Latest Posts by particolored-arts - Page 4

the only true adaptation of les mis is this one

me, sobbing over all these goshdarned adaptions: why isnt bossuet bald? why is he never bald?? hes supposed to be bald???

@pilferingapples oh my God this makes it even better. party trio courfeyrac bossuet and grantaire hitting the club. "dynamite" by taio cruz playing in the background. 🕺🕺🕺

grantaire is in love with enjolras and enjolras is just wondering what this gremlin man is doing hanging around the friends of the abc so dang much and this upsets me greatly but not because i want them to kiss: an essay.

part three: “enjolras and his lieutenants” – or, oh gawd the secondhand embarrassment is awful.

part one | part two

prologue: a short interlude in which grantaire interacts with other people and there is minimal drama.

from “marius, while seeking a girl in a bonnet encounters a man in a cap” :

Once, having confidence in a fine September sun, Marius had allowed himself to be taken to the ball at Sceaux by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and Grantaire, hoping, what a dream! that he might, perhaps, find her there. Of course he did not see the one he sought. -- “But this is the place, all the same, where all lost women are found,” grumbled Grantaire in an aside. Marius left his friends at the ball and returned home on foot, alone, through the night, weary, feverish, with sad and troubled eyes, stunned by the noise and dust of the merry wagons filled with singing creatures on their way home from the feast, which passed close to him, as he, in his discouragement, breathed in the acrid scent of the walnut-trees, along the road, in order to refresh his head.

i need to stop calling grantaire “honey,” but somehow that is just the automatic response that pops into my head at these things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

look at this, though. grantaire’s second appearance in a scene (if barely described) is -- wait for it -- another one where enjolras doesn’t enter into the equation. in fact it’s one of courfeyrac’s attempts to cheer marius up.

R is being a bit of a pill here, in that he’s niggling at marius to find a new girl to moon over when clearly marius wants to Not Do That, but -- look at the wording. it’s an aside, and a short one at that. he’s not directing the comment directly at marius, who no doubt would be morbidly offended by it. he’s not being obtrusive or annoying, just making a small remark. and that’s all of the description hugo deigns to give us about it.

it’s a ball at sceaux -- sceaux being about 10 km south by southwest from the center of paris. there’s a little chateau there, a park, gardens, it’s very pretty. an event there would likely be one of several society events the likes of which courfeyrac, as a former de courfeyrac and therefore extremely bourgeois, probably gets invitations to on a regular basis.

only it’s not only courfeyrac who brings marius along, it’s also bossuet (who he first met; who is unluckily poor nine days out of ten) and grantaire (who we hadn’t seen marius interact with at all before; who is if not bad company then disreputable company).

i hate to keep hammering at the point, except that i don’t.

my garbage nerd son has good friends. and they enjoy his company enough that they don’t drag him along to parties complaining, he willingly goes with them from the get-go. it’s marius who acts like the old “hit the ball drag fred” golf joke.

grantaire isn’t a burden on his friends. he loves them.

... okay. now that a small cute thing is out of the way, on to the main event.

lots of screaming ahead, folks.

“That arranges everything,” said Courfeyrac.

“No.”

“What else is there?”

“A very important thing.”

“What is that?” asked Courfeyrac.

“The Barriere du Maine,” replied Enjolras.

Enjolras remained for a moment as though absorbed in reflection, then he resumed: --

“At the Barriere du Maine there are marble-workers, painters, and journeymen in the studios of sculptors. They are an enthusiastic family, but liable to cool off. I don't know what has been the matter with them for some time past. They are thinking of something else. They are becoming extinguished. They pass their time playing dominoes. There is urgent need that some one should go and talk with them a little, but with firmness. They meet at Richefeu’s. They are to be found there between twelve and one o'clock. Those ashes must be fanned into a glow.

so it looks like the barrière du maine is right up grantaire’s alley, from the very first mention of it. marble-workers ( “what fine marble!” ), painters, sculptors. these are people that grantaire probably knows very well.

but the rest of enjolras’ description is what, on the second read-through, made me thump my computer and say aloud, in probably too loud of a voice, “really, hugo??”

an enthusiastic family, but liable to cool off. thinking of something else. pass their time playing dominoes. those ashes must be fanned into a glow.

does that sound ........... like anybody else we know, enjolras?

That Right Thar Sounds Like A Meta Fer Somethin’ If’n Ya Ask Me!

For that errand I had counted on that abstracted Marius, who is a good fellow on the whole, but he no longer comes to us.

RE -- REALLY? YOU WERE GOING TO ASK MARIUS??

IT’S EIGHTEEN THIRTY-TWO, ENJOLRAS. THE LAST TIME MARIUS CAME TO THE BACK ROOM OF THE MUSAIN WAS IN EIGHTEEN TWENTY-EIGHT WHEN COMBEFERRE HANDED HIS ASS TO HIM, ENJOLRAS. IT’S BEEN FOUR YEARS.

enjolras is sharp as a tack in terms of politics, in terms of persuasion, in terms of battle tactics. but the guy’s a little blunter in terms of interpersonal relationships. i love him. i do. i promise. he is also a nerd ( as exhibited by his wonderful off-the-cuff straight-faced pun earlier in this passage, “joly will go to dupuytren's clinical lecture, and feel the pulse of the medical school” ), and i love him for it.

but -- in keeping with other facets of his characterization ( “silence in the presence of jean-jacques! i admire that man. he denied his own children, yes, but he adopted the people” ) -- enjolras really doesn’t have much of a clue about what makes normal human people tick.

enjo is just as contradictory and human as grantaire, and this scene is one place we really see it.

the artists at the barrière du maine need their passion for revolution to be stoked. well. so does the one right in your backyard, enjolras.

we know from the prose intro that grantaire doesn’t believe. but has enjolras ever tried to convert him? or did he just hear grantaire going off on a tangent about the hopelessness of the world, and never even bother?

this might come back to bite him ...

I need some one for the Barriere du Maine. I have no one.”

“What about me?” said Grantaire. “Here am I.”

“You?”

“I.”

grantaire -- who it is implied never does anything like this -- has just volunteered for a mission.

notice here that enjolras tutoies grantaire in the original french -- he addresses him informally. this might be important later, especially because hugo being hugo, pronoun usage can be a major plot point.

“You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown cold in the name of principle!”

“Why not?”

BECAUSE YOU NEVER WANTED TO BEFORE.

why does he want to do it now? we’re never given an answer. all we’re given is an outsider’s view -- or enjolras’ view -- of the conversation. nothing internal on grantaire’s sudden wish to be useful. (though knowing hugo, and knowing me, that would just result in more screaming.)

“Are you good for anything?”

in the original french, the question is, “est-ce que tu peux être bon à quelque chose ?”

literally: can you be good for something?

this is a sarcastic, rhetorical question. enjolras isn’t actually looking for an answer.

“I have a vague ambition in that direction,” said Grantaire.

but grantaire answers it earnestly, as though enjolras were looking for an answer. he’s frank with enjolras: he has a vague ambition towards being good for something -- i.e., the revolution -- i.e., enjolras. he wants to be good for enjolras. (“good,” as in “useful” : he wants to be as pylades to him.)

given enjolras’ utter bewilderment just before this, this is probably the first time grantaire has voiced anything of the sort. this is, and i cannot stress it enough, an abnormal occurrence.

“You do not believe in everything.”

“I believe in you.”

WELL FUCK ME SIDEWAYS I GUESS !!!!!

enjolras tutoies grantaire, presumably out of that mild disdain mentioned from earlier chapters. “tu ne crois à rien.” -> you believe in nothing.

grantaire tutoies him back. “je crois à toi.” -> i believe in you.

note here, he says “je crois à toi,” not “je crois en toi.”

from l’académie française :

“Croire à quelqu’un signifie tenir pour certaine son existence, admettre son pouvoir : Il croit aux revenants. Il ne croit ni à Dieu ni à Diable.”

to hold someone’s existence for certain, to admit their power.

that is what he thinks of enjolras. and he uses tutoiement to do it.

if he had vouvoied enjolras (addressed him formally), i’m not gonna lie, i probably would have started shrieking, and not in a good way. but what it looks like here is grantaire addressing enjolras with the familiarity of a friend, when it’s just been made clear a handful of lines ago that they are not friends, they are just people who have friends in common.

(or if you want to get really pedantic and symbolic, i can draw attention to the fact that the french use tutoiement for God as well as their friends and family. probably for similar reasons, on a theological level, but i digress. point being that this implies grantaire believes in enjolras the exact same way that someone else would believe in a deity.)

look at this. look at this. grantaire is being utterly transparent about his feelings. he’s not diving off into an extended ramble, he’s not orating to all and sundry. he says four little words that mean everything, and he leaves it at that.

grantaire’s dialogue so far in this scene has been short, concise, one sentence at a time. sometimes even one word at a time. he’s really not trying to yank enjolras’ chain here. at least --

“Grantaire will you do me a service?”

“Anything. I'll black your boots.”

-- until this happens.

i have a suspicion that the joke, “i’ll black your boots,” with its possibly sexual undertones if you’ve got a dirty enough mind, is a hasty retreat from the earnestness of “anything.” grantaire has not yet understood that he is in love with enjolras. (that won’t come until literally his dying breath.) but he does now understand that whatever he feels for enjolras is very strong, and he’s a little afraid of the implication.

“Well, don’t meddle with our affairs. Sleep yourself sober from your absinthe.”

“You are an ingrate, Enjolras.”

enjolras soundly refuses grantaire’s offer, tacking on a sentence implying that the only reason grantaire offered at all is because he’s drunk off his gourd. and grantaire replies -- immediately -- that enjolras is ungrateful for rejecting him.

this is a once in a lifetime offer. take it while it’s still on the table, buddy.

(oh, grantaire. the reverse also applies ...)

“You the man to go to the Barriere du Maine! You capable of it!”

“I am capable of descending the Rue de Gres, of crossing the Place Saint-Michel, of sloping through the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, of taking the Rue de Vaugirard, of passing the Carmelites, of turning into the Rue d’Assas, of reaching the Rue du Cherche-Midi, of leaving behind me the Conseil de Guerre, of pacing the Rue des Vielles Tuileries, of striding across the boulevard, of following the Chaussee du Maine, of passing the barrier, and entering Richefeu’s. I am capable of that.

i’ve mentioned before in part one that this mini monologue works to show us how familiar grantaire is with the city on foot. he can map out a route verbally on request. whether he’s been cogitating over it from the first mention enjolras made of richefeu’s, or whether he’s just speaking off-the-cuff in the moment, the point is he knows paris (or at least that section of paris) like the back of his hand.

My shoes are capable of that.”

i love you.

“Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu’s?”

“Not much. We only address each other as thou.”

grantaire tutoies the richefeu gang. that sounds pretty dang useful to me!

but also ...

