Y’all ain’t gonna believe how action-packed this part is.
Fasten your seat belts, ‘cause Volume 3: Marius of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables
is a wild ride.
 |
Victor Hugo: close observer
of teenage girls |
Ado, begone! It’s time for
Book Eighth – The Wicked Poor Man
Poor Marius! So many sad things in his life, the worst of
which seems to be that the old man and his pretty daughter have vamoosed for
good. He goes all around Paris looking for them, in places both sensible and
strange, all of his youthful exuberance and dreaminess and so forth shattered; “he
was a lost dog.” (p.482)
“He took to living more and more alone, utterly overwhelmed,
wholly given up to his inward anguish, going and coming in his pain like the
wolf in the trap, seeing the absent one everywhere, stupefied by love.” (p.483)
Poor boo. After ages of this, “he had been obliged to take to dining again,
alas! Oh, infirmities of ideal passions!” (p.484)
So he’s walking out to get some food, when he gets bashed in
passing by two fleeing grubby girls. “Through the twilight, Marius could distinguish
their livid faced, their wild heads, their disheveled hair, their hideous
bonnets, their ragged petticoats, and their bare feet.” (p.484) He overhears
them fretting (in “repulsive slang” p.484) about how they’ve barely escaped
being nabbed by the cops. They head off, and Marius finds a packet on the
ground, which he pockets, since the girls are gone.
“ ‘How gloomy my life has become!’ he said to himself.
‘Young girls are always appearing to me, only formerly they were angels and now
they are ghouls.’ “ (p.484) Don’t you feel sorry for Marius? Marius really
wants you to feel sorry for him.
So he eats, heads home, and re-discovers the packet. Turns
out it holds a pile of stinky tobacco-smelling letters, addressed to various
people, signed with various names, each relaying a different sob story but all
in the same hand. One – important info for later! – is addressed “To the
benevolent Gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacqusedu-haut-Pas” (p.486) from a
down-at-luck but grateful actor supplicant calling himself Fabantou.
So Marius is all, ‘huh, someone’s a con artist, eh?’ but is
too bummed out by love to care, much less to speculate that the fleeing girls
had any connection to it all.
Next morning, there’s a knock at the door, and to his
surprise the voice that answers his “come in” isn’t Ma’am Bougon, the portress.
“It was a dull, broken, hoarse, strangled voice, the voice of an old man
roughened with brandy and liquor.” (p.488) It belongs to “one of those beings
which are both feeble and horrible, and which cause those to shudder whom they
do not cause to weep.” (p.488), also known as the older of the girls who ran
into him in the street, also known, lo and behold, as the girl next door.
(Shall we see what Hugo has to say about this particular
teen aged girl’s grim appearance? “The most heart-breaking thing of all was,
that this young girl had not come into the world to be homely. In her early
childhood she must even have been pretty. The grace of her age was still
struggling against the hideous, premature decrepitude of debauchery and
poverty. The remains of beauty were dying away in that face of sixteen, like
the pale sunlight which is extinguished under hideous clouds at dawn on a
winter’s day.” (p.488) In case someone needs to refute that the modern cult of
beauty is at fault for causing teen girls to be image-obsessed, be aware that
creepy old men have been scrutinizing and judging teen girls for centuries, and
it leaves a mark, okay?)
So, this wretch brings Marius a letter asking for alms, and
what? Surprise! It looks just like the other letters (but is signed
“Jondrette”) He figures out that the girls have to carry supplication letters
on behalf of their dad, the gross guy next door, and Marius takes some time to
ruminate about the sad life the girls live, how poverty and manipulation and
all are turning them into more monsters than women.
The girl, meanwhile, is having a ball. She hesitatingly
reads a little from Marius’s books, writes on his paper, tells how her little
brother is a friend of artists (take note for later, folks) and sometimes gets
tickets to the theater she can use, lets Marius know how handsome he is, etc.
Marius is all, ‘uh, yeah, uh, here’s your letters?’ and hands over the packet.
She’s delighted, thought they were lost for good, and dashes off to deliver the
one to “that old fellow who goes to mass.” (p.491) Marius comes up with five
francs for her, keeping his last sixteen sous for himself. (He also paid 6
months rent for the neighbors at one point when he had cash. Remember, Marius
is proud of living poorly to spurn his grandfather.)
