#murder in montparnasse

[missfisherandjack]

“Now, tell me, Jack, does that new furrow in your brow have anything to do with kissing me the other night?”

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012-2015) ↳ 1x07 Murder In Montparnasse // 1x08 Away With The Fairies

[morningmee]

Well... At least the Inspectors priorities are in full working order 😏

You can distract/protect me any day Inspector

#when you're trying to catch a murderer but your boss starts snogging Miss Fisher

[allpartofthejob]

Jack in heavy duty-mode 😅. He sometimes loves to break down doors. Because he can't fly in like peter pan...

(1*07 murder at Montparnasse)

[drinkthemlock]

finished vol. 1 of les mis. feeling a bit of a void in my chest but we stay silly

[wah-pah]

Fucking René.

[caluanthes]

MISS FISHER’S MURDER MYSTERIES 1x07 - Murder in Montparnasse

[1920sxfashionxstyle]

Detective Inspector Jack Robinson (Nathan Page) distracts Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis) in one of my favourite episodes of 'Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries' - 'Murder in Montparnasse'.

[secretmellowblog]

I do love that Valjean’s advice to Montparnasse is just “if you want to be lazy and fashionable, it’s actually very hard to do that while mugging people bc you’re going to end up caught in prison.” Like it’s not “don’t mug people because it’s bad” but “don’t mug people because it’ll mess with your fashion.” The only advice that can possibly reach the world’s shallowest murderer

“You desire fine black cloth, varnished shoes, to have your hair curled and sweet-smelling oils on your locks, to please low women, to be handsome. You will be shaven clean, and you will wear a red blouse and wooden shoes. You want rings on your fingers, you will have an iron necklet on your neck. If you glance at a woman, you will receive a blow. And you will enter there at the age of twenty. And you will come out at fifty! You will enter young, rosy, fresh, with brilliant eyes, and all your white teeth, and your handsome, youthful hair; you will come out broken, bent, wrinkled, toothless, horrible, with white locks! Ah! my poor child, you are on the wrong road; idleness is counselling you badly; the hardest of all work is thieving. Believe me, do not undertake that painful profession of an idle man. It is not comfortable to become a rascal. It is less disagreeable to be an honest man.”

[jolys-cane]

montparnasse redemption arc where he takes what valjean told him to heart and becomes a butcher.

pros:

still gets the thrill of murdering things

already used to being covered in blood so he’ll be fine with that

will get to sell goods for honest pay

no risk of getting arrested

still gets to use his knives

can meet cute girls at market

can tie his apron rly tight to snatch his waist

cons:

becoming a butcher is the greatest cover ever to keep being a serial murderer

hates labour and whines about it the whole time

[missfisherandjack]

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012-2015) ↳ 1x07 Murder In Montparnasse

[allpartofthejob]

Sometimes these local cops are just useless

(there are so many iconic favorite scenes in murder at Montparnasse - the "beep beep", young Phryne, the kiss!, the returning of the painting... - that I tend to forget the wonderful other little snippets of what they do best)

1x07

[pureanonofficial]

LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse, LM 3.7.3 (Shoujo Cosette)

A lugubrious being was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a child; less than twenty years of age, with a handsome face, lips like cherries, charming black hair, the brilliant light of springtime in his eyes; he had all vices and aspired to all crimes. The digestion of evil aroused in him an appetite for worse. It was the street boy turned pickpocket, and a pickpocket turned garroter. He was genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, sluggish, ferocious. The rim of his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make room for a tuft of hair, after the style of 1829. He lived by robbery with violence. His coat was of the best cut, but threadbare. Montparnasse was a fashion-plate in misery and given to the commission of murders. The cause of all this youth’s crimes was the desire to be well-dressed. The first grisette who had said to him: “You are handsome!” had cast the stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this Abel. Finding that he was handsome, he desired to be elegant: now, the height of elegance is idleness; idleness in a poor man means crime. Few prowlers were so dreaded as Montparnasse. At eighteen, he had already numerous corpses in his past. More than one passer-by lay with outstretched arms in the presence of this wretch, with his face in a pool of blood. Curled, pomaded, with laced waist, the hips of a woman, the bust of a Prussian officer, the murmur of admiration from the boulevard wenches surrounding him, his cravat knowingly tied, a bludgeon in his pocket, a flower in his buttonhole; such was this dandy of the sepulchre.