... okay. time for a digression about translations, and translations of tutoiement and vouvoiement specifically.

anyone who’s heard me rant about this before (and i know some of y’all have) can skip to the next quoted section. i’m just flogging a dead horse at this point.

but ... hapgood. hapgood. you’re my favorite translator for les mis. but if you’re gonna use the thou/you archaic english in/formal dichotomy, to show the tu/vous french in/formal dichotomy, then you have to be internally consistent.

enjolras and grantaire are addressing each other as “tu” the entire time. not “vous.” therefore, the dialogue should go something like this:

thou dost believe in nothing. / i believe in thee.

grantaire, wilt thou do me a service? / anything. i’ll black thy boots.

well, do not meddle in our affairs. sleep thyself sober from thine absinthe. / thou art an ingrate, enjolras.

sound clunky and awkward? well, yeah, to our modern ears, because english dropped the in/formal dichotomy pretty suddenly in the 17th century, and the “thou” form was solidified as an archaic form of speech in samuel johnson’s a grammar of the english tongue.

modern english doesn’t have a cultural understanding of the in/formal second person pronoun connotations the same way that french does. that’s a difference that translators have to juggle, and some of them struggle with it. i get it. i’ve tried my hand at translating passages from les mis before, i’ve torn my hair out over it with the valjean & javert barricade scene, i get it. but ...

consistency is all i ask!

“What will you say to them?”

“I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi! Of Danton. Of principles.”

“You?”

“I. But I don’t receive justice. When I set about it, I am terrible. I have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my constitution of the year Two by heart. ‘The liberty of one citizen ends where the liberty of another citizen begins.’

oh, honey.

he’s memorized so many other things. quoted ecclesiastes, quoted horace, pulled dates and figures out of his hat extemporaneously. and among all the myriad things he has memorized, he took the time to learn by heart the republican tracts that all of his friends espouse.

Do you take me for a brute?

i don’t think you want the answer to that :(

I have an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer. The Rights of Man, the sovereignty of the people, sapristi! I am even a bit of a Hebertist. I can talk the most superb twaddle for six hours by the clock, watch in hand.”

and i bet you can, at that, if worked into enough of a passion about it.

grantaire talks about what he’s passionate about. he talks about the suffering of the world, the repetition of history, the inextricable link between vice and virtue. he cares about that.

he cares about enjolras. and, if drunk enough, i would be willing to bet good money that given a sympathetic audience (sans the man himself), grantaire could orate for hours about the pure and perfect halo of enjolras’ golden hair, that symbol of his angelic nature upon the earth, that ferocious righteous cherubim of ezekiel.

but he doesn’t care about the revolution in and of itself. nobody has fanned those ashes into a glow. grantaire could quote as much as he liked about the rights of man, but what audience would agree with a speaker who doesn’t even believe what he himself is saying?

“Be serious,” said Enjolras.

“I am wild,” replied Grantaire.

and here’s the big quote. the one everyone trots out.

it’s a good quote. it’s ... it’s a damn good quote.

it’s even better when you look at the original french.

“sois sérieux.” “je suis farouche.”

from larousse dictionary :

“Se dit d’un animal sauvage qui fuit à l’approche de l’homme. Qui évite les contacts sociaux et dont l’abord est difficile. Qui exprime avec force, vigueur, la violence de quelqu’un ; âpre, véhément.”

said of a savage animal that flees at the approach of a human. someone who avoids social contact and whose social manner is difficult. someone who expresses violence forcefully and vigorously upon someone ; harsh or fierce, vehement.

to be farouche is not just to be wild. it is to be feral.

Enjolras meditated for a few moments, and made the gesture of a man who has taken a resolution.

“Grantaire,” he said gravely, “I consent to try you. You shall go to the Barriere du Maine.”

enjolras has listened to grantaire. he has paid attention to the words that grantaire says, maybe even for the first time ever. he has considered their meaning.

and the result is that he agrees to take a chance on him.

this is monumental! enjolras has bent a little! grantaire argued his case and he won!

this is a victory!

but a small one. enjolras has given grantaire the chance to do something for his cause. it’s what grantaire does with the opportunity that matters the most.

Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Cafe Musain. He went out, and five minutes later he returned. He had gone home to put on a Robespierre waistcoat.

“Red,” said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras.

robespierre red. grantaire has ... a robespierre red waistcoat.

i don’t even know what to say to that. i’ve been trying to think, all day, to come up with a coherent response to the fact that grantaire owns a red robespierre waistcoat. but i got nothing. just inarticulate screaming.

Then, with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet points of the waistcoat across his breast.

And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear: --

“Be easy.”

He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.

oh god. ooooh god. this is fine.

i wonder what everyone else was thinking when they saw that. i know i would have bluescreened.

and we’ve got a little time skip here. a quarter hour after grantaire leaves (in his red robespierre waistcoat), the café musain is empty, and enjolras is reflecting on the revolution, and his friends’ good work, and on his friends’ excellent qualities. it’s a really endearing little section. enjolras isn’t just the metaphorical personification of revolution, he’s human, too. while he doesn’t have hobbies like grantaire does (his hobby is REVOLUTION), he displays the same fiercely devoted love for his friends.

All hands to work. Surely, the result would answer to the effort. This was well. This made him think of Grantaire.

aw, crap.

“Hold,” said he to himself, “the Barriere du Maine will not take me far out of my way. What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu’s? Let us have a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he is getting on.”

oh no.

does anybody else hear the jaws theme in the background right now, or is it just me?

One o’clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras reached the Richefeu smoking-room.

He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door fall to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled with tables, men, and smoke.

A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another voice. It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.

google earth to the rescue. it would take about 35-40 minutes on foot, provided a lack of traffic jams, to walk from the musain to richefeu’s. 30 at a brisk pace.

so let’s call it 45 minutes total between grantaire’s departure and enjolras’ arrival.

given that it is one o’clock when enjolras arrives at richefeu’s, and it is twelve-fifteen when grantaire departs the musain, and it takes grantaire the same length of time to traverse the city that enjolras does --

(ooooh, math in les mis. hugo would be hissing like a cat confronted with water right now. TOO BAD, BUDDY.)

-- grantaire has been at richefeu’s for fifteen minutes tops when enjolras arrives to check on him.

Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos. He was hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard: --

oh no. oh no. noooo. the build-up is terrible. it’s. aw, man. it’s a train wreck coming but you just can’t look away.

“Double-six.”

“Fours.”

“The pig! I have no more.”

“You are dead. A two.”

“Six.”

“Three.”

“One.”

“It’s my move.”

“Four points.”

“Not much.”

“It’s your turn.”

“I have made an enormous mistake.”

“You are doing well.”

“Fifteen.”

“Seven more.”

“That makes me twenty-two.” [Thoughtfully, “Twenty-two!”]

“You weren’t expecting that double-six. If I had placed it at the beginning, the whole play would have been changed.”

“A two again.”

“One.”

“One! Well, five.”

“I haven’t any.”

“It was your play, I believe?”

“Yes.”

“Blank.”

“What luck he has! Ah! You are lucky! [Long revery.] Two.”

“One.”

“Neither five nor one. That's bad for you.”

“Domino.”

“Plague take it!”

PLAGUE TAKE IT, INDEED!

i’ve seen other metas on tumblr about this, about how they want enjolras’ reaction to what he sees. what is enjolras thinking, upon seeing this? does he approach grantaire? does he scold him there, at richefeu’s? does he wait until later, when the company gathers again at the musain, to give him the dressing-down (no innuendoes implied) that he deserves? or does he never mention it at all?

i thoroughly agree with them. i want to resurrect ole vicky and shake him by the shoulders until his teeth rattle and ask him “is that it? how can that be it?? you could write fifty pages about the bishop of digne but you couldn’t spare even one more page on this???”

(that’s not the only thing i want to yell at him about, but that’s neither here nor there.)

we don’t get a follow-up to this scene. the next time that grantaire appears, it is june fifth, and he is crashing joly and bossuet’s brunch date. from then on we’re in full pre-barricade mode.

and the other side to the coin: what on earth is grantaire doing? the other meta writers are pretty vocal about this side of it too.

we’ve got a few options here.

grantaire has already convinced the entire room to join the cause, and then decided to play a game of dominoes after his work is done (unlikely)

grantaire has decided actively to break his promise to try to convince the artists to join the cause, and has decided to faff about and play dominoes instead (unlikely)

grantaire has plum forgotten his promise to enjolras and is just doing what he always does at richefeu’s, which is playing dominoes with a casual acquaintance, no malice intended (likely)

grantaire is in the process of working his way up to a one-on-one conversation about revolution, which is better started with a game of dominoes than with trying to command the attention of the entire room (likely)

grantaire is doing what he always does at richefeu’s, and is trying to think of ways to bring up revolution and therefore fulfill his promise to enjolras, but is stymied for some reason (likely)

that’s really the issue with this scene ending so abruptly. there are multiple possibilities, all of them with different connotations. and with the end of the scene, we get enjolras’ implied exit. certainly we get the reader’s exit.

i personally like the last one. grantaire simply isn’t passionate about the revolutionary cause: he’s passionate about enjolras. but while passion for an individual man can be enough to galvanize people who already have something at stake or who already believe in the cause, it isn’t enough to galvanize people who currently don’t care much one way or another.

there are plenty of watsonian explanations for why grantaire is playing dominoes right now, and there are innumerable ways that fans can extend the scene. but the scene’s quick termination at this particular point has a specific doylist implication here, as far as i can tell.

it doesn’t actually matter why grantaire is playing dominoes right now.

because the fact is that in this particular moment (the moment which enjolras sees: the moment which matters), grantaire is not doing what he promised to do.

enjolras listened to grantaire, and allowed him the opportunity to participate, probably for the very first time in all the time he’s known the man.

and grantaire, for all intents and purposes, has squandered that opportunity.

this scene gets no follow-up because, for all intents and purposes, enjolras now has concrete proof that grantaire isn’t worth a second chance.

oh God it hurts.

Yes, I have the spleen, complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!

Marius: *falls in love with Cosette*

Valjean: sir that’s my emotional support daughter

Marius:

grantaire is in love with enjolras and enjolras is just wondering what this gremlin man is doing hanging around the friends of the abc so dang much and this upsets me greatly but not because i want them to kiss: an essay.

part two: “the back room of the café musain” – or, grantaire is a VERY sad gremlin man, but he has good friends.

read part one here. we’re gonna go through ... all the grantaire scenes, actually. yeah. next up on the docket is gonna be ole R interacting slightly with marius, and interacting with enjolras in the barrière du maine sequence. but for now --

-- action intro! the first time we see grantaire actually interacting with other characters, versus a prose description. basing the analysis off hapgood’s translation here.

we're going sentence by sentence, or handful of sentences, because my boy grantaire doesn’t know what ¶ means. he’s never heard of it. never seen it before in his life. is that like, an indie band? how do you even pronounce it?

anyway.

we’ve been given the groundwork for what to expect in his prose intro, and now: lights, camera, action ...

