Sorry I just gotta analyze the most heartbreaking part of today's chapter. I gotta. This might be slightly frantic, but I'm going to make you all read it:
"A last word in regard to Fantine.
We have all one mother - the earth. Fantine was returned to this mother [Literally this line is eating away at my soul, it's probably the only instance of the idea of Fantine getting peace in death. Returning to her mother, to something that loved and cared for her - that cares for us all. Literally the only bit of comfort/happiness Fantine is given.]
[...] And so Fantine was buried in the common grave of the cemetery, which belongs to everybody and to, and in which the poor are lost. [Yes in this case the image of being given to the Earth is shifted to something more tragic - belonging to everybody and nobody. This is not what was supposed to happen to Fantine. Even in her burial she was not given what was owed her.] Fortunately, God knows where to find the soul. Fantine was laid away in the darkness among the homeless bodies; she suffered the promiscuity of dust. [Again unwillingly, as unwilling as selling all she had and becoming a sex worker in life - play on the idea of promiscuity] She was thrown into the public pit. Her grave way like her bed. [Again, not her own. She owned nothing of her own. It was taken from her when she should have had it.]"
This last part makes me think of this passage when speaking about Valjean's family and then Valjean himself, again with the focus on darkness, on being subsumed into a pit - this time literally as well as figuratively:
"Each took a different path, perhaps, sinking little by little into the chilling haze that swallows up solitary destinies, that sullen gloom where so many ill-fated souls are lost in the somber advance of the human race." (1.2.6)
"Souls sunk to deepest misfortune, unfortunate men lost in the depths of limbo where they are no longer visible, the rejects of the law, feeling on their heads the whole weight of human society, so formidable to those outside it, so terrible to those beneath it." (1.2.7)
"He feels buried by the two infinities together, the ocean and the sky, the one a tomb, the other a shroud [...] O implacable march of human society! Destroying men and souls in its way! Ocean, repository of all that the law lets fall! Ominous disappearance of help! O moral death!" (1.2.8)
And also as a last thought, Fantine's burial was not the result of maliciousness, but of carelessness. Just as her descent was the result of the inhuman carelessness of Tholomyes. Active malice was not what killed her, but the fact that neither people nor the law cared one ounce about whether or not this woman lived or died. That is one of the greatest wrongs that a society can do. Be careless with the lives of the people who live within it.
