J/M/B, yeah?:D Under the Unfortunate Rule of Karaoke that no one really gets exactly the song they’d pick themselves:
All three of them- We’re All In This Together, High School Musical (it’s their drunk dance routine that really Makes it) or Birdhouse In Your Soul (when they get to make their own playlist, they like showing off how well they can do “I’ve Decided To Marry You”, from A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, together, but Alas Karaoke Bars)
Musichetta on her own goes for Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights or “anything from a musical based on a book” , if she can’t find that one.
Joly on his own usually goes for The Heart Song (”Joly you know those aren’t the real lyrics right” “THEY’RE THE ONES I KNOW BLAME SCHOOL”) because The Lumineers’ Hey Ho is usually on the list
Bossuet does Eliza Doolittle’s Pack Up if it’s an option, and a very intentionally hammy (and yet Still Hot, in the opinion of Certain Members of the Audience) version of Take Me Home Tonight if it’s not
(a close runner up for all of them is “any song Weird Al covered” , so they can sing the Weird Al version)
It’s definitely canon that Joly and Bossuet have both been involved with Musichetta, and that Joly and Bossuet live together more often than not, and are in general Partners. From Preliminary Gayeties (4.12.2, Hapgood Edition):
Laigle de Meaux, as the reader knows, lived more with Joly than elsewhere. He had a lodging, as a bird has one on a branch. The two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. They had everything in common, even Musichetta, to some extent. They were, what the subordinate monks who accompany monks are called, bini.
And of course it’s established way back in 3.4.4 that Joly and Musichetta are An Item! Hugo never specifies their relationship beyond that; you can headcanon a full-on poly trio, Musichetta being on-again-off-again with both of them, Musichetta having dated one or the other of them first, both of them having dated her at some point before realizing that actually they’re just gay together, whatever. Current LM Fandom (and I very much include myself in this) has generally settled on the obvious poly reading.
If you were to pin me down and ask me under duress what I think Hugo Really Intended in full cultural context…? Honestly, I’d hazard that he intends them to be an established Relationship Triad. And probably one with minimal drama about it! Like, really-really, that would be my honest cultural-context-based, broader-reading supported interpretation. But I do think Hugo was probably thinking of the three of them according to a specific formulation that would have been recognized as a pretty Standard Trope by his readers.
Long nattering under the cut!
The two young men left the room arm in arm, and it was easy to guess, from seeing them on such good terms, that one was the official lover, and the other the loved lover, of the same person. –Mlle. de Maupin, Theophile Gautier, 1835 (chapter 7)
I’m sure that the whole culture of affairs and lovers and mistresses in 19th century Paris has been the subject of books and endless papers, because it’s complicated and well documented in lots of primary sources. An extremely simplified summation: despite the potential brutality of the official law in dealing with affairs, it was accepted as almost a given that men and women would both have lovers outside of their “official” relationship. For men and women whose relationships were bound to be socially unofficial– lovers with no intent to formalize things– this was even more true.
There were various formations of the husband/ wife/lover– or official lover/mistress/second lover–trio. One of the common ones–and probably one of the easiest to manage for everyone involved– was for the Official Lover or Husband and the Second Lover to actually know each other, and know about each other and be on good terms. This was so common as to actually be almost proverbial– “ like the husband (or Official Lover) and the lover” was a shorthand for two guys being extremely good friends, as seen in that Mlle. de Maupin quote, above.
Along with that, the Husband(/Official Lover, but I’m just going to go with Husband from now on because…it’s shorter><) and Lover commonly (though of course not universally) fit into certain social roles. The Husband would be the more socially presentable, usually wealthier, “officially” involved only with the woman at the center of the trio; the Lover might be poorer, or socially not permissible for various reasons, or officially committed to another woman.
But as the saying goes, just because there were no laws in no way means that there were no rules. Affairs were an acknowledged fact of life, but affairs going public were still seen as a disaster. Maintaining the social appearance of monogamy was crucial. Ideally for everyone, it would be an accepted and friendly arrangement with the whole trio; the better the Official and Unofficial partners got along, after all, the less danger of the whole thing blowing up in everyone’s face.
