#LM 4.9.2

[the-wraxall-illustrations]

[pilferingapples]

LM 4.9.1, LM 4.9.2

..heck with it, time to throw thoughts at the wall and see what punches through

under a cut for mentions of suicidal ideation etc, we're entering LM endgame it's all intense:

-- Given that Marius is definitely planning a suicide at least , Eponine is out here saving lives! Whatever her intentions in telling Valjean to move and telling Marius about the barricade , she has effectively stopped Marius from following through his immediate plans of "see Cosette and then grab a gun"-- and given the way the tropes work around Tragic Young Lovers in this genre, and the fact that there are two guns, she's pretty definitely saved Cosette as well as Marius. There is a much, much bleaker version of this story where Valjean didn't move for another day.

(side note: I can't BELIEVE it took me so long to realize why Marius took the pistols. This is definitely a comment on me and not on Hugo's writing, Hugo set it all up so well all along! Thanks to @everyonewasabird for making this clear, because, well. I like Marius as a character a lot better now, in the sense of finding him more interesting, even if I also urgently want him nine billion miles away from Cosette).

-- On that note: remember that line about how there are loves that destroy and loves that save , and "God has decreed Cosette should find a love that saves? "God willed that Cosette’s love should encounter one of the loves which save"?

I'm starting to think the "love that saves" which Cosette encounters isn't Marius, but Eponine.

Eponine, at this point, is absolutely trying to get Marius to die with her; but she's doing that by dragging Marius to the barricades , which she can't have been expecting to do on the 4th, when she didn't even know Marius' friend Courfeyrac, or that he'd be at the barricades! But she still told Valjean to get out.

I used to think Eponine was reacting to the news of Cosette moving, and thus possibly taking Marius away in that way--but now I'm pretty sure Eponine never heard that:

Éponine, who never took her eyes off of them, saw them retreat by the road by which they had come. She rose and began to creep after them along the walls and the houses. She followed them thus as far as the boulevard.-LM 4.8.4

So her response and actions through these chapters are about something else! And why? What's changed?

On the one hand, she's seen Marius with Cosette for the first time. And her reaction was : “I’m no longer surprised that he comes here every evening." She sees something --in Cosette, in the romance--that she understands. And while it might be hurting her to watch, she DOES watch, without interfering-- except to save them from her dad's gang.

I am pretty sure that Eponine, on any level she'd admit to herself, is only trying to get Cosette out of the picture by telling Valjean to move. But she is also very definitely , and consciously, getting Cosette away from Thenardier.

Beyond that, as we're told later, her plan is very vague until she learns about the barricades from Courfeyrac. But I think Eponine knows she's planning to push herself and Marius to some sort of drastic end. So what is it signifying that she gets Cosette out of the way of that too?

(Does she recognize Cosette? Does she not? Does she see her as a projection of What Might Have Been? What are her feelings there, aside from jealousy? because there's definitely something beyond it...)

Oh yeah also Marius and Valjean are in these chapters, it's whatever XD

[dolphin1812]

It’s not surprising that if Marius missed the cholera sweeping Paris, he also missed Lamarque and his death. Lamarque was a general who was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1828 and became very popular. He also had many successful campaigns in Napoleon’s army (so he was liked by many Bonapartists, although Les Amis liked him as republicans). He died at the beginning of June 1832 of cholera. The noise Marius hears is likely from the funeral, which became a catalyst for protests.

And Cosette has already vanished! Poor Marius! And he’s now been sent to the barricade!

The pistols were so ominous, though. There’s a real possibility he intended to kill himself and Cosette with them, realizing his dream of a shared tomb. Now, he has the barricade instead.

[cliozaur]

The one, in which Marius ignores the beginning of the revolt (Lamarque’s funeral). Well, he is deeply depressed, and, let’s be honest, he was never interested in Les Amis’ affairs.

But even before that: Hugo is so wrong here! “Marius was at an age when one believes nothing in the line of evil” — with this, he tries to explain that Marius was not jealous of Cosette because of Théodule. Ha! Wasn’t it that same Marius who was ready to beat up some poor invalid because of his own sick fantasy?

