Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [477]
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The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a national holiday on August 15, refers to her being taken up directly into Heaven at the moment of her death, and before her mortal body could suffer any corruption (decay).
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The disclaimer means that Hugo feels more skeptical and critical than Jean Valjean. He admires many nuns as individuals, but condemns the monastic life.
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Such spiritual development characterizes the Idealistic Novel; compare Flaubert’s tale “A Simple Heart,” or several of George Sand’s novels.
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Gamin is “street urchin,” a meaning that is now archaic.
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Plautus and Terence, ancient Roman writers of comedies, use the word “homuncio,” as does the satirist Juvenal; the most famous example, in the sense of “test tube baby” that we find here, appears in part II of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (the Homunculus).
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A pun: Pont des Arts is a bridge in Paris; arrhes is earnest money paid to bind a contract.
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“Agreeable” in conjunction with the word “useful” in the next chapter title alludes to the ancient Roman definition of the desiderata for literary satire: the gamin Gavroche is satire personified.
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A ship’s cheapest cabins are in the hold, below the decks; a theater’s are in the top balcony.
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A term jokingly used for the upper balconies of a theater, because they seem so close to Heaven.
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Muche is perhaps from the variant form of musse-pot, “in hiding.” Hugo disliked the famous actress Mlle Mars, who complained of and sometimes refused to use the informal language in his plays.
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the last two paragraphs characterize the gamin as an eiron (debunker, deflator of pretentions), and thus as the natural enemy of the bourgeois alazon, or self-satisfied braggart.
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The term “red spectre” described a bloodthirsty revolutionary, in the eyes of the Royalists; the reference is to Colonel Pontmercy, Marius’s gentle, courageous, devoted father, an idealization of Hugo’s.
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Baron was an honorific title ranking just above chevalier and just below vicomte (the lowest rank of land-owning nobility). Napoleon awarded it widely to honor meritorious achievement; his enemies, the Royalists, therefore had no inclination to honor it.
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Pistoles were 10-franc coins.
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“A B C” in French is pronounced ah-bay-say, exactly like the French word abaïssé, “the abased.”
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Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, harbinger of the Revolution, put all five of his children up for adoption. (The evil Thénardiers also will have five, but they at least keep two.)
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The beginning of wisdom (Latin).
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Because my name is lion (Latin; the implication is “I am entitled to the largest share”): a well-known proverb taken from a fable.
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If Caesar had given me / Glory and war / And I had to abandon /The love of my mother, / I would say to great Caesar: / Take thy sceptre and car, / I prefer my mother, ah me! / I prefer my mother.
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Throughout the novel Hugo emphasizes the grandeur of moral courage, which may show itself in obscure deeds and in humble lives.
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Note Hugo’s tidy construction: the meeting of Marius and Cosette, whose story will dominate the remainder of the novel, occurs exactly in the middle of the third of five parts.
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The Italian painter Raphael (1483-1520) captures the ideal spirituality of woman; the French sculptor and architect Jean Goujon, her material beauty: Cosette—at least in Marius’s eyes, combines both.
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The “pale, bluish light” represents a perception of the ideal. Flaubert had fiercely satirized this association in Madame Bovary (1857).
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An autobiographical reference: at age fifteen, Hugo himself had allowed the much older Neufchâteau, a member of the Académie Française, to take credit for Hugo’s brilliant article on Alain-René Lesage’s early eighteenth-century novel, in exchange for patronage in his nascent literary career.
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Marius is so emotionally overwrought by being in love that he responds intensely to the most banal potboiler of the popular boulevard theater.
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Marius would love to be able to flaunt