#qui avait favorisé sa carrière' (had to make this portrait as favorable as possible to the character of the man who had favored his career) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

coquelicoq · 2 years ago

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if you're wondering what the big deal is about the louis-philippe sentence in les misérables, it is, in the original french, 760 words long. the subject of the sentence doesn't appear until 95% of the way through, at word #711; the main verb is word #712. the sentence contains 91 commas and 49 semicolons and is almost entirely a list of laudatory adjectival phrases describing the erstwhile king of france. this is perhaps especially notable because les mis is, shall we say, not known for being particularly gung-ho about the monarchy.

this sentence copied and pasted into Word takes up more than one page single-spaced. in the 1800-page folio classique edition, it is fully two and a half of those 1800 pages. that means that les mis is 0.14% this single sentence. more of les mis is made up of this sentence than earth's atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide (0.04%). if the page count of les mis stayed the same but every sentence was the length of this one, les mis would consist of only 720 sentences total.

incidentally, guess who named hugo a peer of france 17 years before the publication of les mis?

#he also goes on for another six pages after this but by then he has remembered the existence of the full stop #the endnotes say that hugo 'se devait de faire [ce portrait] aussi favorable que possible à la personnalité de l'homme #qui avait favorisé sa carrière' (had to make this portrait as favorable as possible to the character of the man who had favored his career)#in fairness to hugo it's not like louis-philippe was alive to read this. so he wasn't just sucking up to get something out of it #he says at the end of the chapter that this description is 'entirely disinterested'. which like on the one hand i get #bc like i said louis-philippe was not in power and reading this. but otoh victor 'ancien pair de france' hugo u r not exactly unbiased. lol #les mis #lm 4.1.3 #i just looked up the english translation and gasp! hapgood turned it into four separate sentences!!!!#so i think y'all who are reading it via les mis letters (which uses hapgood i think?) are gonna miss out on the full experience :/#my posts #linked to #syntax #idk if i got this across but the worst part is that the subject of the sentence - the beginning of the independent clause -#doesn't occur until the very end. so for the first 95% of the sentence you're just waiting for the bass to drop!!!#like reading it out loud you have to raise your pitch at the end of every dependent clause because you haven't gotten to the subject yet #AND THERE ARE SO MANY CLAUSES!! 49 SEMICOLONS PEOPLE!!! FORTY-NINE!!!!#victor hugo would be TERRIBLE as a hype man. he would take so long that the crowd would tear him to pieces with their fingernails #before louis-philippe could come out on stage. and then they'd be so mad at louis-philippe for inspiring him that they'd tear LP apart too #actually i think i'm using hype man wrong. i'm thinking of the guy that gets the crowd hyped up for the main guy before the main guy #makes an appearance. a hype man is the guy who makes interjections during a song. victor hugo would be bad at both of these #like just imagine the announcer at the beginning of a basketball game. and now...your starting lineup...at power forward...#and then he just says the 760-word louis-philippe sentence.#dead. murdered at the hands of the fans. microphone shoved down his trachea.

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