#LM 1.2.10

[secretmellowblog]

So many things in Les Mis makes sense when you realize half the characters are making decisions on little to no sleep….it’s literally just that one meme

[the-wraxall-illustrations]

[cliozaur]

I have just a couple of observations about this chapter. Judging from the preparation Jean Valjean made before committing a theft, he seems to be a highly skilled escape artist. It suggests that he has extensive experience in this regard: he studies the scenery—windows, doors, the garden, and the garden wall, takes off his shoes, and puts them into his pocket. So, his action is only partly spontaneous.

I wonder how he could be so adept at evaluating the price for the silver set? Of course, it is unfair that forks and a ladle cost more than nineteen years of his hard labour, but how would he know that?

A convict named Brevet with a single suspender with a checkered pattern... Hugo, why do we need to know this trivial detail? Why was Valjean thinking about him and his suspender? Why now? Will he now live rent-free in my head?

[dolphin1812]

Reading this chapter makes me wonder if Victor Hugo had a lot of experience not sleeping well, the details he gives are so specific.

“When many varied sensations have agitated the day, when various matters preoccupy the mind, one falls asleep once, but not a second time. Sleep comes more easily than it returns. This is what happened to Jean Valjean. He could not get to sleep again, and he fell to thinking.”

This? Very true. And the way Valjean’s thoughts circle around one idea while remaining very vague? Also accurate.

But for the purposes of this section, I think that Valjean’s sleeplessness adds to the tense atmosphere. On the one hand, Hugo specifies that he’s used to sleeping this little (four hours really isn’t a lot). On the other, we know that he isn’t thinking clearly (not just from getting little sleep - although the fact that he’s used to not sleeping is yet another sign of the inhumane treatment he received - but from stress, hence the focus on his thoughts). I loved the detail about the convict Brevet and his single suspender; it’s such a good way of showing how tumultuous Valjean’s mind is, as there’s no reason for him to be remembering that at the moment. The clocks are also a great detail. Valjean already seems as if he’s ready to pounce at any moment; it’s not surprising that a sound loud enough to snap him out of his thoughts would encourage him to act, as if he were running out of time. And in a way, he is, because he has to decide if he’s going to steal the silver or not before morning. It’s only at night that he has a chance of remaining undiscovered.

Another interesting detail: the moonlight. A full moon makes things both easier and harder for Valjean: easier because he can see what he’s doing and where he’s fleeing, but harder because anyone who wakes will see him, too. Hugo specifically describes the light like this:

“The night was not very dark; there was a full moon, across which coursed large clouds driven by the wind. This created, outdoors, alternate shadow and gleams of light, eclipses, then bright openings of the clouds; and indoors a sort of twilight. This twilight, sufficient to enable a person to see his way, intermittent on account of the clouds, resembled the sort of livid light which falls through an air-hole in a cellar, before which the passers-by come and go.”

The alternating shadows and light resemble Valjean’s inner state; torn between the darkness of a crime (and the “dark confusion” in his mind) and the light of getting through the night peacefully. The ever-changing atmosphere both outside and inside builds tension as well; a night with light that always shifts is more ominous than one that is clearly lit. 

The connection to a cellar is also intriguing. It’s not a blatant reference to prison, but it seems similar to how I would imagine the interior of a cell: poorly lit except for, perhaps, a few openings. Yet in a cellar, “passers-by come and go.” Being in this house is the first time Valjean has had a choice of where to be in 19 years (between prison and being thrown out of villages afterward). As he struggles to make his decision, he’s really choosing multiple things at once: whether to literally stay in the bishop’s house until morning; whether to be a criminal again or not; whether to be driven by his anger or not. 

Since the chapter ends with Valjean leaning towards theft, Hugo had to find a way to make us sad about it after stressing that the robbery committed by Valjean could never equal what the state did to him.

“On arriving at this door, he found it ajar. The Bishop had not closed it.”

He succeeded. The bishop continuing to be welcoming and trusting, even in sleep, is such a nice image, but it’s so heart-wrenching when we know that Valjean is about to break that trust. And not even out of dislike of the bishop, but out of an inability to trust at all because of how much society has hurt him.

[katenepveu]

The audiobook likely enhanced this, but yesterday and today's Les Mis Letters (1.2.10 and 1.2.11, "The Man Wakes Up" and "What He Does Next") were genuinely tense for me. Again: I know very little about the plot of this book! But I have discerned that Hugo can do detailed psychological realism and blatant deck-stacking, and I don't have a feel yet for the ways he's likely to have those interact.