Grantaire, thoroughly drunk, was deafening the corner of which he had taken possession, reasoning and contradicting at the top of his lungs, and shouting: --

of course he’s commandeered a corner of the room. of course he is shouting at the top of his lungs. my garbage son is a nerd, and a dramatic nerd at that.

“I am thirsty. Mortals, I am dreaming: that the tun of Heidelberg has an attack of apoplexy, and that I am one of the dozen leeches which will be applied to it.

you know, when i went to look this up, i don't rightly know what i was expecting. maybe something poetic.

nope.

the heidelberg tun is a wine cask in a castle in germany, constructed in 1751, which has the capacity to store nearly 60,000 gallons of wine.

grantaire. honey. you overdramatic dumpsterfire. darling.

no.

I want a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is worth nothing. One breaks one’s neck in living. Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an antique reliquary painted on one side only.

sound familiar to anyone?

“tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace from day to day, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. out, out, brief candle! life’s but a walking shadow: a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

cripes, now i want a drink.

Ecclesiastes says: ‘All is vanity.’ I agree with that good man, who never existed, perhaps. Zero not wishing to go stark naked, clothed himself in vanity. O vanity! The patching up of everything with big words! a kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is a professor, an acrobat is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artist, a hodman is an architect, a jockey is a sportsman, a wood-louse is a pterigybranche.

wow, what set my dude off? he’s pretty clearly got an axe to grind about vanity. oh wait --

“aucune femme n’était admise dans cette arrière-salle, excepté louison, la laveuse de vaisselle du café, qui la traversait de temps en temps pour aller de la laverie au « laboratoire ».”

“a kitchen is a laboratory.”

... honey. honey. leave louison alone. let her have her fun. this is not a reason to start monologuing to all and sundry.

Vanity has a right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is the negro with his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the philosopher with his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the other. What are called honors and dignities, and even dignity and honor, are generally of pinchbeck. Kings make playthings of human pride. Caligula made a horse a consul; Charles II. made a knight of a sirloin. Wrap yourself up now, then, between Consul Incitatus and Baronet Roastbeef.

you know the saying about even broken clocks being right twice a day?

sometimes skepticism is toxic crap, but sometimes it lets you see through the crap too. grantaire sees the way people try to elevate their lives with fancy words, and he sees how different motivations play into that vanity, and, well ...

... he weeps at poor people's efforts to dress up their circumstances with a little prettiness. he laughs at rich people’s affectations of more virtue than they actually possess. and he wraps himself back up in sarcasm.

and puns, too, oh my God. it’s impossible to translate it properly into english, but this is what he does in french:

“caligula faisait consul un cheval ; charles ii faisait chevalier un aloyau.” (emphasis mine.)

MY GARBAGE SON IS A NERD.

As for the intrinsic value of people, it is no longer respectable in the least. Listen to the panegyric which neighbor makes of neighbor. White on white is ferocious; if the lily could speak, what a setting down it would give the dove! A bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous than the asp and the cobra.

here we go, cutting through the crap yet again.

please. please. this is fantine’s story from beginning to end. grantaire, without knowing her, has described her tragedy and her victimhood in its entirety.

and, unaware of how he is speaking precisely about the suffering of a single person (a symbol for all women), he uses an example of human meanness to condemn all of humanity.

It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing.

????????????????

self deprecation much??

even if he’s being sarcastic here (signs point to yes), it’s still a baffling statement. already we’ve had references to five separate events, people, or things outside what turns up in ordinary conversation, and all of this right off the top of his head.

For instance, I have always been witty; when I was a pupil of Gros, instead of daubing wretched little pictures, I passed my time in pilfering apples; rapin[24] is the masculine of rapine.

[24] The slang term for a painter's assistant.

alright. i’ve already addressed his impatience in drawing apples from still life in part one -- let’s take a look at that play on words there, rapin and rapine.

rapin: painter's assistant. rapine: direct cognate with the english ...

rapine: plunder: thievery.

in stealing apples from the still life he was supposed to paint, he was a rapin who committed a rapine.

DID I MENTION THAT MY GARBAGE SON IS A HUGE NERD?

So much for myself; as for the rest of you, you are worth no more than I am. I scoff at your perfections, excellencies, and qualities. Every good quality tends towards a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous man is next door to the prodigal, the brave man rubs elbows with the braggart; he who says very pious says a trifle bigoted; there are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes’ cloak.

from “javert satisfied”:

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues which have one vice, -- error. The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously venerable radiance.

HELLO??? HELLO?????

grantaire has summed up fantine; now he sums up javert.

hey. hugo.

hey. hugo.

vicky.

i got a question.

if you’re trying to make grantaire so obnoxious, why do you keep having him say things that support your previous plot points??

back to “the back room of the café musain.”

Whom do you admire, the slain or the slayer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally men are in favor of the slayer. Long live Brutus, he has slain! There lies the virtue. Virtue, granted, but madness also. There are queer spots on those great men. The Brutus who killed Caesar was in love with the statue of a little boy. This statue was from the hand of the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also carved that figure of an Amazon known as the Beautiful Leg, Eucnemos, which Nero carried with him in his travels. This Strongylion left but two statues which placed Nero and Brutus in accord. Brutus was in love with the one, Nero with the other.

here my boy is trying to connect vice and virtue again, but this is more of a “six degrees of kevin bacon” thing, not the overextension of virtue that he was talking about previously. and uh, this particular argument here is ... kinda weak? i think?

the thing is, you are never more than five feet away from a spider at any given moment. this is a literal fact and a metaphorical fact. there’s immorality in the world, and since it is in the same world as goodness, they cannot be completely divided from each other. but that doesn’t mean the evil isn’t still evil, or that the good isn’t still good. it just means you have to look at the whole picture.

(this reminds me a little of the theme that hugo tries to hammer in his comparison of enjolras to the bird which soars and grantaire as the earthbound toad. the one is connected to the other. does that mean that the bird elevates the toad? or that the toad drags the bird down? not sure what hugo grantaire is going for here exactly, but not liking the implication much ...)

All history is nothing but wearisome repetition. One century is the plagiarist of the other. The battle of Marengo copies the battle of Pydna; the Tolbiac of Clovis and the Austerlitz of Napoleon are as like each other as two drops of water.

and this is the guy who said he knew nothing.

“repetition” is the term hapgood uses, which is one translation of the original rabâchage. but it can also be translated as “regurgitation.”

y’all: he has been educated in history, and he looks around and sees it repeating itself, and it wearies him, and it disgusts him, and it saddens him.

also -- i hate to keep harping on translations but y’all:

“le tolbiac de clovis et l’austerlitz de napoléon se ressemblent comme deux gouttes de sang.” (emphasis mine.)

SANG! BLOOD! NOT WATER!

WHAT THE FUCK, HAPGOOD?

I don’t attach much importance to victory. Nothing is so stupid as to conquer; true glory lies in convincing. But try to prove something! If you are content with success, what mediocrity, and with conquering, what wretchedness! Alas, vanity and cowardice everywhere. Everything obeys success, even grammar. Si volet usus, says Horace. Therefore I disdain the human race.

“rien n’est stupide comme vaincre ; la vraie gloire est convaincre.”

here’s my boy, back at it again with the untranslatable word play.

he isn’t staying on topic, really. what we’ve got here is full stream-of-consciousness ramble. we’ve gone from vanity, to virtue becoming vice, to the inevitable ties between horror and hero, to the awful repetition of history, and now to victory. and thence ...

Shall we descend to the party at all? Do you wish me to begin admiring the peoples? What people, if you please? Shall it be Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of days gone by, slew Phocion, as we might say Coligny, and fawned upon tyrants to such an extent that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus: “His urine attracts the bees.” The most prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas, who was so small and so thin that he was obliged to load his shoes with lead in order not to be blown away by the wind. There stood on the great square in Corinth a statue carved by Silanion and catalogued by Pliny; this statue represented Episthates. What did Episthates do? He invented a trip. That sums up Greece and glory. Let us pass on to others.

... to phocion, who was an athenian politician quite popular with the people and who seemed to rule quite fairly for several decades, until the macedonians came along invading as macedonians do, and the athenians killed him for not capitulating. grantaire then ferociously condemns the athenians with that little, uh, vulgar quote right there.

in five words, a single breath, grantaire compares phocion to coligny -- presumably gaspard ii de coligny, a prominent huguenot in the mid-to-late 1500s. coligny worked to establish huguenot colonies in brazil and spanish florida, fought in a series of wars, fell in with charles ix, and was ultimately ordered assassinated by henri de navarre’s mother-in-law the queen mother catherine de medici. all this leading up to the war of the three henrys.

(yaaaaay for wikipedia.)

thus R links the two ideas together: assassination for refusing to admit to a conquering nation, and assassination for trying to protect religious freedom. and all this, again, in just five words.

BUDDY.

not much to say regarding philetas -- the fella apparently didn’t do much all else besides write, and teach, and practically starve to death because he was too busy doing the first two things.

episthates flummoxed me for a hot second, i must admit. the only references to him i could find were in les mis. but the original french is “épisthate,” which, while not a word, can be turned into “épistate,” which is not a proper name but the french term for an ancient greek magistrate.

which magistrate does grantaire mean? well, the only statue carved by silanion and catalogued by pliny that’s associated with athens is a bust of plato.

and what says grantaire of plato? that he invented a trip. literally. croc-en-jambe, the act of tripping someone.

and that’s that on greece!

Shall I admire England? Shall I admire France? France? Why? Because of Paris? I have just told you my opinion of Athens. England? Why? Because of London? I hate Carthage. And then, London, the metropolis of luxury, is the headquarters of wretchedness. There are a hundred deaths a year of hunger in the parish of Charing-Cross alone. Such is Albion.

i’ve mentioned it already, but ... this bit right here ... this is it.

this is, essentially, grantaire’s thesis. (not MY thesis but there you have it.)

he hates the world because of how much misery it contains.

I add, as the climax, that I have seen an Englishwoman dancing in a wreath of roses and blue spectacles. A fig then for England!

i have looked and looked and i cannot find out what the hell an englishwoman dancing with a crown of roses and blue glasses is supposed to mean. if anyone knows, please tell me. i am profoundly confused.

If I do not admire John Bull, shall I admire Brother Jonathan? I have but little taste for that slave-holding brother. Take away Time is money, what remains of England? Take away Cotton is king, what remains of America?

GOD BE GOOD. LOOK AT THIS. LOOK AT THIS!!!

what is it the kids say nowadays when you read someone for filth? “wig”? is that what you say? that’s what grantaire just did to england and the united states.

les misérables was published in 1863. smack dab in the middle of the american civil war. if we didn’t know hugo’s opinions about it before, we sure do now!

