilf was talking yesterday about how Bruneseau is the anti-Great Man: he didn’t do anything glorious, he didn’t do anything alone, he just got some people together, went to the place where things were very bad, and fixed them. And this resisting the pull of Destiny feels like part of that: he’s neither too enamored nor too dismissive of the past. His goal is only to make the future a little better.

And he fixes up the worst of it, cleaning the sewer and extending its reach to the extent that he’s able--a kind of fixing and future-proofing that never happened to the convent. He’s the ideal reformer, bravely venturing into the lowest depths and respectfully and without ego improving what he finds there as best he can.

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V.ii.4 Détails ignorés

Which is your favorite translation of this chapter title?

Details Ignored

Concealed Details

Details But Little Known

Unknown Details

Details Nobody Knows

Voting ended onMar 27, 2025

In perhaps one of the funniest translation goofs, it appears (at least going by the Gutenberg version) that Hapgood did not translate this title? Détails ignorés indeed. I believe @blatherby found “Bruneseau’s Visit” in an edited printing, which doesn’t seem fitting either and may be a later emendation to fill in this gap.

Details Ignored: Wilbour

Concealed Details: Wraxall

[error 404 title not found]: Hapgood

Details But Little Known: Gray

Unknown Details: Denny, FMA, Donougher

Details Nobody Knows: Rose