(Also, there’s the Queer Factor in here for sure. It’s impossible to say how many lover/friend pairings were having an affair with each other as much or more than with their presumed shared heteropartner, but it would be silly to think it wasn’t happening sometimes.)
This was obviously easier when everyone was operating somewhat unofficially and there were no questions of paternity or property at risk, but it certainly happened in married households too. Hugo himself lived with the Wife-Shared Man-Mistress version of such a friendly arrangement for a while, when his mistress Leonie Baird moved in with his family , becoming a close friend of his wife Adele, and there’s some evidence that he encouraged various close friends of his to take the Lover role with Adele in their later years.
Hugo absolutely knew all this; he talked about it directly as a common thing and mentioned his own (frequent) role as the Lover in the setup (in a quote I will certainly manage to find just a little too late for this post, sigh ><).
So Hugo would have been expecting readers to parse well off, professional-to-be Joly, and flat broke, socially unacceptable Bossuet both having Musichetta “in common, a bit” to be an immediately recognizable arrangement–Official Couple Plus Friend Everyone Assumes is the Third. How mutually accepted and open and happy readers would consider that arrangement would vary by reader, of course. But the standard fandom interpretation of them as a happy poly triad is entirely plausible, and the three of them romantically overlapping somehow is just flat out stated canon.
I honestly just love everything about this ship I love the puns, I love the sense of humor, I love how easy it is and I really really love that when presented with two canonically-life-partnered guys and an ALSO canonically-involved-with-both-of-them woman, the fandom didn’t muck about with gross love triangles or try to destroy either ship for the other but just went “so they’re poly, cool” and kept on truckin’
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
mostly for Ve, but also for anyone else who didn’t know that Eglantine’s got a whole lovely series about this trio! (warning I guess for implied/discussed sexual content, but nothing really NSFW! There’s hugging. Lots of hugging.)
Additional Tags: long-delayed gratification, Canon Era, getting drunk on the floor, unabashed gossip and speculation, I have come to sleep with you, and now there's a threesome
Series: Part 2 of
Joly&Bossuet&Musichetta
Summary:
"I suspect you have grown weary of being thought of as one half of a whole."
Part One: Bossuet moves out.
Part Two: Musichetta joins in.
Part Three: Joly asks around.
lalala I neeeeed to draaawwww smaller projeeeectssss
Also apparently my brain has decided that Bossuet and Musichetta are total gossip pals and go to parties and tell each other awful things about the other guests and I'm okay with this Not so thrilled with myself for drawing it TWICE but what the heck it was a for-practice thing I WILL PAY MORE ATTENTION TO MYSELF IN THE FUTURE or probably not, this is why I need to draw smaller projects!
also also middle left panel that's a compass why are compasses tiny why am I such a hack
☯ for Musichetta, ▼ for Bossuet, ♒ for Joly since you're cooking too!
Musichetta mostly hates being rushed; she likes to do things to her standards and sometimes that means being finicky and time-consuming, darn it. She’s also got an unabashed love for Tiny Versions of Regular Things; there’s a little collection of various miniatures in her apartment. (And this is one more reason why it is HER apartment, and not a place she especially wants to share with her dear multi-cat-owning, furniture-moving, destruction-inviting male friends.)Bossuet was a much quieter kid than anyone who knows him in Paris would believe; he’d talk a lot, but only to people he knew pretty well, which amounted to his parents and one or two other kids in one on one conversations. With most people he was so quiet that some of his teachers thought there might be hearing loss or something.since he was already very social and clearly not shy, but nope, he was just quiet. (The verbal taps turned on about age 13 and the adults around him started to quickly miss the good old days of him being The Quiet One.)
Joly- Joly has an awful sense of taste.Like, physically. A perpetual rotation of allergies and head colds has made him only slightly less anosmic than Bossuet. It’s convenient, then, that they’re BOTH perfectly content to eat food spiced and salted nigh beyond recognition or to within an inch of being a chemical weapon (because Herbs are healthy, you know! Here, let’s put some chamomile on that potato, it’ll help you sleep.)
