Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [475]
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Alain-René Lesage’s play Turcaret (1709) satirizes a lustful financier from the provinces. Priapus, son of Dionysus, was the Greek god of virility and procreation.
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Here, as elsewhere, Fantine’s remark shows that only she among the four companions really cares for her lover. See the first half of the next chapter as well.
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M. Madeleine’s assumed name, borrowed from Mary Magdalene in the New Testament of the Bible, connotes repentance; his attitudes here reflect whole-hearted faith in Providence.
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Hugo believed in punitive reincarnation, and in universal salvation at the end of time (the Pelagian heresy). See “Ce que dit la Bouche d‘Ombre” in his Contemplations (1856).
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The Faubourg Saint Germain refers to high society in Paris, and is applied to Montreuil-sur-Mer as a whimsical antonomasia (another example: “the champagne of bottled beers”).
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Reacting vehemently and blindly against his criminal family origins, Javert illustrates the psychological mechanism of overcompensation.
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The Styx, the river of Death, surrounded the ancient Greek and Roman Hades nine times; once you crossed, there was no return. Javert believes redemption is impossible.
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Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, condemned his son to death as a conspirator (509 B.C.); François-Eugène Vidocq (1775-1857), a famous criminal who became Chief of Police, inspired romantic writers with his badly written Memoirs (1828).
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The Venezuelan hero Simon Bolívar (1783-1830) devoted his life to trying to create a federation of Latin American countries. Gabriel García Márquez tells his tragic story in The General in His Labyrinth (1989).
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For details, see Emile Zola’s Nana (1880), and Charles Bernheimer’s Figures of lll Repute (Harvard University Press, 1989).
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M. Madeleine’s beneficent influence on Fantine illustrates the transference of merit in the Communion of Saints. Bishop Myriel previously imparted redemptive grace to Jean Valjean.
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Hugo borrows two techniques from Balzac here: allusions to the pseudo-science of physiognomy, and the episodic observer brought in to deliver expert testimony.
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Former convict.
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Like Jean Valjean elsewhere, Javert here applies the title word misérable to himself, in the sense of morally debased.
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Hugo compares Jean Valjean to Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, ordered by God to accept the chalice of fear, pain, and death that is the Crucifixion.
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This paragraph, in free indirect discourse, faithfully renders Jean Valjean’s point of view. The tone is at once sincere, because his rationalizations fully convince him for the moment, and ironic, because the reader can see through them so easily.
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A whiffle-tree or single-tree is a pivoted horizontal crossbar attached to the harness traces of a draft animal and to the vehicle it pulls.
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“Convictions” is a pun: the prosecutors and judges want to prove guilt and impose sentence, a social damnation; Jean Valjean, in contrast, comes to realize that his soul’s health depends on his accepting his material guilt.
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By claiming that prosecutors’ denunciations of criminals all are derived from Jean Racine’s récit de Théramène (Phèdre V.7), Hugo condemns the poverty of their imagination.
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Honest Javert is unfair to Jean Valjean, who tried to escape four times, not “five or six.” He is innocent of the Pierron robbery and was exonerated by the Bishop.
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The Restoration was so eager to reinstitute state-sponsored Catholicism, the moral basis of divine-right monarchy, that it accepted any manifestation of religious sentiment at face value.
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To have hair turn white overnight from an emotional shock is a common melodramatic device in nineteenth-century fiction.
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The letters are the abbreviation for travaux forcés à perpétuité—hard labor for life. Compare the scene in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834) in which slapping