Before going out on the 5th of June, he somehow finds the pistols (presented to him by Javert) and takes them with him. We are told that he did it absent-mindedly, but it could also mean that Marius is already suicidal. He forgets to eat, he takes a bath in the Seine (Probably. He himself is not sure about it). Marius, wake up!

His last hope to see Cosette in the evening is gone, because Jean Valjean followed the advice he read in the note and left the house on the Rue Plumet. And there is a confirmation that Marius indeed wants to kill himself: “his heart filled with sweetness and resolution, he blessed his love in the depths of his thought, and he said to himself that, since Cosette was gone, all that there was left for him was to die.” (It’s far too romantic a presentation of the decision to end one’s life – you have to be very careful with it, M. Hugo!)

Last thing we learn is that Éponine calls Marius to join his friends (are they?) at the barricade. Given that neither of them is motivated by revolutionary fervour, we can suspect that these two are simply ready to die. (And in the next chapter, they will be joined by the third person with a similar motivation.)

[pureanonofficial]

LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - Marius, LM 4.9.2 (Les Miserables 1925)

Marius fixed his despairing eyes on that dismal house, which was as black and as silent as a tomb and far more empty. He gazed at the stone seat on which he had passed so many adorable hours with Cosette. Then he seated himself on the flight of steps, his heart filled with sweetness and resolution, he blessed his love in the depths of his thought, and he said to himself that, since Cosette was gone, all that there was left for him was to die.

[fremedon]

Brickclub 4.9, “Where Are They Going?”, Chapters 1-2

Posting for today and tomorrow, since these chapters make a good pair. This is a short book--three chapters, titled “Jean Valjean,” “Marius,” and “Monsieur Mabeuf,” following each of them over different but overlapping parts of June 4 and 5.

And they’re all in terrible shape. Valjean is the most together, in that he’s the only one of the three who is not actively suicidal. But his survival instincts are about the only part of him that’s noticing and interacting with the world--he’s noticed Thénardier skulking about the Rue Plumet; he’s noticed the growing political unrest, which increases his chance of being swept up in a mass arrest--but he hasn’t noticed that anything has happened with Cosette in the six weeks she’s been secretly meeting Marius. (Maybe if he’d slept in the main house, he’d have heard voices in the front garden, but they don’t reach him in the Shame Hut.)

And he’s not questioning the promptings of instinct telling him to flee--to the point where he doesn’t question Éponine’s “MOVE OUT” note--which is folded in four, and falls into his lap out of a shadow cast by the sun that’s behind him and out of his sight, two bad signs--but just obeys it, because it’s telling him what he’s already decided to do. And he’s worried by the address scratched in his wall, but he doesn’t investigate it. (I love to read a fic where Valjean’s response to finding it is to go find out who lives at 16 Rue de la Verrerie.)

Marius, meanwhile, takes the pistols with him without having a plan for using them--but even when he still expects to see Cosette one more time, he doesn’t see his life continuing after that: “He had only one clear idea, that at nine o’clock he would see Cosette. This ultimate happiness was now his whole future, followed by darkness.”

It rains; he doesn’t notice: “Apparently, he bathed in the Seine without being aware of it.” The rain is the revolution--as we’ll see more explicitly in “The Atom Fraternizes with the Hurricane,” and in the way the rain ends immediately when the barricade’s first stones are laid--and it already isn’t touching him. But it’s also the drowning imagery that has been hanging around Éponine, touching him for (I think) the first time.

This story is very clear that someone is going to drown in the Seine, and that someone is going to attempt a romantic murder-suicide--but it hasn’t decided who yet. (The drowning will be as pointless and awful as we expect; but I do wonder if there’s some magical calculus in which Éponine changing her mind and saving Marius at the last minute is what enables Grantaire and Enjolras to die together in sublime perfection.)

Other details: Marius scratched Courfeyrac’s address on the wall above a tuft of nettles, which are covered with plaster dust. I don’t know if this is a significant example of nettles or not.