i fucking love Les Mis

"She interrupted herself impatiently"

“There is M. Géborand purchasing paradise for a sou.”

"Once he was begging for the poor in a drawing-room of the town; there was present the Marquis de Champtercier, a wealthy and avaricious old man, who contrived to be, at one and the same time, an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairian. This variety of man has actually existed. When the Bishop came to him, he touched his arm, 'You must give me something, M. le Marquis.' The Marquis turned round and answered dryly, “I have poor people of my own, Monseigneur.' 'Give them to me,' replied the Bishop."

"Alas! God gives air to men; the law sells it to them."

"He understood how to say the grandest things in the most vulgar of idioms. As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts."

"To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err, fall, sin if you will, but be upright."

"The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow.”

"It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel."

another great pun moment with Magloire's title for Bishop Myriel as "Your Grace" (or in French, as Votre Grandeur), to which Myriel responds when he can't reach a shelf:

“fetch me a chair. My greatness [grandeur] does not reach as far as that shelf.”

In Chinese, Magloire calls him 大人, a term used to refer to people one respects/people of a higher status, and also used in a "Your Excellency" etc. kind of way. 大人 also literally means Big Man, which makes Myriel's response just as good:

“请您搬张椅子给我。本大人还‘大’不到那块木板呢。”

(Please bring over a chair; Your Excellency is not yet "big" enough to reach the shelf)

This is exactly how that scene went right??

Tags by @bundibird

javert's suicide / david thaxton, 17 march 2023

so you the know the police leitmotif? the "tell me quickly what's the story/who saw what and why and where/let him give a full description/let him answer to javert!" tune that appears whenever somebody gets arrested?

now turn your ear to javert's suicide, specifically the "i am reaching but i fall/and the stars are black and cold" part. it took me a while to notice, but this whole section of the song is just a snippet of the arrest leitmotif:

but he never completes it. the snippet repeats and repeats. try as he might, he finds himself unable to sing the same old song of Justice and Law and Righteousness and Order. he's like a jammed cassette player spitting out the same second of music over and over and over and over again, unable to follow his old ways, but unable to let them go. he's stuck, but he will keep throwing himself against the walls of the cage.

javert is desperately trying to run on his old tracks of thought, but, as vicky h puts it, he experiences "the derailment of a soul, the shattering of an integrity irresistibly propelled in a straight line and dashed against God".

I can't tell if it's just the Finnish translation being weird or if this scene just has psychosexual undertones. Like Javert is described as "toying with his prey", he has "a moment of hellish pleasure", he's so happy he indulges in some snuff, he "swallows [Valjean] with his gaze", and one sentence is literally just "Javert enjoyed [this]." They also use the word "arouse" and an adjective I've never seen used outside a sexual context (it translates to something like licentious or orgiastic).

and i’ll dance with you in Vienna, i’ll be wearing a river’s disguise

(listen to take this waltz by leonard cohen PLEASE it HITS)

ID tags reading: if pursues your orgasm like he hunted the protag you're gonna do fine / end ID