Also, the drawn-out descriptions were both effective in themselves, and resolved so wonderfully with the crashingly abrupt ending to the second chapter.

Anyway: good stuff.

[pureanonofficial]

LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - The Man Aroused, LM 1.2.10 (Les Miserables 1925)

Those six sets of silver haunted him.—They were there.—A few paces distant.—Just as he was traversing the adjoining room to reach the one in which he then was, the old servant-woman had been in the act of placing them in a little cupboard near the head of the bed.—He had taken careful note of this cupboard.—On the right, as you entered from the dining-room.—They were solid.—And old silver.—From the ladle one could get at least two hundred francs.—Double what he had earned in nineteen years.—It is true that he would have earned more if “the administration had not robbed him.”

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 1.2.10 ‘The man awakes‘

DUN DUN DUN

I really like how this chapter shifts back and forth between Extremely Relateable Things about Valjean, and an adept and specialized skillset he has that most readers won’t.

The falling asleep easily once but not twice on during time of crisis is so relatable. Also relatable is the tumult of a total paradigm shift: the way when all your narratives are broken, time is much longer and it’s impossible to pick out the important things from the unimportant things. 1817 will be a year having that problem. Javert will eventually be an entire life become that problem.

And in the midst of that, Valjean has his go-to skills of how to be quiet and judge the layout of a place he’s stealing from/escaping from. I love how solid that feels in him. He may be all over the place mentally, but he knows what he knows.

But also, this isn’t any kind of well-thought-out plan at all: it’s constructed logically in terms of the steps of getting out of the house, but in terms of definitely getting him caught, it’s a terrible idea. He just feels very real here, and trapped, and falling back on what he knows in a world that has opened up too large above him.

He really does feel like Javert wandering around and doing his job the evening of June 6.

And the bishop’s bedroom door is literally open, because he said a bishop’s door should always be open. Internal personal consistency is so astonishingly rare in characters in this novel, which is one of the novel’s best qualities.

It feels really noteworthy to have one thing about one character track as straightforwardly as this: that whatever Myriel’s faults, he really is dedicated to treating Valjean and everyone like Valjean with kindness and trust and respect all the way down to the latch on his bedroom door.

[meta-squash]

Brick Club 1.2.10 “The Man Wakes Up”

Valjean wakes up because his bed is too comfortable. He’s only slept 4 hours. There was a conversation some other brick club people were having (I think?) about how the characters in the Brick are all so melodramatic because none of them ever freaking sleep. I’d love to see someone track the sleeping of everybody. It seems like Cosette is the only one who gets a normal amount of sleep. Everyone else is zombie-ing their way through life on like two hours.

However, I do think it’s interesting that Valjean wakes after four hours because “he was not accustomed to many hours of sleep” and he is no longer tired, and yet a sentence later he closes his eyes to try and go back to sleep. This line feels to me like the kind of “go back to sleep” that people do when they’re trying to avoid something they’re dreading. When I was in college I used to “sleep through” my math classes because I dreaded them so much. This feels like that. The “if I just close my eyes I can go back to sleep and not deal with this weird/scary/unknown/uncomfortable/etc thing” type of thinking.

“His oldest and his most recent memories floated pell-mell and mingled confusedly, losing shape, swelling beyond measure, then abruptly disappearing as if in a muddy, troubled stream.” Okay, I love this line because it implies that the previous chapters 6-9 weren’t just Hugo narrating for the sake of painting a picture of a character and building his backstory before the main action starts, but were actually Valjean thinking about his past and how he got to where he is.

At this point in time, Valjean seems to do a lot of things sort of unconsciously. He “find[s] himself, somehow, seated on his bed” as if his body is moving independently of his thoughts. Hugo implies that his “strange gesture” towards the bishop is unconscious. The same thing happens with Petit Gervais’ coin. I want to keep my eye out later once Valjean becomes Madeleine to see when exactly he obeys this sort of unconscious instinct and lets his body do the work for him, and when he stops and thinks things over. At this moment it’s a weird sort of push-pull between both; his body moves for him, but he sits and thinks about the silver for over an hour.

A mention of Brevet and his single checked suspender--the detail which Valjean describes to him later at Arras in order to identify himself. Valjean remembering a little detail from his life in prison, as if some tiny part of his conscience is trying to remind him what he might go back to if he steals the silver. Also, is this Hugo flexing his “I know what convicts were like” detail knowledge or is he making shit up, like with the nostril-candle-blowing thing?”