Germany is the lymph, Italy is the bile. Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia? Voltaire admired it. He also admired China. I admit that Russia has its beauties, among others, a stout despotism; but I pity the despots. Their health is delicate. A decapitated Alexis, a poignarded Peter, a strangled Paul, another Paul crushed flat with kicks, divers Ivans strangled, with their throats cut, numerous Nicholases and Basils poisoned, all this indicates that the palace of the Emperors of Russia is in a condition of flagrant insalubrity.

the lymph: a source of phlegm, in terms of the four humors. to be phlegmatic is to be cold and wet and to flush out illness. and that’s that on germany.

 the bile: black bile as melancholy, which thickens, or yellow bile as choler, which consumes. and that’s that on italy.

grantaire is not having it with the elevation of europe over everyone else. or at least, the elevation of western europe.

but then he turns east towards russia, and basically this whole bit right here is just grantaire looking at the history of imperial russia and going “yikes.”

All civilized peoples offer this detail to the admiration of the thinker; war; now, war, civilized war, exhausts and sums up all the forms of ruffianism, from the brigandage of the Trabuceros in the gorges of Mont Jaxa to the marauding of the Comanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass.

“trabuceros in mont jaxa” has a similar problem as “episthetes”: the only english references are to les mis, or to advertisements for various latin bands or commercially produced products. but the original french is “trabucaire,” which larousse defines as either members of the spanish army or brigands in the pyrenées.

comanche in the doubtful pass is an error on hugo’s part: it was actually apache natives who carried out the raids in the doubtful canyon. so called, actually, because the apache made white settlers doubt whether they would pass through it safely.

sounds like the apache were pretty justified in those skirmishes, though, i’d say, especially given, oh, i don’t know, everything about u.s. history. comparing the skirmish in the doubtful canyon to trabucaires’ pillaging seems pretty disingenuous to me.

(though it’s not like the french don’t have plenty of skeletons in the closet about colonialism themselves, either.)

‘Bah!’ you will say to me, ‘but Europe is certainly better than Asia?’ I admit that Asia is a farce; but I do not precisely see what you find to laugh at in the Grand Lama, you peoples of the west, who have mingled with your fashions and your elegances all the complicated filth of majesty, from the dirty chemise of Queen Isabella to the chamber-chair of the Dauphin. Gentlemen of the human race, I tell you, not a bit of it!

alright, trackin’, yadda yadda yadda ...

hapgood at it again with the weird translation, though, because this last sentence in french is “messieurs les humains, je vous dis bernique !”

which ... according to argoji, my other favorite translation machine, “bernique” means “i don’t want this.”

grantaire, honey ...

It is at Brussels that the most beer is consumed, at Stockholm the most brandy, at Madrid the most chocolate, at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the most wine, at Constantinople the most coffee, at Paris the most absinthe; there are all the useful notions. Paris carries the day, in short.

... honey. no.

but here he is at it again, honestly: this is in keeping with his prose description from two chapters ago. grantaire cares about things because it’s easier to care about things than about people. and he’s here for a good time not a long time, so absinthe wins out over everything else, including chocolate and coffee.

In Paris, even the rag-pickers are sybarites; Diogenes would have loved to be a rag-picker of the Place Maubert better than to be a philosopher at the Piraeus.

a sybarite: a bon viveur, a libertine, a voluptuary. in paris even the most miserable can live in style.

Learn this in addition; the wineshops of the ragpickers are called bibines; the most celebrated are the Saucepan and The Slaughter-House. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis, mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers, caravanseries of the caliphs,

as for substance, my boy isn’t saying much of anything right here. all these fun vocab words are essentially just fancy terms for types of cafés and restaurants.

but look at how it scans in french:

“donc, ô guinguettes, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis, mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines des chiffoniers, caravanséreils des califs”.

THIS TONGUE-TWISTING FOOL!

it’s a good thing he’s from the south and therefore he speaks slowly, because if he was from the north of france and was saying this in rapid ch’ti speed, nobody would be able to understand him!

I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I eat at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to roll naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it is you, Louison. Good day.”

HONEY.

it’s been five pages. and this is where he pauses. and there has been not a single paragraph break in all that time.

Thus did Grantaire, more than intoxicated, launch into speech, catching at the dish-washer in her passage, from his corner in the back room of the Cafe Musain.

honey. no. leave her be.

and i hope he hasn’t been monologuing at her this whole time. i dearly, dearly hope he only caught her by the arm for this last bit.

actually, you know what, death of the author. since hugo didn’t spell out precisely whether or not grantaire has been harassing louison for the last five pages entirely, i am going to infer that he has not done so, and that it is only in the space of the last couple sentences that he specifically apprehended her. i can do that. i have the power.

Bossuet, extending his hand towards him, tried to impose silence on him, and Grantaire began again worse than ever: --

“Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws. You produce on me no effect with your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes' bric-a-brac. I excuse you from the task of soothing me.

“I EXCUSE YOU FROM THE TASK OF SOOTHING ME.”

this implies:

a) it has at some point become a habit for bossuet to calm him down from his tirades, and

b) bossuet doesn’t bat an eye at his rambling; he only interferes when he sees grantaire is bothering someone else, specifically louison.

good man, bossuet.

Moreover, I am sad. What do you wish me to say to you? Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a success, man is a failure. God made a mistake with that animal.

HONEY ...

A crowd offers a choice of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch.

in the french: “une foule est un choix de laideurs.”

a crowd is a choice of uglinesses -- or ugly men, i suppose. thus implying the mob without outright saying it.

Femme -- woman -- rhymes with infame, -- infamous.

... sort of on the same theme? but getting a bit incoherent now, R, despite yet another good pun. (this is the second play on words hapgood describes in her translation. well, 2/4 ain’t bad.)

but he’s on a roll now, and as we’ve seen, he’s more than drunk. i guess it doesn’t have to make any sense at this point.

Yes, I have the spleen, complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!”

“Silence then, capital R!” resumed Bossuet,

oh this part makes me sad. the first part is pretty much word for word transliterated, but once we get to the verbs it’s more complicated. let’s break down the french word for word:

“et je bisque” -- and i am furious (very old argot, as the modern literally translates to “shrimp”)

“et je rage” -- and i rage

“et je bâille” -- and i yawn

“et je m’ennuie” -- and i am bored

“et je m’assomme” -- and i am stunned/stricken/knocked out (the larousse definition has the verb used in a hunting context for all of its examples)

“et je m’embête !” -- and i bother myself!

“que Dieu aille au diable !” -- God can go to hell!

God can go to hell -- well. that sums up the last five pages pretty succinctly, i suppose.

needless to say, he’s working himself up into a real tizzy here. and whether bossuet’s still interfering on behalf of louison, or whether he’s seen how upset grantaire is now, the action is the same: he tells grantaire, in words this time instead of a gesture, to be quiet.

and it seems to work!

who was discussing a point of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist high in a phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion: --

“--And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at the most, an amateur attorney, I maintain this: that, in accordance with the terms of the customs of Normandy, at Saint-Michel, and for each year, an equivalent must be paid to the profit of the lord of the manor, saving the rights of others, and by all and several, the proprietors as well as those seized with inheritance, and that, for all emphyteuses, leases, freeholds, contracts of domain, mortgages--”

“Echo, plaintive nymph,” hummed Grantaire.

the reference to echo and narcissus is one thing, but look at the tone with which it’s delivered. grantaire isn’t antagonistic anymore. he isn’t agitated. with the single command to be silent, grantaire has mellowed quite a bit -- he’s even humming. and he relegates himself to a single sentence as an aside, instead of launching once more into a tirade.

well, would you look at that. grantaire and his friend bossuet are interacting in a constructive manner, which has a positive outcome.

grantaire is a sad guy. he disguises it with jokes, with puns, he dresses it up in long-winded comparisons and references and quick flashing asides, but he is a sad person underneath it all -- and anyone who’s really paying attention to what he says can see it very clearly.

he starts out grumpy, he works himself into indignation, and from there quite easily into true melancholy and belligerence.

yet even in that heightened state, a handful of words from a friend can bring him back to docility.

keep this in mind, when we go to the barrière du maine scene for part three. grantaire can be read just as easily as a book, if you take the time to listen and try to understand.

and he can be managed, with a little gentle brusqueness. oxymoron? not really. for some people, telling them to snap out of a spiral is the opposite of productive, but it works with grantaire.

he has a cheat code. it’s called kindness; not necessarily niceness, not necessarily softness, but kindness.

as a coda, let’s slip over to bahorel and joly’s conversation regarding winning back a sulking girlfriend.

“In your place, I would let her alone.”

“That is easy enough to say.”

“And to do. Is not her name Musichetta?”

“Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled, with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her.”

“My dear fellow, then in order to please her, you must be elegant, and produce effects with your knees. Buy a good pair of trousers of double-milled cloth at Staub’s. That will assist.”

“At what price?” shouted Grantaire.

first of all: bahorel knows what’s up.

and second, and last:

grantaire, overhearing his friends speaking about a panacea for relationship trouble, jumps into the conversation -- from across the room -- to ask how much these magical trousers cost, with an implication that he wants to buy them.

God bless.

I.. wanted to draw Bahorel wearing that vest [x] and I don’t know what happened.

grantaire is in love with enjolras and enjolras is just wondering what this gremlin man is doing hanging around the friends of the abc so dang much and this upsets me greatly but not because i want them to kiss: an essay.

part one: “a group which barely missed becoming historic” -- or, unhealthy coping mechanisms galore.

for reference, this post is what set me off.

it’s not that i don’t agree with the contents of the post. i do. i just ... wanted to detail why it upsets me so much.

buckle up, friends, it’s gonna be a long one.

for part one we’re gonna break down grantaire’s descriptive intro (going off hapgood’s translation here), versus his action intro (that’ll be part two).

we’re gonna do every sentence of this. because just as he does with fantine, with javert, with every character, hugo likes to pack as many punches possible into every single word.

Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there was one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition.

vicky, buddy. i need more information. “juxtaposition” what? “juxtaposition” who? this is not specific. this is thematic, sure. but it gives no inkling of how he fell in with the amis, or why.

This sceptic's name was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with this rebus: R.

we get his name, and we get a pun. my garbage son is a nerd. grantaire -> grand r -> R ; but let’s go a little deeper here.

grand r (capital r) is pronounced the same as grand erre. which doesn’t make much sense grammatically speaking in french, so let’s just look at erre, the third person singular conjugation of the verb errer. errer: “to wander,” “to roam.”

errer is also one single vowel away from erreur: “error.”

grantaire wanders, he roams, (he loafs) ; he makes mistakes. perhaps he is a mistake. (we’ll get back to that later.)

Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything.

this implies a certain level of effort. he takes care to avoid believing in anything in much the same way that bossuet and bahorel take care not to become lawyers.

not for the same reasons -- bahorel in particular, having been a veteran of lallemand’s funeral, views becoming a lawyer as becoming complicit in the oppression which lawyers and other bourgeois deal out. (this also puts bossuet’s funeral oration for blondeau in a very different light.)

so far, we aren’t given any reason why grantaire is a skeptic. all we know is that he puts effort into being skeptical. but in the same way that hugo forces us to make the connection between lallemand’s funeral and bahorel’s avoidance of lawyers by using only a sentence or two to describe it, so he treats grantaire’s avoidance of belief.

Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the most during their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be had at the Cafe Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Cafe Voltaire, that good cakes and lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the Boulevard du Maine, spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotes at the Barriere de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at the Barriere du Com pat.

this fella is what i would call epicurean. the best coffee, the best games, the best chicken, cakes, wine -- he knows how to enjoy the good things in life. and purely from this little section, we can gather that he loafs probably just about as much as bahorel.

from “enjolras and his lieutenants” later on we can infer even more. he has a tiny monologue there when he describes, off the top of his head, the route he will take to get to the barrière du maine. it’s not much of a stretch to think that he knows the layout of the rest of the city on foot very very well.

he wanders. he roams.

while he doesn’t have as many political contacts as the rest of the group -- since he doesn’t have any political inclinations himself -- he probably knows just as many people as they do. he’s a social creature.

He knew the best place for everything; in addition, boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a thorough single-stick player.

i’m gonna quote an exchange i had with a friend on discord about this sentence here.

clio: ok so uhh singlesticks is LIKE fencing only with a fuckin uh, 3ft pole with a leather bucket on one end to protect your hand and the primary guard is you stand with your arm up over your head with the stick pointing at the other guy so first of all, arm strength and point goes to the head, not anything else, BUT everything else is fair game so if you + opponent are equally skilled and you both hate each other a little you can just spend 5-10 minutes in the ring beating each other black and blue until one of you gets tired and decides to end the fight with a tap to the head so just like ......... i just ..... hes described with a fuckjn, he knows boxing and chausson and a bit of dancing, and hes a profound singlestick fighter IF people rememver that bit its only the boxing they think of! I WANNA SEE R SMACKIN AND GETTING SMACKED WITH A STICK sam: that's so grantaire though... i don't know how to convey with typed words what i'm feeling right now clio: ? sam: an equivalent of fencing with poles instead of swords where there's only one way to score a point but everything else is allowed, leading to matches of people beating each other where they know they'll never score a point clio: oh fuck youre right grantaire: it's fun idk what you're talking about! joly: you have three cracked ribs. sam: the futility of the exercise but the skill needed to pull it off... clio: drawing it out painfully because at least thats more interesting than ending it quickly singlesticks originated in the highlands with scottish clans handing their 5 year old sons friggin sticks to teach them how to fight their feuds it isnt fancy and refined, it isnt stylish, it requires skill and speed and strength and it gets the job done, and its an outlet for destructive energy that is frowned upon elsewhere courfeyrac with his sword cane knows how to fence. grantaires got a stick. "il savait .. quelques danses" only the fast ones ill bet, i dont think hed have the patience for the slow ones all his patience would be reserved for drawing and even then it would have a time limit. buddy would rather eat the apples than draw them

also known as: y’all, get thee to google and find out if there’s a local hema (historical european martial arts) chapter near you. it’s a lot of fun and you get some practical experiences in there with it, if you’re the writerly type.

ALSO known as: grantaire can definitely hold his own in a fight.

he has skill, he has precision. he doesn’t just loaf, he lives. he is a corporeal being in every sense of the word.

if enjolras is fire and air, grantaire is earth and water. and this isn’t a bad thing.

He was a tremendous drinker to boot.

a single line. seven words. more words will be expended to describe this in various scenes later on, but for now, his alcoholism is only worth seven words.

He was inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as follows: “Grantaire is impossible”;

in the french the phrase is “il était laid démesurément” : he was immeasurably ugly, disproportionately ugly, cartoonishly ugly.

How Ugly Is He?

he’s So Ugly that pretty girls get mad about how ugly he is.

no, wait, hugo -- wait, that can’t be it, you spent a zillion words talking about javert’s physical description, about fantine, hell, about enjolras only a couple pages ago. you gotta tell us what kind of ugly grantaire is! tell us in words!!

but Grantaire's fatuity was not to be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the air of saying to them all: “If I only chose!” and of trying to make his comrades believe that he was in general demand.

nope. no physical description on that account. the audience is allowed to conjure their own version of ugliness and apply it to him.

and ... oh, buddy. he makes moon eyes at ladies, he tells his friends that they can’t keep their hands off him. we don’t see him with a woman except when he’s harassing the waitstaff at the musain and the corinthe, though.

i don’t know about y’all, but i kind of see this as trying to compensate for a certain level of insecurity. when you have people telling you that you’re impossible because of your physical appearance, maybe sometimes you decide to pretend you’re the handsomest guy in the room just to give everyone else a safer target to aim at.

(it’s not a healthy coping mechanism. but ... yeah, we’ll get to that too.)

All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the social contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity, civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothing whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of the intelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with irony. This was his axiom: “There is but one certainty, my full glass.” He sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. “They are greatly in advance to be dead,” he exclaimed. He said of the crucifix: “There is a gibbet which has been a success.” A rover, a gambler, a libertine, often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly: “J’aimons les filles, et j’aimons le bon vin.” Air: Vive Henri IV.

this is bundled into one bit because breaking them down sentence by sentence amounts to the same thing:

he shuts himself off from politics, he dismisses them, because he would rather not think of them. he treats political ideology the same way he treats familial ties: hapgood says he sneers at them, and hugo says “il raillait” -- which ... holy moly, okay, let’s unpack that for a second.

“il raillait” -- he mocked, he jested, he taunted, he railed against it.

hapgood, what the fuck?

to mock familial and political ties, alright, fine. to make teasing jokes about them, cool, trackin’. to rail against them ...

please please please tell me i’m not the only one who can see there’s a level of personal bitterness implied there.

and with this, tucked into the skepticism and quite easy to overlook, we have a snippet of underlying depression. “they are greatly in advance to be dead”? if he was alive today, you can bet he would be crown to toe top-full of suicide jokes.

it hurts him to believe in something. so rather than allowing himself to feel that pain, he shuts himself down from believing in anything.

did i mention how he doesn’t do the healthy coping mechanism thing well?

However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras.

oh boy. here we go.

first up: it’s perfectly fine and normal to admire a person you love. it’s perfectly fine and normal to love someone.

it is not normal to venerate someone you know personally.

to venerate: to exalt: to worship.

friends, this is pedestal-putting the likes of which we see in Nice Guys (tm) which makes our hackles rise, is it not? because we are people, and we don’t want to be treated like goddesses, because inevitably we will break that illusion and part of the relationship will shatter too as a result?

this is a train wreck waiting to happen.

To whom did this anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable. A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors.

scrapes hands down face.

cripes.

take careful note of the use of the word “subjugated” here. this is a direct cognate to the french.

i beg you not to find this romantic.

does enjolras mean to subjugate him? no. definitely not. but does enjolras consistently act in a manner which actively rejects anyone who does not actively seek to advance his cause? yes. very much yes.

grantaire does not seek to advance his cause. he does not believe in enjolras’ cause. he only believes in enjolras -- and out of the sheer force of his personality, not out of anything else.

he venerates enjolras because of his personality. and enjolras subjugates him -- or grantaire purposefully puts himself in that position -- because they are opposites. in using complementary colors as a mini motif, hugo implies that one is valueless without the other. however ...

That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras.

... hugo lays out pretty blatantly that he thinks belief is better than skepticism. light, height, heaven, flight. blindness, baseness, the earth, being earthbound.

i mentioned before that if enjolras is fire and air, grantaire is earth and water. that’s balance there, that’s complementary colors. push and pull, light and dark, life and death. one needs the other, and vice versa.

for hugo -- as far as enjolras and grantaire are concerned -- darkness needs light, but light does not need the dark. there is no vice versa. there is no equal exchange.

enjolras does not need grantaire in any way. when talking of who completes enjolras, hugo speaks of combeferre, philosophy and humanity. he speaks of courfeyrac, the warmth, the center. the triumvirate balance each other out. grantaire doesn’t even enter into the equation.

grantaire is the shadow on the wall of plato’s cave; enjolras is that which casts the shadow.

grantaire is error, and enjolras is truth.

That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurred to him. He admired his opposite by instinct.

given that grantaire finds it painful to believe in anything, it’s completely understandable that he would be attracted to someone who can believe so vehemently, including -- maybe even especially -- revolutionary republicanism.

so far so logical. but i smell a rat ...

His soft, yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves to Enjolras as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once more.

... and there it is.

here is the problem.

lack of ideals is an issue that grantaire has, certainly. but it is a carefully cultivated lack. remember: “[he] took good care not to believe in anything.”

atheism is a religious choice just as much as any other, y’all. same thing applies here.

if there is a void inside grantaire, it is one he hollowed out himself. and it is not enjolras’ job to fill it.

and grantaire already is somebody, even when enjolras isn’t around! he knows the best place for billiards! and spatchcocked chicken! and thin white wine! and he knows a few dances! and he’s a thorough singlestick player!

that adds up to a whole person! one who, i might add, is not entirely consumed by his beliefs every waking hour the way that enjolras “chastely dropped his eyes before everything which was not the republic” seems to be!

He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were, to all appearance, incompatible. He was ironical and cordial. His indifference loved. His mind could get along without belief, but his heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction; for an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted.

here it is again: grantaire is a whole person, because he has hobbies and likes and dislikes, and he has friends. and he loves his friends.

he has no ideological convictions, but he loves, which is in itself a conviction. alright: he is contradictory. that’s okay. it means he is human.

he is somebody all by himself.

There are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong side. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja. They only exist on condition that they are backed up with another man; their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction and; and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was the obverse of Enjolras.

no. no no no noooooo. NO!!!

HUGO. LOOK AT WHAT YOU IMPLIED JUST BEFORE THIS. NOW LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE JUST WRITTEN. DO YOU NOT SEE HOW IT IS YOU’VE JUST SNEERED AT THE VERY CHARACTER YOU’VE ESTABLISHED?

look. i absolutely get that hugo is going for that homoerotic vibe. that is EXACTLY what he is doing here. he might as well be shouting it with a megaphone. he couldn’t be more obvious than if he was making a comparison to ganymede, zeus’ personal boytoy cupbearer.

but just like women do not exist solely in their attachment to men (re: cosette and the problem of There Can Only Be One Man In My Life), neither do mlm exist solely in their attachment to their lovers.

(note, here, that every homoerotic example hugo provides is one which the classical scholars argued as being the “beloved”, not the “lover” -- i.e., the passive one in the relationship, and not the pursuer.)

grantaire is enjolras’ opposite, sure. sure. i can hang with that. but he is not a sequel. he is not an appendage. he is his own person.

One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You can, at will, pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.

neat little literary trick there, buddy, i see you. and yet!

i did a lil research on this and boy does it only make me madder. apparently, pylades only has a handful of speaking lines in aeschylus’ oresteia, if that. he exists as orestes’ helpmeet in the vengeance he takes, and that is all. “passive” doesn’t even begin to explain it. pylades only has scenes when orestes has need of him. and once orestes exits the story, pylades vanishes without a trace.

the clear implication being that as pylades is to orestes -- minion, friend, beloved -- so too is grantaire to enjolras. or at least, so he wants to be ...