So now Marius realizes that his level of destitution isn’t
on the same scale as his neighbors. He contemplates all that misery and if this
volume weren’t already so voluminous, I’d share more, but as it is, let’s get
to the point: he discovers a hole near the ceiling that allows him to stand on
the furniture and see into the Jondrette’s room. Or “hovel” as we should call
it. “Marius was poor, and his chamber was poverty-stricken, but as his poverty
was noble, his garret was neat. The den upon which his eye now rested was
abject, dirty, fetid, pestiferous, mean, sordid.” (p.494)
Notable among the broken, shoddy furnishings, the lack of
food, the barely-clothed torsos of the residents, was the fact that Jondrette
had tobacco for his pipe. He’s writing more letters, and his big coarse wife is
lauding him hollowly and his pitiful younger daughter is morose.
Marius is about to leave them to it, when the older daughter
bursts into the hovel and tells her family that the old fellow from the church
is following her, about to join them in their home. After Jondrette quizzed her
closely to be sure she wasn’t spreading misinformation, he sprang into action.
He put out the fire, broke the straw out of the bottom of their one chair,
forced the younger girl to shove her hand through the window pane, breaking it
to let in the cold and bloodying herself to add more pathos to their home. “One
would have said he was a general making the final preparation at the moment
when the battle is on the point of beginning.” (p.498) He tears his shirt,
sends his wife to bed, encourages the kid to cry, and stands posing at the
mantle, ready to look as miserable as possible, muttering about how the
philanthropist probably won’t give them anything but bread and clothes that
don’t fit and all his work will have been for nothing.
A knock!
The man and his daughter enter!
“Marius had not quitted his post. His feelings for the
moment surpassed the powers of the human tongue.
It was She!” (p. 500)
He’s agog, he can’t believe his angel is in that horrible
garret. His soul soars.
Meanwhile, the old man has given Jondrette the expected
bundle of clothes and food, which Jondrette pretends to appreciate while making
snide comments to his daughter about it. But he wants more, so he “exclaimed
with an accent which smacked at the same time of the vainglory of the
mountebank at fairs, and the humility of the mendicant on the highway” (p.501),
pointing out the lack of fire and clothes, the broken window, the “ill” wife in
the bed. He pinches his daughter’s bleeding hand to make her sob more,
attributing the injury to unsafe factory work. He claims they’ll be kicked out
if they don’t come up with a year’s rent, and names an amount that would have
covered 18 months instead. (Also, Marius knows it’s a lie because it had only
been 6 months since he paid their back rent.)
The philanthropist hands over his coat and the only five
francs he has on him, promising to return at six that evening with the sixty
francs Jondrette needs.
Marius kind of noticed all this, but mostly he’s been
staring at the girl all this time. Her. His angel. Being all angelic with her
charitable goods, her kindness to mother and daughters, and so on. When they
leave, Marius tries to follow, but the cabbie is all “pay in advance, bub” and
Marius is all “I’m good for it, I swear!” and the cabbie is all “you think I
was born yesterday?” and since Marius gave his cash to the Jondrette girl, he
can’t afford to follow his angel. ALAS!
He’s super sad and grumpy as he heads back to his room, and
the last person he wants to see is the Jondrette girl who took his cash, but
she butts into his room and suggests that, since she is always running helpful
errands for her dad, she has the skills to help him out of whatever jam is
bumming him out. She is NOT delighted to be asked to find the Angel Girl’s
address, but she agrees. “There was a shade in the words ‘the beautiful lady’
which troubled Marius,” (p.506) but he pays no attention to his instinct and
promises her anything if she’ll find his lady love.
Okay, this particular volume has a LOT more action, but
there’s a limit to how long I’m willing to
make this post. So we shall leave it
here with these compelling questions:
·
Will the philanthropist return with the cash?
·
Will the younger Jondrette have her arm cut off
due to injury?
·
Will the older Jondrette find the angel lady’s
address?
·
Will Marius fall through the commode he’s
standing on to spy on his neighbors?
You guys! I'm struggling. Struggling to explain away my niggling negativity towards Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. Should I have read it instead of listening? But David Pittu's narration was quite good, his voices interesting and consistent and his Theo, in particular, accessible and familiar. Is it because I'm working so much on my own writing at the moment? But I've noticed writerly tricks in other authors' works and not felt irritated by them. Is it the high expectations stemming from my love of The Secret History? But I've already been vaguely disappointed by The Little Friend, so I ought to be inured to Tartt's follow-ups not delighting me in that same way.
