#3.6.2

And so, Hugo begins being Weird about a teenage girl. Like, it’s not super bad yet, but it’s coming and also, Hugo, girls don’t work that way. How this man knew so many women so very intimately and yet knows absolutely nothing about women will forever be a mystery to me.

Most of this chapter is just a discussion of how Cosette is suddenly hot. Like, she’s the personification of the Ideal and also modest now, because fuck you Hugo, but mostly she’s hot. And Marius, to his credit, doesn’t notice. I forget sometimes just how much the musical speeds up the Marius and Cosette timeline. This Marius isn’t busy waiting for The One, he’s still not interested even when the girl becomes beautiful. He’s like the anti Derek from Swan Princess, to pull a reference very much out of left field. Points to Marius.

This brings us to ‘present day’ which I believe is 1831; Marius is 21 if not 22 years old and Cosette is freshly 15.

Having been 15 once, I find it hard to swallow that Cosette went from homely to “this ravishing form,” comparable to Venus herself, within the space of six months. “In six months the little girl had become a young woman; that was all. Nothing is more frequent than this phenomenon. There is a moment when girls bloom out in a twinkling and become roses all at once.” Again, having been a teenage girl, I absolutely beg to differ, but I’m sure Hugo knows more about teenage girls than me. Was discovering fashion all it took? Nailing down a skincare routine? Why are men allowed to gradually grow into adulthood, but for women it’s all or nothing? (I know why)

“Yesterday we left them children, to-day we find them dangerous.” Cosette hasn’t quite graduated to the title of dangerous, “in this veiled azure was nothing yet beyond the look of a child,” but she will inevitably develop desires and feelings as women tend to do.

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate Cosette’s nose in this illustration, “the nose was not beautiful, it was pretty; neither straight nor curved, neither Italian nor Greek; it was the Parisian nose; that is, something sprightly, fine, irregular, and pure, the despair of painters and the charm of poets.”

I’m going to rein in (most of) my comments about how sexuality is forced on young girls in a harmful way and stick to our single case. I’ll just observe how the language in this chapter wholly attributes the initiation of this relationship to Cosette, while also maintaining that it was entirely unintentional on her part. Here are the bad words on this:

“It is a snare which Innocence unconsciously spreads, and in which she catches hearts without intending to, and without knowing it. It is a maiden glancing like a woman.”

She’s capturing men with her youthful allure! She can’t help it, she’s dangerous. Just by existing, Cosette is “forcing into bloom” men’s desires. There’s a fascinating tangent in here about how women in classic literature are often associated with poison and poisonous flora, something that can kill without contact or intention while still appearing outwardly beautiful, but I won’t be going down that rabbit hole. (Check out this cool article on it here though!)

Marius gets a long paragraph of introduction. Considering that he is meant to be partly based on young Victor Marie Hugo, it is amusing to picture young Hugo when thinking of Marius, and yet Hugo makes fun of Marius as well, ‘Given a serious situation, he had everything it takes to be stupid.’

I like the paragraph describing Marius as a handsome young man in great detail. Marius also gets comparisons as ‘almost sublime’ and ‘narrow eyes with a broad vision’ which also hint at how he has potential to be better in the future.

I also love the hilarity of how Marius thinks that the girls are making fun of him in his old coat when they think him attractive and would want him to flirt with them. He’s too self-conscious and Courfeyrac rightly makes fun of him. Courfeyrac also keeps teasing him, which is so amusing and Marius being Marius in turn avoids him and women, I want more fics of Courfeyrac teasing Marius, it’s so much fun.

On one hand, Cosette is described as ugly because of the trauma and malnutrition of living in poverty and abuse for so long to which she was a passive receiver, on the other hand, thirteen/fourteen-year-old girls aren’t really supposed to be extremely pretty in my experience because they are going through puberty and it is an awkward time.

There are differences in how Marius and Cosette have been described- both lived in poverty, Marius came out of it with his shining teeth and handsome looks intact, Cosette on the other hand probably faced malnutrition and therefore is very thin and looks ugly, although to be fair, Marius’ poverty was limited to a couple of years while Cosette’s poverty and abuse was long lasting and happened in the crucial childhood years.  

Marius thinks of Valjean as a soldier which is interesting because it seems to recall his own father and therefore notice the man more than he would have. His description of kindly but unapproachable air, a sad and sorrowful look, never meeting anyone’s gaze speaks of the trauma of his prison years that Valjean is still living with. Hugo is good at writing that trauma for the characters and in some ways Valjean as a former convict is very likely to resemble a former military man, because convicts have to follow orders and discipline, maybe Hugo also thinks of soldiers being good but caught in the wars of great men. It would fit his attitude towards individual soldiers in the Waterloo digression.

Donougher calls her ‘almost not a person’, FMA calls her ‘not yet a woman’ Hapgood also calls her ‘not yet a person’. I will just leave that here, because it bothers me. I do like that Cosette has an air of confidence in her manner which was not there in her childhood and which she has acquired with Valjean as her Papa, although the air of confidence is described as unpleasant. Courfeyrac also does not look at her because she is unattractive, which is also not that good.

Anyway, we never get a name for the old man even though we suspect it is someone we already know and Courfeyrac also dubs them M. Leblanc and Mademoiselle Lenoire and with names being important, it is interesting that once more Valjean acquires another name to add to his collection. Except this time, it is what other people talk about him and the narration also adopts that name instead of calling him Valjean, which is interesting.  

3.6.2

Since a lot of things in this book are deliberate foreshadowing, I find it interesting that Marius hears bird songs, which recall the nickname that Cosette was dubbed with in her childhood.

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About two years after moving out of his grandfather’s house, Marius breaks his daily habit of going to the Luxembourg for about six months for no real reason other than to further the plot.

But then, at the end of the six months, he decides to go back. He sees Monsieur Leblanc, but the girl who is with him does not appear to be Mademoiselle Lanoire. She is beautiful and graceful and crossing over from childhood to womanhood. Marius supposes that this must be Lanoire’s older sister, but it is her, just six months older and with more fashionable clothes.

Six month time skip: Cosette is now pretty (and well-dressed), Marius is still doing his thing, and Hugo's getting lyrical about the beauty of fifteen-year-olds. At least it comes across as more nostalgic than lecherous?

[Modern-AU Marius usually is a bit of a linguistic nerd, but have we considered: Marius running for a hobby. He basically does laps in the park as it is. Or triathelete Marius who does swimming and running, as canon!Marius swims and takes long walks. For pure crack!fic, Marius who has several tree field guides on the his bookshelf and uncanny aim at darts despite never being seen to play before...]