Grantaire, Enjolras’ true satellite, inhabited this circle of young men; he lived there, he took no pleasure anywhere but there; he followed them everywhere. His joy was to see these forms go and come through the fumes of wine. They tolerated him on account of his good humor.

... but that isn’t quite right. because again, grantaire has been shown to exist as a person outside enjolras. he has hobbies, he has friends. he adheres himself to enjolras, but he cannot be as pylades to enjolras’ orestes, because he exists outside enjolras’ revolution. and his very first scene in the back room of the musain is one in which he does not interact with enjolras at all.

Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a sober man himself, scorned this drunkard. He accorded him a little lofty pity. Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always harshly treated by Enjolras, roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever returning to the charge, he said of Enjolras: “What fine marble!”

and here we finally have enjolras' thoughts on the matter: disdain and a little lofty pity.

tell me -- when you love someone, do you want them to pity you? to look down upon you from high above, and say, “ew, gross,” and then move on with their life?

please. please look at the word choice here. harshly treated. roughly repulsed. rejected. unaccepted.

is enjolras wrong to treat him this way? kinda no. grantaire belittles his cause, he takes up his friends’ attention by not shutting up for five pages at a time, he volunteers to help but then doesn’t follow through.

but also kinda yeah. enjolras is a jerk to grantaire. he asks him if it’s possible he can be good for something, rhetorically, with the answer obvious in his mind that grantaire is good for nothing. he tells him he is incapable of believing, of thinking, of wanting, of living, and of dying. for now we aren’t given any specifics, but again -- the language here, harshly treated and roughly repulsed, tells us that enjolras isn’t nice about it at all.

that shit hurts me, and i’m not even the one enjo is talking to.

enjolras probably isn’t aware that grantaire is in love with him. hell, hugo makes sure to tell us that grantaire isn’t even fully aware of his own feelings. but ...

... grantaire. honey. when someone rejects you, when someone treats you harshly, the healthy thing to do is to stop putting yourself in their path.

this is the one instance in which grantaire seeks out that which he knows will cause him pain, instead of numbing himself ahead of time to prevent it.

again and again he puts himself in a position to be rejected, without even knowing why.

this is the part where i devolve into wordless pterodactyl shrieking.

it’s not fantine week anymore but that doesn’t mean i’m not eternally thinking about fantine so *fingerguns* here we go.

“i only understand love and liberty” is something that grantaire says but it might as well be fantine’s motto too because let’s be real here, these people come at it from different directions but they come to the same conclusion.

big old ramble under the cut.

grantaire is a student, or a former student by the time 1832 rolls around; he’s bossuet’s age, which i think comes to 4 years older than enjolras, which puts him at a solid age 30 at the barricade, 26 when marius meets the ensemble at the musain. in his debut, which is to say his introduction in a scene versus a description by hugo, he gives a grand declamation which takes up over five pages. i tried reading the whole thing in french and my eyes glazed over; in english it’s little better, if more decipherable since it’s my native language. friends, grantaire is verbose. but we can gather a few things from his long-ass rant:

that he apprenticed under gros, a painter of the time, and stole the apples he was supposed to have been drawing from still life (presumably ate them too). what we can take from this is that he is from a wealthy enough family to devote his time to learning how to paint, rather than a trade, e.g. feuilly.

that he believes virtue can easily turn into vice, saying almost the same thing in dialogue as a throwaway line that hugo said in description about javert when he got his terrible st michael on while arresting valjean in m-sur-m. (he also, in a single throwaway line -- the hapgood translation is “a bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous than the asp and the cobra” -- sums up fantine’s entire awful fate.)

that he is probably not an atheist, but definitely isn’t on board with the idea of an all-knowing all-powerful all-merciful god.

that a big part of why he believes this is because he sees how the world suffers. he has studied history and sees the way it repeats itself; he gives several classical examples and compares them to the contemporary history of his day. he also gives a statistic (how accurate it is i couldn’t tell you) about the number of deaths from hunger in a single neighborhood of london. he uses this as a reason to condemn all of england.

in short: grantaire is a skeptic, yes, but as the saying goes: a skeptic is only a bitterly disappointed optimist.

grantaire does not believe in the revolution because he does not think humankind has the ability to rise from its present miserable condition, and he does not think it has the will to rise from that condition either.

(at this point in time, he’s wrong about the first part, but tragically right about the second. and it’s the second one that’s the kicker.)

fantine was a gamine and a grisette. she was as musichetta is; the difference is that joly probably would actually marry musichetta, and we all know how tholomyès worked out for fantine. (poorly.) fantine was a gutter kid, who worked for her living. given an alt canon where she survives 1823 and makes it to paris with valjean and cosette (age 36 at the barricade), we can assume the following:

that while she has a comfortable place in the fauchelevent household, she will probably still be doing much of the sewing and upkeep; louison would likely take a much smaller role. she can teach cosette about coquetry and fashion, she can show cosette a little about upper society, but she cannot be part of that society any longer. she is masquerading as the shy retiring wife to a shy retiring man. theater, the arts, et cetera, these are all faded memories carefully preserved in her mind. any indulgences the fauchelevents take are pretty much relegated to walks in the luxembourg gardens.

that she has been through hell and back, and knows intrinsically both the good and the evil that every man is capable of. jean valjean in particular encapsulates this: when she knew him as mayor madeleine, he was both an angel and the very devil. so the inherent goodness of man is a complicated thing for her. perhaps some people are simply born wicked, but certainly some have wickedness thrust upon them. (yes, i know that’s from wicked, yes, i know the original shakespeare quote is a dick joke, yes, i got it, yes, grantaire would laugh his ass off at this, yes. however. still kinda true.)

that even after going through the worst hell a human can imagine, she still believes not only that there is a god but that he is good. we know this in particular because there is a bit of dialogue when she is in the hospital where she is planning what sort of confirmation dress little cosette is going to wear.

that seeing students on the street talking of barricades and rebellion would make her hackles rise like those of a cornered wolf. fantine was born in 1796, just two years after the reign of terror ended. she grew up watching napoleon’s rise to power, she grew up watching the wars, she was a young woman for the bourbon restoration. she knows what revolutions do: she is a product of one. we can reasonably extrapolate from hugo’s introduction of her character that the revolution is why she has no family and why she grew up as a gutter kid, but again: she grew up watching everything.

so fantine knows, has known from birth, how unfair the world is.

does she want the world to be better? well, sure. but while she knows that individuals can change for the better, she also knows from experience that The People generally don’t.

grantaire and fantine having a conversation about belief and revolution would be an interesting one, i think.

... and now i want to write a fic about it. damn it.

PSA: Stuff You Maybe Didn’t Realize You Can Back Up To AO3, And How To Tag it

Tumblr seems to be in potential death throes or at least, incredibly volatile and unreliable lately, but we’ve done some pretty good and informative work on canon analysis and reference guides so I was looking for ways to back it up without losing it…and the solution became obvious to me: Archive of Our Own, aka AO3.  “What?” you might ask if you are less familiar with their TOS. “Isn’t that just a fanfic archive??” No! It’s a fanWORK archive. It is an archive for fanworks in general! “Fanwork” is a broad term that encompasses a lot of things, but it doesn’t just include fanfic and fanart, vids etc; it also includes “fannish” essays and articles that fall under what’s often called “meta” (from the word for “beyond” or “above”, referencing that it goes beyond the original exact text)! The defining factor of whether Archive of Our Own is the appropriate place to post it is not whether or not it’s a fictional expansion of canon (fanfic), though that is definitely included - no, it’s literally just “is this a work by a ‘fan’ intended for other ‘fannish’ folks/of ‘fannish’ interest?”  The articles we’ve written as a handy reference to the period-appropriate Japanese clothing worn by Inuyasha characters?  The analyses of characters? The delineations of concrete canon (the original work) vs common “fanon” (common misconceptions within the fandom)? Even the discussion of broader cultural, historical, and geographic context that applies to the series and many potential fanworks?  All of those are fannish nonfiction! Which means they absolutely can (and will) have a home on AO3, and I encourage anybody who is wanting to back up similar works of “fannish interest” - ranging from research they’ve done for a fic, to character analyses and headcanons - to use AO3 for it, because it’s a stable, smooth-running platform that is ad-free and unlike tumblr, is run by a nonprofit (The OTW) that itself is run by and for the benefit of, fellow fans.  Of course, that begs the question of how to tag your work if you do cross-post it, eh? So on that note, here’s a quick run-down of tags we’re finding useful and applicable, which I’ve figured out through a combination of trial and error and actually asking a tag wrangler (shoutout to @wrangletangle for their invaluable help!): First, the Very Broad: - “ Nonfiction ”. This helps separate it from fanfic on the archive, so people who aren’t looking for anything but fanfic are less likely to have to skim past it, whereas people looking for exactly that content are more likely to find it. - while “Meta” and “Essay” and even “Information” are all sometimes used for the kinds of nonfiction and analytical works we post, I’ve been told “ Meta Essay ” is the advisable specific tag for such works. This would apply to character analyses, reference guides to canon, and even reference guides to real-world things that are reflected in the canon (such as our articles on Japanese clothing as worn by the characters).  The other three tags are usable, and I’ve been using them as well to cover my bases, but they’ll also tend to bring up content such as “essay format” fanfic or fanfic with titles with those words in them - something that does not happen with “Meta Essay”.

- I’ve also found by poking around in suggested tags, that “ Fanwork Research & Reference Guides ” is consistently used (even by casual users) for: nonfiction fannish works relating to analyses of canon materials; analyses of and meta on fandom-specific or fanwork-specific tropes; information on or guides to writing real-world stuff that applies to or is reflected in specific fandoms’ media (e.g. articles on period-appropriate culture-specific costuming and how to describe it); and expanded background materials for specific fans’ fanworks (such as how a given AU’s worldbuilding is supposed to be set up) that didn’t fit within the narrative proper and is separated out as a reference for interested readers. Basically, if it’s an original fan-made reference for something specific to one or more fanworks, or a research aid for writing certain things applicable to fanworks or fannish interests in general, then it can fall under that latter tag. 

- You should also mark it with any appropriate fandom(s) in the “Fandom” field. Just like you would for a fanfic, because of course, the work is specifically relevant to fans of X canon, right? If it discusses sensitive topics, or particular characters, etc., you should probably tag for those. E.g. “death” or “mental illness”, “Kagome Higurashi”, etc. 

Additionally, if you are backing it up from a Tumblr you may wish to add: - “ Archived From Tumblr “ and/or “ Cross-Posted From Tumblr ” to reference the original place of publication, for works originally posted to tumblr. (I advise this if only because someday, there might not be “tumblr” as we know it, and someone might be specifically looking for content that was originally on it, you never know) - “ Archived From [blog name] Blog ”; this marks it as an archived work from a specific blog. And yes, I recommend adding the word “blog” in there for clarity- Wrangletangle was actually delighted that I bothered to tag our first archived work with “Archived From Inu-Fiction Blog” because being EXTREMLY specific about things like that is super helpful to the tag wranglers on AO3, who have to decide how to categorize/”syn” (synonym) various new tags from alphabetized lists without context of the original posting right in front of them.  In other words, including the name AND the word “blog” in it, helps them categorize the tag on the back end without having to spend extra time googling what the heck “[Insert Name Here]” was originally. 

