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Round 1, Matchup 204: V.i.14 vs V.viii.4

Which chapter title do you prefer?

In Which We Learn the Name of Enjolras' Mistress

Attraction and Extinction

Voting ended onMay 26, 2025

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It's less than a week until the end. I've lost count of how many times I've said this, but each subsequent chapter becomes more unbearable to read than the last.

This one dissects Valjean's torment of being unable to simply stop visiting Cosette. It's painful to witness his daily ritual of leaving the house and heading toward the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, only to fall short of reaching his destination. Hugo informs us that this routine persisted for several months. What's even more distressing is the absence of information—yet to be revealed in the next chapter—regarding Cosette's reaction to Valjean's prolonged absence. At this stage, some readers might begin to accuse Cosette of neglecting and forgetting him. He's an old man living on his own, and anything could have happened during these months. He might have even passed away in his house, unnoticed by anyone. The situation is dire and heart-wrenching. However, Hugo chooses to withhold crucial puzzle pieces for later.

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This chapter remains one of the saddest things I’ve ever read. I both hate and love how Hugo takes so much time to describe Valjean’s tear as it begins to fall, letting us dwell on the depth of his despair. His failure to walk all the way is hard to read, too. The children following him calls to mind his time as Père Madeleine, but whereas they once followed him out of joy, now they follow him because they think he’s mad in his despair. It’s awful.

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Brickclub 5.8.5 “Attraction and Extinction”

I wish I were more in sync with Hugo at this point, because this truly is a horribly sad chapter. Valjean is fading: every day he walks up almost to the street Cosette lives on but never quite sets foot on it, then gradually he gives up even getting that far. We’ve come full circle, with his being enough of a visible outcast that children follow him him in the streets mocking him, the way they did when he first left the bagne.

I don’t know if it’s a deliberate influence of that horrible Gillenormand house or just the way Hugo writes old men, but Valjean has imitated the one sort of pitiable quality of Gillenormand, which is saying everything he possibly can to make his kid believe he doesn’t want to be around them while secretly pining for them to see through it and do exactly the opposite--though, of course, he’s acting out of a self-abnegation and (at least attempted) selflessness that’s absolutely antithetical to everything Gillenormand is. It’s a very different kind of frustrating and horrible when Valjean does it, where it’s actually a good relationship that he’s ended for no reason.

(The better comparison is Georges, of course, who was also separated from his kid by Gillenormand-family machinations and manipulation. But Georges kept his seat in the church to observe Marius--and Georges kept his self-esteem and pride and kept living his life. It was horribly sad and cruel, but it wasn’t this. (Fantine, of course, never resigned herself to anything the way Valjean or Georges did, and she was fighting tooth and nail to get Cosette back up to the moment of her death.))

It’s all still hard, though, because I think we’re meant to be a lot more on board for Marius getting to decide who Cosette sees. We’re supposed to think Marius is *mistaken,* taking the part of Gillenormand against Georges or the Thenardiers against Fantine, but I’m not sure we’re supposed to be reading this as the gross overreach and horrifyingly controlling bullshit it reads as being to me. I don’t think I’m supposed to be saying “WTF why would Marius get to have any say in ANY of this???“

Which, of course, I am.

The other thing about this chapter is: this is the end of book 8 of this tome. The first three tomes all ended on book 8; tome 4 went to book 15, and this last tome will be 9 books. If we ended at book 8, the way we’ve usually done, the end of the book would be right here.

Is it valid, then, to say we’re averting the doom of 8′s by having a final book after this? ...Maybe. The other thing about this numbering system (btw, it really helps to look at the table of contents for the Project Gutenberg version of Hapgood, where this is all laid out) is that tome 4 ended in an objectively insane place (Gavroche was cheerily stealing a cart) instead of one book later at the end of the barricades, a natural stopping point. If Hugo had included the end of the barricades in tome 4, that would have made tome 4 16 books, which isn’t 8 but it’s a multiple of 8. And tome 5 would have been 8 books.

Putting the barricades at the beginning of 5 rather than the end of 4 was a deliberate censorship dodge on Hugo’s part: ending with the most rousing-to-arms section of this novel would have been a disaster for getting this book published under Napoleon III’s dictatorship, so he didn’t. Beginning book 5 with a confusing apologia for 1848, then moving through the barricades to then spend a full tome’s length on a fluffy apolitical bourgeois marriage plot was much, much safer.

But it also means that we avert the doom of 8′s twice, and we end the novel in a section that’s 9 books long. That is: a ninth book is showing up at the very end to make things just a little less horrifically bad--the same way, most of a tome ago, Enjolras’s ninth friend showed up at the very end to do the same.

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