[potatosonnet]

I love your art so much!!! Always makes my day whenever I see it on my dash :) Have you ever drawn any of the Patron-Minette before? Asking for a *friend*…

First of all, tysm!!!

I did sketch the members of Patron-Minette a little because THEY ARE SO FUN but I’m still working on the designs!

I’ll probably be uploading my Eponine stuff in a few days? And there’s a little Montparnasse in it, he’s such a funny kitten (murderous and comedic at the same time.) In the mean time, please have some Montparnasse from last week.

PS. I love your work on the Patron-Minette so much!! Your fics! Your presentation!! Your blog!!! 😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳👍👍👍👍Q U A L I T Y

[iceprinceofbelair]

bricktober day 29: patron-minette

prompts by @lesmis-prompts

this is the second macavity parody poem ive written so i think now i have to make it my whole brand. it just fit montparnasse so well i couldn't get my brain to think about anything else.

-

Montparnasse, Montparnasse, there’s no-one like Montparnasse

He steals and picks the pockets of the rich and upper class.

Babet at his left hand and with Claquesous at his right

He roams the streets of Paris – the terror of the night.

It might be that you hear screaming echo through the dark,

Or find the murdered body of a debtor in the park,

But one thing is for certain, as sure as widowed despair,

Once you reach the scene of crime: Patron-Minette’s not there.

You may search the marketplace, upturn the bustling square

I tell you once again – Patron-Minette’s not there.

[dolphin1812]

I recognize that "dark-haired and beautiful" is a really vague description of Montparnasse, but somehow it's still enough for me to imagine him as "Marius, but evil and with self-confidence." The emphasis on his youth is intriguing. As a former "street boy," the repetition of language related to youth ("a child," "springtime," his age, etc) reminds us that his crimes likely began around the age a child would "age out" of being a gamin (13). With that also being around the age he would have become a teenager, he might have also become more interested in his appearance then (and would have attracted more attention while also not having a place to turn to), leading to his crimes. Montparnasse isn't meant to be sympathetic - he's said to have every "vice" and he literally murders people because he wants to look nice - but it's still concerning that someone so young could have been positioned to commit violence crimes. It's both an indictment of Montparnasse and of the society that created him.

I don't know that I'll have much to say about Claquesous beyond how much I enjoy his description. His disappearances make him almost supernatural, a mysterious force of night rather than another criminal. He's also the least trustworthy of the group from any angle. No one in Patron Minette is trustworthy, of course, but Claquesous specifically is unknown even to those he works with. Between spying and betrayal within the criminal underworld and on behalf of the police (think of Leblanc's porter accusing Marius of being a police spy), someone this mysterious is even scarier than the known murderer Montparnasse, simply because it's impossible to say who he is or what he does with his knowledge.

Babet feels like the kind of criminal who is the biggest threat to someone like Fantine: a vulnerable person in desperate circumstances, hurt more by manipulation than by outright violence. Part of this is just that he extracts teeth, which she notably had to sell. But it's also because he's "learned." Another issue Fantine had was that her illiteracy meant that another had to know her secret, which made it easier to discover. Her situation wouldn't have been uncommon in Paris, suggesting that Babet could exploit others through actual knowledge acquired by reading and by the pretension to expertise that "learning" gave him (see how he calls himself a "chemist"). A small and funny(?) detail is that he lost his wife and children like a "handkerchief," which only seems humorous because it comes so soon after Marius' obsession with M Leblanc's handkerchief.

Gueulemer is the most heavily racialized of the Patron Minette, made more explicit by the suggestion that he was "creole." His description mostly just feels racist in how Hugo describes his physical features and emphasizes his physical strength. There is a brief historical reference, though. Marshal Brune was an officer during the French Revolutionary Wars and under Napoleon. He was murdered, so the suggestion that Gueulemer was connected to him likely means that he was involved in his death. Notably, he was a porter at the time. Doors in this novel are significant in how they show acceptance and care (opening) or societal rejection (closing), so it's interesting that he sidesteps this entirely in favor of violence.