Overall, you should be as specific and clear as possible, but those tags/tag formats should prove useful in tagging it correctly should you choose to put fannish essays and articles up on AO3 :) Oh, and protip sidebar for those posting, especially works that are more than plain text: you can make archiving things quicker and easier for yourself, but remember to plan ahead for tumblr’s potential demise/disabling/service interruptions. The good news: You can literally copy and paste the ENTIRE text of a tumblr post from say, an “edit” window, on tumblr, straight into AO3′s Rich Text Format editor, and it will preserve pretty much all or almost all of the formatting - such as bold, italics, embedded links, etc! But the bad news: keep in mind that while AO3 allows for embedded images and it WILL transfer those embedded images with a quick copy-paste like that, AO3 itself doesn’t host the images for embedding; those are still external images. This means that whether or not they continue to load/display for users, depends entirely on whether the file is still on the original external server! As I quickly discovered, in the case of posts copied from the Edit window of a tumblr post, the images will still point to the copies of the images ON tumblr’s servers. What this means is that you should back up (save copies elsewhere of) any embedded images that you consider vital to such posts, in case you need to upload them elsewhere and fiddle with where the external image is being pulled from, later.  Personally, I’m doing that AND adding image descriptions underneath them, just to be on the safe side (and in fairness, this makes it more accessible to people who cannot view the images anyway, such as sight-impaired people who use screen readers or people who have images set to not automatically display on their browser, so it’s win-win)

Me: *Goes through ao3 tag*

Me: *Reaches the end*

Me: *Goes through ao3 tag with lower standards*

I was about to make an impassioned argument complete with bullet points for why Javert didn’t actually kill Fantine, except I already wrote a chapter in my WIP addressing that issue.

so here, have Fantine’s ghost giving Javert the lowdown.

critique day’s over which means I can fiNALLY POST THESE. story, art, and font are all mine ✨

@fantineweek 2018 - day three: family | friendship.

this is gonna be one part angsty canon meta, and one part angsty headcanon. because, uhhh, because i have a lot of feelings about this.

(extra long post too, whoops.)

friendship first.

okay. as much as i really, really do want fantine to have a whole bunch of friends who love and support her, and as much as i would love for favourite / dahlia / zéphine to belong to that category --

she really doesn’t have any friends at all. especially not the rest of the paris quartet.

believe me, i want favourite to be fantine’s best friend. i want dahlia to be the one who taught her which particular type of maroon made her blonde hair glow best. i want zéphine to have sat up with fantine during those restless nights when cosette was an infant and helped her with all the small important things involved with caring for a child of that age.

but while canon gives us not very much interaction between these ladies at all, it does give us just enough to say “uh-uh. the only reason these people spend any time together at all is because their boyfriends are best friends.”

from “tholomyes [sic] is so merry that he sings a spanish ditty” :

all received, to some extent, the kisses of all, with the exception of Fantine, who was hedged about with that vague resistance of hers composed of dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love. “You always have a queer look about you,” said Favourite to her.

okay, but just because hapgood has this translation, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what hugo originally wrote. (i parsed a little of this with the quartet last year here on my fantine blog.)

“tholomyès est si joyeux qu’il chante une chanson espagnole” :

toute recevaient un peu çà et là les baisers de tous, excepté Fantine, en fermée dans sa vague résistance rêveuse et farouche, et qui aimait. -- Toi, lui disait Favourite, tu as toujours l’air chose.

“avoir l’air chose” can be read as “you’re always daydreaming” or “there’s something peculiar about you” -- or any other number of ways to tell someone that they’re the odd one out.

fantine is the only one vouvoied by the entire party, except for tholomyès who of course tutoies her. we see why in this section -- because even though this is only one afternoon, and only one of the three ladies talking to her, we can reasonably extrapolate that this is how the dynamic has been between all of them for at least the past two years.

fantine is the only one who doesn’t want to play their game of exchanging kisses indiscriminately. the only one she’s in love with is tholomyès, so the only person she wants to be kissing her is tholomyès. meanwhile, the other ladies aren’t actually in love with their gentlemen: they see them as hobbies to drop when one or both parties get bored: of course they don’t care who kisses who.

the oldest, favourite, is twenty-three; the youngest, fantine, is twenty-one. that’s the same age gap between me and my sister. hugo treats this like an insurmountable distance. but it isn’t the age gap which isolates fantine from the other three ladies. it’s simply that she sees the world so differently than they do.

how could such different people be real friends?

in fact, the only person who extends a hand of friendship -- and i mean that in the sense of providing warmth and kindness in her life, out of no sense of obligation (*cough* valjean *cough*) -- is marguerite, her elderly neighbor.

from “madame victurnien’s success” :

She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison, and earned twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that she began to pay the Thenardiers [sic] irregularly.

However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned at night, taught her the art of living in misery. Back of living on little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the first is dark, the second is black.

Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to give up a bird which eats a half a farthing's worth of millet every two days; how to make a coverlet of one's petticoat, and a petticoat of one's coverlet; how to save one's candle, by taking one's meals by the light of the opposite window. No one knows all that certain feeble creatures, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can get out of a sou. It ends by being a talent.

[...]

The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.

this is where the angsty headcanon about family comes in.

hugo does nothing by accident. except for his math, which he does badly on purpose, because he hates math.

in one of the earlier drafts of les misérables, he gives fantine the name of marguerite louet. he scratched this out later, of course; he gave her a diminutive instead of a proper name, to show better how much of a street urchin she was.

but he kept the name marguerite, and he gave it to the elderly spinster neighbor who helped fantine.

marguerite is a type of daisy. it is also the french version of the name margaret, which ultimately derives from the greek word margaron, meaning pearl.

y’all know where i’m heading with this.

it would be too much of a stretch to headcanon that marguerite is fantine’s mother. marguerite is probably too old to be her mother -- and she takes a grandmotherly sort of role, anyway.

more likely that marguerite is the older aunt to a niece she did not even know existed.

maybe fantine is the spit and image of marguerite’s youngest sister. maybe fantine has the same nose that their dad had, the same high forehead as her brother, the same smile as the one she sees in the mirror (the same pearls).

or maybe it’s cosette who embodies those things, and if marguerite saw that little girl, she would be struck with a living image of the past.

@fantineweek 2018 - day two: gold.

once more we are going off the hapgood translation available here.

i guess i could technically put this under the “sacrifice” prompt, but ... i honestly think that her hair alone is its own category.

two things related to fantine’s hair which account for a lot of symbolism in her story: the fact that it is gold, and the fact that she sells it.

so starting off with the fact that it is gold --

i haven’t seen many of the movie adaptations -- in fact i am avoiding the liam neeson & uma thurman one like the plague, for probably obvious reasons -- but in lm 2012, and the 25th anniversary cast, we basically see that cosette’s hair color and fantine’s hair color is switched. the same thing will be true of the bbc miniseries. it’s basically only staged productions that i’ve seen that stay true to the book.

this bothered me for a while, and at first i thought the only reason it bothered me was because i am a stickler for details. marius ought to have dark hair, grantaire ought to be ugly, the barricade is on rue de la chanvrerie not rue de villette, musical, i don’t care if it doesn’t rhyme.

except ... well, hugo writes these things, even the smallest of details, for a reason. marius has dark hair because he is a Romantic, which is associated with melancholy, and you can’t very well have a byronic brooding sort of fellow with golden hair. and you can see the same care for details with his physical descriptions of grantaire, enjolras, éponine, et cetera. there’s an element of symbolism involved.

he writes the fallen woman, fantine, with long golden hair.

this being western society, and all the issues that it entails, blond hair is associated with not only beauty but purity. we give princesses like rapunzel and cinderella blonde hair; we give prince charming blond hair; we give stained glass angels blond hair. 

in the picture of dorian gray, oscar wilde gives dorian blond hair to emphasize the fact that he hides under an image of purity to conduct his evil deeds. he uses the trope of blond hair = purity to turn our character expectations upside down.

hugo gives fantine blonde hair, and tells us she is innocent; tells us she works hard; tells us she is good. then he shows us how society devours her, starting with her blonde hair. he uses the trope, and the expectations that follow that trope, to show the reader (who at that time would have been a bourgeois not unlike tholomyès or bamatabois) that despite her abasement, fantine never deserves what happens to her.

hugo is intent on hammering it into our heads that she never actually did anything wrong, and he uses her hair as a symbol for her purity and innocence.

she sells that pure golden hair herself.

-- which brings me to my second point.

in the musical, it is the wigmaker who approaches fantine. it is the wigmaker who tells her what pretty hair she has, and how much money she can make by selling it. fantine is reluctant -- she stubbornly digs in her heels at first, she is horrified by the prospect (and rightly so!). it is only the thought of cosette which forces her to accept the wigmaker’s offer.

i can’t find a picture of it, so let me describe what i saw at the us tour:

fantine, wrapped in a shawl, on the left. the wigmaker, stage center, a crone, hunched over -- and at the words “ten francs may save my poor cosette,” she raises her right hand in a slow arc towards the ceiling, holding her shears aloft -- the shears are open, the moment is predatory triumph, and as soon as the note ends she practically leaps upon her victim to drag her offstage.

this scene gives us the hungry jaws of society which devour fantine. it’s horrible. but the book gives us something even more horrifying, for all that it’s brief.

from “result of the success” :

One day they wrote to her that her little Cosette was entirely naked in that cold weather, that she needed a woollen skirt, and that her mother must send at least ten francs for this. She received the letter, and crushed it in her hands all day long. That evening she went into a barber’s shop at the corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her admirable golden hair fell to her knees.

“What splendid hair!” exclaimed the barber.

“How much will you give me for it?” said she.

“Ten francs.”

