#1.2.12

The bishop approached him and said, in a low voice, “Do not forget, ever, that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.”

"'Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!'"

"The child turned his back to the sun, which made his hair like threads of gold and flushed the savage face of Jean Valjean with a lurid glow." [This one seems especially notable, since Petit Gervais is the incident that truly changes Valjean, truly brings him to the light so to speak]

"In a few minutes the boy was gone.

The sun had set.

The shadows were deepening around Jean Valjean." [Again, this push and pull for Valjean's soul/goodness. Him going after Petit Gervais - following the light - is crucial to his character.]

"The countryside was desolate and gloomy. There were vast open stretches on all sides, nothing around him but a shadow in which his gaze was lost and a silence in which his voice was lost."

"He was just out of that monstrous, somber place called prison and the bishop had hurt his soul, as too vivid a light would have hurt his eyes on coming out of the dark. [...] Like an owl seeing the sun suddenly rise, the convict had been dazzled and blinded by virtue."

"However that may be, this last offense had a decisive effect upon him; it rushed across the chaos of his intellect and dissipated it, set the light on one side and the dark clouds on the other, and acted on his soul, in the state it was in [...]"

"He saw himself then, so to speak, face to face, and at the same time through that hallucination he saw, at a mysterious distance, a sort of light, which he took at first to be a torch. Looking more closely at this light dawning on his conscience, he recognized it had a human form, that it was the bishop. [Again the motif of conscience as light that we saw when Valjean was going to steal the silver]

According to Donougher’s footnotes, the flower the Bishop is mourning is not a real flower, but one Hugo made up. Here is her note on it: “A Hugolian invention: Les Guillons is a place on the way to Pontarlier, which here is combined with the name of a four-petalled plant of the Cruciferae family (‘ cruciferous’ meaning cross-bearing).”

Which, okay. You know how I talked about Hugo’s lack of subtlety? This is, like, the opposite of that while simultaneously somehow being unbelievably unsubtle. The plant is referring to the Bishop’s earlier idea that Valjean go to Pontarlier, while also being a reference to God, because crosses don’t show up randomly if you’re Hugo, and it’s been crushed. So the Bishop is mourning Valjean’s clear choice to reject this path and instead continue his path of violence and destruction. Super duper unsuble except that all of that is contained in a passing joke about flower names. Hugo probably thought he was being so very clever when he thought of it, and I can’t even argue that he wasn’t!

And it’s probably a pun and an in-joke with his friends too. (Actually, making up Symbolic binomials sounds exactly like something Hugo and his friends would do, nerds that they were. This isn’t quite a binomial, but it’s close enough.)

Anyway, Madame Magloire continues to read as... not weird, because her reactions are definitely perfectly sensible given the everything, but slightly incongruous. She’s there as a foil to the Bishop, as a woman of the soil to contrast the Bishop’s lofty idealism. And from a narrative perspective sure, it works. They contrast nicely, her worldly concerns for things like his reputation and personal safety work to further highlight how much the Bishop’s lack of concern for those things stand out.

But, and I’ve been struggling for a while to put this into words, she doesn’t ring true as a person in the situation she’s in. She reads like someone who doesn’t know the Bishop all that well, like a concerned townsperson or something. But we know that she’s been with him for at least 9 years now, probably significantly longer. Magloire knows what he’s like. But she still tries to appeal to him as though he’s a normal person. ‘Aren’t you concerned for your personal safety?’ she asks. No, he’s not. ‘Won’t it upset you greatly to not eat off silver anymore?’ No, not really. ‘Won’t you put yourself first for once?’ No, he won’t.

And I want to emphasize, her concerns are reasonable! It’s entirely sensible to be worried about personal safety, or to want enough money to live, or to dislike being stolen from. In the ‘being a normal person with normal concerns’ sweepstakes, Magloire wins by a landslide.

But the Bishop isn’t even playing that game. That’s his whole deal. So Magloire’s treating him, not as he is, but as she thinks he should be, tells me that they’ve spent a decade talking past each other. As much as the Bishop doesn’t really care to understand why Magloire wants what she wants, Magloire equally doesn’t really care to understand why the Bishop is how he is. “But it’s for Monseigneur. What’s Monseigneur to eat with now?” is not the cry of someone who really gets what Myriel is doing and why.

“In the meantime Monseigneur Bienvenu had approached as quickly as his great age permitted: “Ah, there you are!” he said, looking at Jean Valjean. “I’m glad to see you. But I gave you the candlesticks, too, which are silver like the rest and would bring two hundred francs. Why didn’t you take them along with your cutlery?”

“Monseigneur, Monseigneur,” she cried, “does Your Lordship know where the silver basket is?”

“Yes,” said the bishop.

“God be praised!” she said. “I did not know what had become of it.

The bishop had just found the basket on a flower bed. He gave it to Madame Magloire and said, “Here it is.”

“Yes,” she said, “but there’s nothing in it. Where’s the silver?”

“The door opened. A strange, fierce group appeared on the threshold. Three men were holding a fourth by the collar. The three men were gendarmes; the fourth Jean Valjean.”

“Monseigneur,” he said--