"Savoir, penser, rêver. Tout est là". Victor Hugo

Happy (?) barricade day!!

This is a last minute art piece😭😭idk if it counts as one, I'm not sure if I liked it or not in the end, but I wanted to make something.

I wrote two dissertations, which, put together, total 140 pages and nearly 30,000 words. I am PROUD to say that neither of them involved any chaptgpt or any other form of ai AT ALL.

Epilogue

Happy Barricade Day! After all, June 6th is the day they made their sacrifice, so I’m not late, right?

The inspiration for this drawing came from the Toledo Cathedral—the sense of the heavens opening up, which also corresponds to the final song of Les Misérables, "Epilogue."

In the painting, I wanted to depict the scene Jean Valjean vaguely sees as he passes away. Fantine takes his hand, leading him toward heaven, while the Bishop stands beside him, illuminating the path behind. And in the background are those who fell during the battle.

The upward composition gives the feeling that their voices fade into the "valley of the light," reflecting their destiny of "climbing to the light." I wanted the darker surroundings to contrast with the light of heaven, showing that they now dwell in that place beyond—echoing the lyric, "We will live again in freedom in the garden of the Lord."

Jehan loves playing the flute, so perhaps the "distant drums" are sounds he conjures.

Behind Valjean, there is a mural of women—intended to represent the "lovely ladies," along with little Gavroche and his sister Éponine above. These figures embody the suffering people of the earth, much like the lyrics of "Wretched of the Earth."

And at the top of each new search query is that goddamn LLM telling me that I’m confused, that I likely actually mean this other thing.

And it was just so infuriating that eventually I replied and told it was wrong. This mythic character with a different name is not what I am searching for. I’m searching for the Latin author with this other name.

And then. It came back. Telling me that no, I was confused. That is not an author, that is actually a character in this different obscure Latin author.

So I told it no, it is wrong. I am searching for this author whose work appears in the Latin anthology and this is one of the topics he wrote about.

And finally it got it to produce an ‘answer’ relating to the actual person I was searching for. Answer here being a statement of acknowledgement that the things I had just told it were correct.

Also, Camilla, despite being directly implicated in the main conflict, just disappears in Francis’s speech as if she’s not noticeable because she’s a female but also as she doesn’t play an active role in the eyes of the others. She’s not an active actor in the scene and her name doesn’t even appears, she disappears grammatically (« hers » becomes « we » and then there’s only « me ») but also from the scene, completely overtaken by Charles who immediately « rules » the scenes. It kind of mirrors their relationship in the book with Camilla being noticed as a girl (« something » that can be kissed in Richard a boy’s perspective; not to mention she played Clymnestra which could have for etymology (erroneously) « the one who’s known for having suitors » highlighting how in the book she’s mainly viewed as an individual only under her female aspect and not recognised as a fully functional human being, but that’s another story) but her identity quickly being replaced by the fact she has a twin, which make her go from an individual to a group, until she’s completely erased by Charles control. In a similar manner, Francis is a victim of Charles just like Camilla and, despite not being faded, he appears as powerless. Since the moment Charles enters the scene, he becomes the protagonist, the subject of every action (grammatically) whereas Francis becomes the object that is subjected to the verb, the action controlled by the subject (« he » (…) « me »). Charles may be the object of Francis attention, Francis is the one who gets played in the end and who can only become the master of his fate (« I ») when Charles’s not around (he switches to Henry or he thinks back to the moment when Charles is not physically in the same room as him). It could also reflect that Francis will alway be a prisoner of his lust/love.

On the contrary, Bunny is shown as always being present, whether he is mentioned explicitly or not and I think it’s a great mirror of how his death will always haunt Francis and the rest of the group. He doesn’t seem to belong in this scene, yet he’s always there and even changes the course of things. Especially in this extract where Francis doesn’t remember Bunny as the homophobe he was but as someone who helped him, who made sure Francis couldn’t be hurt. And that probably just makes everything worst for Francis as it can only amplify his guilt. Also, it shows that in an odd way, Bunny kind of was maintaining the group as a whole which can explain why they were so quick to fall apart after his death. He may have been obnoxious and honestly quite a rude person, he was anchored in the reality of his time (too much, unfortunately, sometimes) and as he wasn’t blinded by the intellectual world the rest of the group tried to live in, he was able of keeping them whole by being a bridge between their inner worlds, problems and the rest of the world. It’s almost the opposite of Henry who, as the passage highlights, isn’t there when the group faces an « earthly » problem but is instead lost in his inner world, towards the dark and the moon, towards what’s ever changing. Bunny’s reality is the balance to Henry’s mystery. One looks at the real world, at the ground and dies by falling (so a motion towards the ground) whereas the second looks up to the realm of Ideas, to the sky and dies by shooting himself in the head (so the upper part of his body but also what is home to Ideas). Also, Henry being turned to the moon which is a symbol of the night and can be linked to dreams could be a sweet nod to the fact that Henry belongs to a dream, that he could be the man from Camilla’s dreams and therefore that they’re together.