“Cut it off.”

within twelve hours of receiving the letter, she has willingly given up her hair for the sake of her child.

her hair: the symbol of her purity.

okay, pretend we’re talking about an actual human being and not a character for two seconds.

she is known, earlier in the book, as fantine la blonde. part of her identity is taken up by the fact that she has this glossy beautiful hair.

this hair falls down to her knees. her knees.

this? (source)

is a LOT OF HAIR.

and it STILL doesn’t even come down to the knees. this is maybe just over HALF as long as fantine’s hair is.

my hair used to go down to the middle of my back before i had it cut off in a pixie in 2016. so without realizing it i sort of did a mini fantine ... you know, sans the rest of the trauma that goes along with her entire situation.

my hair only went to the middle of my back. call that 2.5, 3 feet of hair total. it was long enough that if it was loose, it would get caught in my armpits if i wasn’t paying attention. (super glamorous, right?) i can only imagine what having hair like that ^ would be like, let alone hair that goes down to the knees. long enough to sit on, for God’s sake!

hair that long has to be maintained daily. combing it, washing it, drying it, making sure it doesn’t tangle, making sure it doesn’t get caught in things and snap off, getting rid of split ends. braiding it, learning different hairstyles, all the little accessories like pins and combs and brushes. it’s practically its own hobby -- and when we consider that this is the only pleasure left in fantine’s life, that she spends the entire rest of her day sewing piecework ...

i had my hair cut to a pixie and everyone in my life who knew me before the pixie cut went crazy over it. part of a woman’s identity is in her hair, and there are other writers more articulate than i am who will happily talk at length about how different hair lengths make society perceive you in different ways. feminine, masculine, whatever. i’m not here to talk about that part. i’m talking about how her hair, her long hair which was a part of her identity simply because of its length, is also a part of her body.

man, i got my hair cut to a pixie on purpose, because i wanted to and because i thought it would be a cute low-maintenance haircut. there was no emotional turmoil involved in that decision. i made it willingly, and i had been looking forward to it for a few months. yet even then -- even now, two years later when my hair’s grown down past my shoulders again -- i still miss having hair down to the middle of my back.

fantine has no time to contemplate that decision. she does not want to make that decision. she is poor, she lives off practically nothing, and combing her hair is the one thing left in her life that affords her some happiness. her hair is the only beautiful thing left in her life.

one thing the lm 2012 movie did right is it showed fantine’s face during the haircut, and anne hathaway looks like she’s a split second away from bursting into tears. there is an element of trauma here. i can only imagine that fantine spends a fair few nights crying over that loss, and she would be justified in doing so.

it’s after the loss of her hair that she falls into anger and bitterness. this was the last bit of joy in her life, and she has sold it away willingly.

nobody makes the decision for her that her hair is worth selling. nobody gives her a choice to make that she can decline or accept. she comes up with the idea on her own.

to take an image from little shop of horrors, she chooses to step into the monster’s mouth.

this is a literal way that fantine sells herself, months before she becomes a woman of the town. the way she becomes a prostitute is exactly the same: no pimp approaches her, no women in the chorus tell her she’ll make easy money. she comes to the conclusion herself, and she takes that final step.

from “christus nos liberavit” :

Misery offers; society accepts.

@fantineweek 2018 - day one: youth | childhood.

going off the hapgood translation available online here.

She was born at M. sur M. Of what parents? Who can say? She had never known father or mother. She was called Fantine. Why Fantine? She had never borne any other name. At the epoch of her birth the Directory still existed. She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. She was called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature had entered life in just this way. At the age of ten, Fantine quitted the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood. At fifteen she came to Paris “to seek her fortune.”

this is the only paragraph we have that describes anything of her youth. as far as hugo is concerned, her story begins in 1817, when she is 21 years old and two years a mother.

fantine, as in (en)fantine - childlike. the obvious connotation there is innocence.

it is pretty much implied that fantine grows up on the street much the same way that gavroche and the mômes did. and yet hugo spends so much time after this telling us how much she is naively in love with tholomyès; how young she is, how sweet this first love is, even if tholomyès does not requite it.

that naïveté might be solely attached to her romantic inclinations, though, i think.

fantine survives a childhood in the gutter. yet hugo only devotes two sentences (two! out of this enormous book, only two!) to her rise from gamine to grisette.

she is clever enough to realize that she will not be able to get anywhere in life if she stays where she is. hugo says she quits montreuil-sur-mer at the age of ten. ten years old. what on earth was i doing at the age of ten? pretending to be a gargoyle at recess? reading books about talking owls? fantine volunteered to work at a farm; she worked there for five years; and when she wanted more out of life, at the age of fifteen (only two years younger than cosette in 1832!) she walks to paris.

four years later she becomes a mother.

when we first see fantine in “double quartette” and “four and four”, she is young; she is quiet, prone to melancholy daydreaming; she is in love with tholomyès.

(side note: digging through “four and four” for quotes, i found this:

Listolier and Fameuil, who were engaged in discussing their professors, explained to Fantine the difference that existed between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.

blondeau, that old rat! eleven years from now we’ll be hearing your funeral oration courtesy of bossuet! it’s little nuggets like these that keep me in love with this book, dammit.)

fantine wears fashionable if modest clothes, and hugo takes great care to describe not only the curve of her throat and the dimple between her shoulder (uh ... thanks, buddy) but the type of fabric that she wears, the particular color of the muslin, et cetera. fantine is a pieceworker at this point -- she clearly knows what she is doing, even if she is less coquettish about it than the other girls in the quartet. this gives us an inkling of what she spent her time doing from the age of fifteen onward. though, really, this is only a different venue for what she had been doing ever since she was ten.

she spent her time climbing up the ladder. she found a new skill, and she learned it, and she made herself useful. i don’t call that particularly naive.

she got out of the gutter, and the horrors that this entails. she made herself a comfortable life away from the constraints of what she was born into.

contrast this with the stories of valjean and javert:

valjean did not start in the gutter. he was forced into prison, and he was forced into the abyss that is being an ex-convict. only the grace of m. myriel allowed him to climb out of that pit -- not just his kindness, but his silver. ( “i have bought your soul for God.” )

javert started in the gutter, but unlike fantine -- let’s be honest here -- given the social and historical context in which hugo was writing, the terms with which he describes javert can easily be interpreted as javert being part romani -- javert does not have the same options to rise from his horrible circumstances. he has no miraculous donor to give him money. and he is not a blonde white girl.

so fantine and valjean get out. there is a catch; of course there is.

it is valjean’s history which is the pitfall waiting for him. as long as someone knows who he is, and will take advantage of it, he will always have the specter of the bagne lurking over him.

and fantine’s fate? well, by the time we meet her, as young as she still is (21! by God, she’s only twenty-one years old!), the trap has already been baited and set for her, and she’s already been caught in it. tholomyès has made her the mother of his child, but he has refused to make her his wife.

i don’t believe that fantine is so innocent she cannot comprehend it is only tholomyès’ whim which keeps her, an unmarried mother, out of the yawning abyss. i can’t believe it. she must have seen enough of life, both in paris and in m-sur-m before that, to know how society devours unmarried mothers.

i can, however, believe that it is her innocent love which blinds her to the fact that he is willing to condemn her to such despair.

Crowley & Aziraphale at St. James Park.

Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.

Pollution, the 4th horseman of the apocalypse from Pterry & Gneil’s Good Omens.

the Mighty Arising eyy *fingerguns*

as it turns out my opinions about melkor the morgoth upon arda (tm) have changed significantly, oh well

We all have our gambles. Just ‘cause I’m willing to bet on the long shot doesn’t mean I don’t know the odds.

I’m well aware that there’s a high chance that what we’re doing may result in doomsday for us all. But I pushed my chips into the middle of the table long ago, so I might as well play my hand to the end.

gemsona for @shadowflameswords

did some outlining today.

by which I mean: 59 total chapters that I have left to write. possibly more, possibly less, but this will probably reach 90k when it’s done.

when I said Climbing to the Light was gonna be a slow-burn monster of a fic, I meant it.

help me

Harley and Ivy for @hellotybalt. happy birthday!

New chapter up for Climbing to the Light!

New chapter up for Climbing to the Light!

Title: Wisdom to Know the Difference Rating: General Audiences Fandom(s): Les Misérables Relationships: Fantine & Javert, Fantine/Javert, Fantine & Javert & Jean Valjean Characters: Fantine, Javert, Jean Valjean, Cosette Fauchelevent, Marius Pontmercy Additional Tags: AU - canon divergence, Javert Lives, Ghost Fantine, Slow Build, Work in Progress

Dead doesn’t necessarily mean gone. In the ugly morning hours of June 7th, Javert falls over the bridge’s edge, and Fantine’s ghost pulls him out of the river. Now they’ll just have to live with the skeletons in their collective closets - for a given value of “live”, anyway.

Chapter 2: They yell at each other a bit. Fantine gets the feeling this is going to be par for the course.

Title: Wisdom to Know the Difference Rating: General Audiences Fandom(s): Les Misérables Relationships: Fantine & Javert, Fantine/Javert, Fantine & Javert & Jean Valjean Characters: Fantine, Javert, Jean Valjean, Cosette Fauchelevent, Marius Pontmercy Additional Tags: AU - canon divergence, Javert Lives, Ghost Fantine, Slow Build, Work in Progress

Dead doesn't necessarily mean gone. In the ugly morning hours of June 7th, Javert falls over the bridge's edge, and Fantine's ghost pulls him out of the river. Now they'll just have to live with the skeletons in their collective closets - for a given value of “live”, anyway.

Useful posts on how to write comments for fanfics - [here] & [here]

On a personal note. I’ve met wonderful people throughout fandoms and by leaving comments. I’ve made great friends, some even on comment sections, as we shared our enthusiasm for the same story. 

People who like the same ships often hold similar character traits and life experiences; they’re people who would get you. The bonds in fandoms only strengthen when people meet other people as humans - and there are fantastic humans waiting to meet you. 

Leave a comment. :)

((Methodology For Data Collected

For this, I’ve used AO3, currently the most popular fanfiction website. 

I’ve taken the first ranked story in each ship, completed, rated by kudos - since bookmarks on AO3 can be set to private so the counters don’t reflect the real numbers - to reflect the stories that had the most positive feedback in their category.

For the comments, I’ve (falsely and intentionally) assumed the numbers represented are singular comments from singular, different users (tipping the scales in favor of the commenters). For Destiel, Johnlock and Spirk I had to pick the second story by kudos, since for the first the deviation error (assuming the author haven’t replied and there aren’t discussion threads included in the comments) was far too high for the ratio to be accurate, and my initial assumption couldn’t be applied. My apologies to the authors. 

The data was collected on May 2nd , 2016.))

New chapter up!

Climbing to the Light (WIP)

Just before Voldemort’s first rise to power, 11-year-old Fantine receives an acceptance letter from Beauxbatons Academy of Magic -- a letter that will pull her into a new world full of just as much danger and prejudice as the one she left behind.

Setting: 1970s magical France Characters: Fantine, Javert, Jean Valjean, Bahorel’s Older Sister, Georges Pontmercy, Sister Simplice, Bishop Myriel, &tc Pairings: Valjean/Javert, Fantine/Javert, Fantine/Javert/Valjean (eventual), Georges Pontmercy/Mlle Gillenormand (secondary)

Chapter 12/?: Musings on Olympe Maxime, and a new direction for Jean Valjean.

Comments, questions, and concrit welcome!

-Vaarsuvius, how'd ye ever learn so much aboot how folks fall in love? Ye don't seem the type, really. -Only through empirical experience did I arrive at such knowledge. It took my mate and me many years to acknowledge our feelings for one other. Our wedding was the finest day of my long life.

I’ve been Compromised by the latest OOTS update so here, have some newlyweds.