Oh man, the twilit lighting as a sort of morally liminal space that Valjean is currently occupying. He has a choice between the “alternative light and shade” that’s going on outside, what will he choose in this weird in-between twilight?

This is a bit silly but I’m interested in what kind of lock was on the window Valjean studies? My translation (FMA) says it’s fastened “with a wedge” but the Hapgood translation on Gutenberg says “only with a small pin.” What were old window fasteners like? Did they lock on the sash or the sill? I grew up in a house built in 1905 or so, but I imagine this lock is even older than the half-circle shaped sash lock I’m familiar with.

Also, this is the chapter we learn Valjean has some hypervigilant observational superpowers.

[fremedon]

Brickclub I.2.8 - I.2.11

Catching up on last week’s brickclub posts; have some stray thoughts:

I.2.8, “Deep Waters, Dark Shadows”: The introduction of the Man Overboard motif that’s going to recur throughout the book. What struck me this time is how the images of depths and precipices have been layered into the previous few chapters--in the philosophical questions the bishop avoids, and then more ominously, in the previous chapter’s image of the pyramid of society towering over Valjean.

And here again we have the image of the sky as inverted abyss that’s going to show up in Valjean’s and Javert’s crises of conscience: “He feels buried by the two infinities together, the ocean and the sky, the one a tomb, the other a shroud.”

I.2.9, “New Grievances”: I liked @everyonewasabird‘s observation that this chapter’s plunge from grand metaphor to the details of petty wage theft is designed to put the reader in the position of Society, sailing on--if precisely how many sous Valjean has been shorted bores you, you are part of the problem. It is not the last time Hugo will try to wring a reaction he’s just problematized out of the reader.

I.2.10, “The Man Wakes Up”: The contrast between awareness of mundane, even boring detail and grand imagery continues, though, in the mind of Jean Valjean. For the first time, we’re fully in his viewpoint, in the story’s present; it’s taken us almost a hundred pages to get here--through flashback, through omniscient observation of Valjean, and through the bishop, whose own POV sections were much more distant, less physically immediate. This is the first time our viewpoint as readers has been fully embodied. 

H/t to whoever it was in the Watchalong Discord the other week who pointed out that Valjean’s intrusive visual memory of the checkered pattern of Brevet’s suspender sounds like migraine aura, which Hugo suffered from.

H/t to the Les Miserables Reading Companion podcast for pointing out that the iron miner’s drill Valjean picks up is, in French, a miner’s candlestick.

I.2.11, “What He Does Next”: I hardly have anything to say about this chapter; it’s too good. I’ve read the Brick all the way through ten times, and I must have browsed this chapter many more times, and I’m still always in suspense, as though this might be the time Valjean puts the silver back and goes back to bed.

And Hugo’s descriptions of light and shadow are always so evocative--pulling a lot of metaphorical weight, but also exquisitely well-observed and well-described.

[pilferingapples]

Les Mis 365 Retrobricking 1.2.8-1.2.10

1.2.8- Billows and Shadows

I honestly have nothing useful to say about this chapter. It's too perfect. I mean I guess I could make the obvious note about Hugo's daughter here but-- yeah, no. This whole section just holds up too well on its own for me to even analyze. Possibly the most perfect bit of prose I've ever read, and excuse me while I go writhe in emotions for a bit.

1.2.9- Fresh Grievances

There's a certain dark humor to Valjean's accounting of his wages here.Having already judged society in earlier chapters, having come SO CLOSE to getting a really solid concept of the idea of institutional oppresssion, here he is being outraged by a 'theft' of what he perceives as his rightful wages. Not the wages themselves, which are insultingly small, or the prison/profit system that dictates them, but the few pieces of coin that he didn't account for in his adding. The food is bad and the portions are too small, basically.  Also noteworthy: whoever is running the release of prisoners apparently makes no effort to explain their finances to them. Why should they? Who are the prisoners going to complain to? ARGH. 

1.2.10 ...Jean Valjean is the WORST THIEF EVER. I mean, even in the planning here. Yeah, he's noticed something expensive worth a lot of money-- but how was he expecting to fence it? Looking the way he does, he could hardly have said "hello, yes, I found these in my family attic" and ever been believed. I wonder in seriousness if he wasn't partly TRYING to get re-arrested.