#leopoldine

[saltybluffs]

Sailing in the bay number.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Austrian actress Leopoldine Konstantin on a vintage postcard

[jolifleurbleu]

Josef drove home drunk again.

[mclillustrationaday]

[swamp-gremlin]

Horrible woman <3

[draigviller]

[empirearchives]

I am now imagining Napoleon monkey hunting in America and eating coconuts to reflect on his past greatness

[secretmellowblog]

Before writing Les Mis, Hugo’s beloved 19-year-old daughter Leopoldine tragically drowned. As a result Les Mis is full of drowning imagery— drowning as a a symbol of impossible grief and loss, drowning as a symbol of being left behind by a society that doesn’t care about protecting your life, drowning as a method of suicide.

The les mis letters chapter today is the first chapter where Hugo highlights the drowning imagery that becomes central to the rest of the novel. The horrible symbolic death Valjean suffers as a result of being entirely isolated and forgotten by a society that doesn’t value his life is also foreshadowing of Javert’s eventual death.

Throughout the novel, Eponine also frequently talks about her desire to drown herself in the Seine; Thenardier monologues about how “the river is the true grave” and when bodies fall in it “justice makes no inquiries;” later Valjean escapes prison by faking his death by drowning, and so on and so on. There’s this emphasis that drowning doesn’t just mean death, it means erasing yourself from existence. It means you’re forgotten.

One of the saddest references to the death of Leopoldine is the way Valjean and Javert learn about the other’s death (or “death.”)

Hugo learned about his daughter’s death not from a family member/friend, but by reading about it in a newspaper. He was on vacation away from his family at the time. He was reading the news in a cafe and happened to stumble on an article about Leopoldine’s horrible tragic drowning, which was how he first learned that she was dead.

When Javert learns about Valjean’s “death” in prison (when Valjean pretends to drown in order to escape), he learns about it by reading it in the newspaper. When Valjean learns about Javert’s death by drowning, he learns about it by reading it in the newspaper.

So…yeah :(. Les Mis is full of all these agonized metaphors around drowning (as a metaphor for death/grief/being entirely forgotten by the people around you) and part of that comes from Hugo’s own deep personal trauma around the death of death of his daughter.

[pureanonofficial]

What you come to understand about Les Miserables as you learn more about Victor Hugo is that it is all about Léopoldine, it is nothing but Léopoldine, Léopoldine is the heart and soul of it, every word and chapter is full of Léopoldine, Léopoldine, Léopoldine.

It is a book immutably shaped by the pain of losing a child.

[daguerreotypen]

Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[citizenscreen]

‘I am married to an American agent.’

OH OH

[postcard-from-the-past]

Austrian actress Leopoldine Konstantin on a vintage postcard

[yiyi025]

butters' genderbend was the most requested, so here's marjorine!

[psikonauti]

Joseph Abel (Austrian,1764-1818)

Maria Leopoldine Pachler (pianist), 1827

Oil

[scholarofgloom]