The Les Mis thing I can’t stop thinking about today: in the book Valjean’s decision to confess to Marius and begin distancing himself from his family is described as Valjean choosing to drown himself.
Javert drowned himself in the Seine, but Valjean chose to drown himself too– by deliberately cutting himself off from life and happiness.
Cosette, that charming existence, was the raft of this shipwreck. What was he to do? To cling fast to it, or to let go his hold?
If he clung to it, he should emerge from disaster, he should ascend again into the sunlight, he should let the bitter water drip from his garments and his hair, he was saved, he should live.
And if he let go his hold?
Cosette is a raft, Cosette is the only thing keeping him above water— he chooses to let go, to plunge into the abyss, and drown.
To impose his prison upon these two dazzling children, or to consummate by himself his irremediable drowning.
(some translations translate “drowning” as “engulfment,”but this is the Fahnestock/McAffee translation which is!!!! ahh!!!)
Many lines in the chapter where Valjean to cut himself out of Cosette’s life (”The Immortal Liver”) are eerie echoes of lines in the chapter where Javert commits suicide (”Javert Derailed.”)
He beheld before him two paths, both equally straight, but he beheld two; and that terrified him; him, who had never in all his life known more than one straight line. And, the poignant anguish lay in this, that the two paths were contrary to each other. One of these straight lines excluded the other. Which of the two was the true one?
He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had that gloomy intersection beneath his eyes. On this occasion once more, as had happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out before him, the one tempting, the other alarming.
There were only two ways to get out of it. One, to go resolutely to Valjean, and return the convict to the dungeon. The other….
To impose his prison upon these two dazzling children, or to consummate by himself his irremediable drowning.
Something barred his way in that direction.
To feel the sacred shadow that bars the way.
Jean Valjean’s generosity towards him, Javert, crushed him.
Prostrate beneath the enormity of fate, crushed, perchance, alas!
His hand had relaxed and had let him go free. (…) to suddenly feel one’s fingers opening! to relax one’s grip,—what a terrible thing!
To cling fast to it, or to let go his hold? (….) and if he let go? the abyss.
the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse with its rigid road, could be unseated by a flash of light! (….) God, always within man, and refractory, He, the true conscience, to the false; a prohibition to the spark to die out; an order to the ray to remember the sun…..
How many times, hurled to earth by the light, had he begged for mercy! How many times had that implacable spark, lighted within him, and upon him by the Bishop, dazzled him by force when he had wished to be blind!
What lay below was not water, it was a gulf.
To which of the gulfs did he nod his head?
The ending of both chapters is eerily similar too:
Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this opening of shadow.
He was as motionless as a corpse, while his thoughts wallowed on the earth and soared, now like the hydra, now like the eagle. Any one to behold him thus motionless would have pronounced him dead.
There are so many more lines that echo each other too and I could make this post really long, but it’s like….?
I also think it’s so interesting that Javert’s ultimate Realization is that putting your “selfish personal motives” above your sense of duty can sometimes be a good thing:
“And I in showing mercy upon him in my turn—what have I done? My duty? No. Something more. So there is something beyond duty?”
But Valjean seems to have the exact opposite belief, seeing his “selfish” desire to be with Cosette as the opposite of his Good desire to do his duty:
How many times had his refractory thoughts rattled convulsively in his throat, under the evidence of duty!
in this fight to the death between our egotism and our duty, when we thus retreat step by step before our immutable ideal, bewildered, furious, exasperated at having to yield, disputing the ground, hoping for a possible flight, seeking an escape, what an abrupt and sinister resistance does the foot of the wall offer in our rear!
It’s like Valjean lost the ability to tell the difference between noble self-sacrifice and pure self-destruction.
And it just really Gets me that…… Valjean saved Javert’s life, even when Javert thought it was his duty to die. And Javert let Valjean go free, even when Valjean dutifully turned himself in.
Valjean believed Javert’s life was worth saving, and Javert ultimately believed that Valjean’s life was worth saving. They saw the value in each other’s lives but couldn’t see it in their own.
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