Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [478]
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Marius imagines the handkerchief to be a love token left for him by Cosette: in fact, it is a trap set by Jean Valjean, to test the young man’s feelings.
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Hugo alludes to the French proverb l‘appétit vient en mangeant, “eating gives you an appetite”—that is, having a little makes you want more.
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Idealizing Cosette and her “father,” Marius assumes that they must be rich; lodgings on the lower floors above ground level cost more.
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Ugolino, in Dante’s early-fourteenth-century Inferno, was punished for having devoured his children to survive when he and they were imprisoned together. Thénardier, who sacrifices his own children for paltry profits, illustrates the social form of such supreme egotism.
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Lacenaire was a famous contemporary criminal and murderer.
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François-Noël Babeuf (1760-1797) and Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) both justified massacres with their egalitarian theories, before they themselves died in the Revolution. Cartouche and Schinderhannes were criminals who killed from pure hate.
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For Hugo’s understanding of Satan’s rebellion, his fall, and Hell, see his long visionary poem La Fin de Satan (unfinished; c.1859-1860), which correlates the cosmic drama with the phases of the French Revolution.
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“The cave Ignorance” and “the mole Crime” are further examples of Hugo’s métaphore maxima (maximal metaphor) that modifies one noun with another—contrary to French grammar—to produce a synthetic concept that reflects supernatural truths.
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“To take on Paris hand to hand” imitates the challenge that Honoré de Balzac’s flawed hero Eugène de Rastignac cries out to the city at the end of Le Père Goriot (1834): à nous deux maintenant, “the two of us will have it out now.”
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Let it gleam or let it glimmer, / The bear returns into his cave. The equivalent of Ground Hog Day is a long-standing international tradition.
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Marius’s point of view, gently mocked by Hugo; to attend to his material needs seems unworthy of his devotion to Cosette.
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The city gate, where tolls (l‘octroi) were levied for importing certain merchandise; these entrance duties were suppressed throughout France in 1949.
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“The cops came. They just missed nabbing me at the half-circle [-shaped road intersection].” “I saw them. I beat it out of there.”
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“Colin Maillard,” who is “it” in the child’s game Blind-Man’s Buff, tries to catch and identify one of the other players. Marius can’t figure out who they are.
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Eponine, once favored over Cosette, now contrasts dramatically with Jean Valjean’s radiant ward, having become prematurely aged, ill, and morally degraded.
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That she feels at home in a man’s bedroom suggests that she has engaged in prostitution. What follows makes it clear that her father is offering to sell her body.
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I’m hungry, dad. /The food is gone. / I’m cold, ma. / No coat to put on. / Shiver, girl! / Cry, little boy.
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The agrammatical métaphore maxima, modifying one noun with another, indicates the effects of supernatural intervention.
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Thénardier has misspelled four of the five names of Napoléon’s great victories—he wants to imply that he fought in them, but his spelling exposes his lack of familiarity with those campaigns.
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“Vanity of vanity, says the preacher; all is vanity,” Ecclesiastes 12:8. The Bible rejects attachment to worldly things; Thénardier, in contrast, bitterly resents not having received more recognition from the world of men.
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A pun on the French s‘exécuter (comply) and exécuter (kill).
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Two people don’t get together in an isolated place in order to say the rosary (Latin).
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Thénardier, who plans to blackmail Jean Valjean for 200,000 francs, apparently plans to try to get away with giving only 500 to each of his accomplices.
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Fumistes also means cruel tricksters.
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The French uses the idiom Je mets de l‘eau dans mon vin (“I’m watering down my wine”).
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La bourgeoise is equivalent to “my old lady.”
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The Hand of Providence, which willed that democracy would ultimately triumph in France.
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