#and you know sometimes it is sexy. sometimes doomed self destructive worship is more fun to read about than ‘healthy relationships’

[secretmellowblog]

Grantaire’s bar is on the floor, but Javert’s bar is at the bottom of the Seine XD. 

And yee!  To me it’s less that Javert/Valjean and Grantaire/Enjolras specifically are parallels, as much as..... they’re both part of a wider trend throughout the novel. There’s this repeated relationship dynamic where characters who consider themselves grotesque and “misérable” start worshiping another character as an ideal— and then destroy/ kill themselves in the process of that worship. 

Like Jean Valjean’s worship of Cosette: 

“Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety. He who felt that he could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most, beheld wings sprouting on Cosette.”

Vs terminally Ill Fantine’s worship of Cosette:

“I have been a sinner; but when I have my child beside me, it will be a sign that God has pardoned me. While I was leading a bad life, I should not have liked to have my Cosette with me; I could not have borne her sad, astonished eyes. It was for her sake that I did evil, and that is why God pardons me. I shall feel the benediction of the good God when Cosette is here. I shall gaze at her; it will do me good to see that innocent creature. She knows nothing at all. She is an angel, you see, my sisters. At that age the wings have not fallen off.”

Vs Grantaire’s worship of Enjolras

“The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight.

And Eponine’s strange self destructive love for Marius has shade of this— she refers to herself as “the devil,” and a “dog,” as if she’s subhuman, and obsesses over Marius as a symbol of the life she hasn’t been allowed to have.

And then there’s obviously ….whatever on earth is going on with Javert in Derailed. XD Descibing Jean Valjean as some kind of impossibly holy monster, comparing him to angels and Jesus Christ, while describing himself in these beast-like terms as  “a wolf who finds its prey, and a dog that finds its master again” and etc etc etc. 

And beside Jean Valjean glorified he beheld himself, Javert, degraded.

And this is only tangentially related but when it comes to specific character foils, I’m personally way more passionate about the parallels between Eponine and Javert's self-destructions, than between Grantaire and Javert's— and I think the Eponine/Javert parallels are far more intentional on Hugo’s part! Though I'm still not completely sure about what he was doing with it.

I know other people have talked about this before, but I ramble about it every time I have an excuse because it's like! The way Javert and Eponine "trade deaths." The way Eponine repeatedly talks about drowning herself in the Seine, and Javert is supposed to die by being shot at the barricades— but then Eponine is shot at the barricades, while Javert drowns himself in the Seine. Eponine is the quote “daughter of a wolf” who makes herself the “guard dog” of Marius, while Javert is the quote “dog son of a wolf” who ultimately becomes “a dog that has found its master again”/“the watch dog that licks the intruder’s hand”  towards Jean Valjean. Again I'm still not fully sure what Hugo was doing with that parallel (though I've rambled about it a lot) but it iS my current favorite "relationship between two Les Mis characters who almost never interact."

The point is. I guess Romantic authors really loved it when characters destroyed themselves in questionably healthy ways out of a weird combination of self-loathing and admiration   

I beg y’all’s pardon, in my recent shitpost my inexperience thinking hard about Grantaire’s character arc led me to make an inadequate punchline, and in place of “The—no;…” I would like to present as a revision:

G: So you’re a man of Aegeus’ sin, so beloved of the nineteenth century, though we perhaps thought too little of the marriage of the boathook and the bloated flesh after. You prefer a watery baptism at the tail of life as well as the head—not my preferred sacrament, when Christ has been so good a host as to give his blood, and I a gracious guest, but one can’t judge another man’s religion. Besides, she’s a very fine thing, the Seine, a romantic. All the same, a bullet’s quicker.

J: That’s well enough, but the ninny had my pistols.