#4.2.4

This chapter solidifies what we have been told from the mines and Miners chapter, that the crime is aided by the authorities. I also find it interesting to parse the title as Hugo’s opinions on prisons being incubators of crime, which they are in many cases and why he insists on education for the gamin to prevent him from going to prison for crime.

This relationship between crime and authority are very interesting because the relationship seems to run both ways. The authorities want the escaped prisoner because he was valuable to the criminals and criminals help find people who are valuable to the authorities. It makes the links between the Patron Minette and the police of which Javert is a part that much deeper and lends a much more sinister air to the likes of Claquesous, who we are told mysteriously vanished.

It is interesting that Javert is not surprised by it, leading to the conjecture that the police is too inefficient and easily corruptible if it lets criminals escape so easily, but he is annoyed that Claquesous was not tracked down and caught because he was too valuable. He was valuable because he was more villainous, which makes for good agents. Similar to there being no good lawyer in canon era. Javert too views lawyers through that lens where he thinks Marius too innocent to be one.

Eponine seems to be doing so many errands for the Patron Minette, now she is taking messages from Magnon to spy on a house in Rue Plumet, but here we see her take agency and of her own accord tell Patron Minette that the house was a biscuit. She could have chosen not to do this. She is trying like Gavroche to make her own decisions and live her own life in what little way she can, and I love her all the more for it.

4.2.3

Marius and Mabeuf are directly compared again. Their lives are increasingly running towards desperate circumstances down towards darkness. It is also heart-breaking that all that desperation has created a rift between Marius and Mabeuf, because of their poverty. Father Mabeuf is also stubbornly carrying out his indigo plant experiment. I know that Hugo wanted to emphasise the beautiful as being useful but for Mabeuf, his not relying on the community around him and not using his garden to grow food or even doing something else that would give him a little bit of money for a while, is thrusting him deeper into poverty and desperation.

His obsession with the indigo seems to me to closely mirror Marius’ obsession with Cosette. Both are things outside their reach currently and they both are neglecting to eat to focus on it. Father Mabeuf seems a dreamer in much the same way as Marius and a warning to him.  

I also find the emphasis on Eponine as a supernatural creature in this chapter really fascinating. Father Mabeuf seems to rely on superstition, which is not deemed to be such a good thing since Hugo has already said much about superstition in his convent chapters and so thinks of her as a fairy, supernatural creature.

But the way the narration describes Eponine as a wild creature reminds me of the werewolf child description from Cosette’s chapter. Eponine also seems to be described as an evening flower manifestation. So, her appearance puts her outside society and within nature. Nature for Hugo can be unforgiving but also better in some ways than civilisation.

It’s also interesting that we do get that description of nature with Mabeuf gazing heavenward at the stars while the sky is a mixture of twilight and fading light, though his gaze seems more a plea from Providence than the bishop’s philosophical contemplations.

For Mabeuf though she is a fairy and Eponine does a little kindness for the old man showing as in the last chapter that she does good for people, that she needs that recognition and is kind, despite having worked for Patron-Minette, she is not a monster or a devil even though she says so, but an angel for Mabeuf who watered the plants for him. In return she asks for a favour, not for herself, but to find Marius.

4.2.4

Marius has gone back to his translation work but he still has the haze around him and is still distracted from work and makes promises to do work but doesn’t which is relatable. 

Eponine seems to move towards the metaphorical light and becomes beautiful. I wonder if it also mirrors how Fantine was described as beautiful even when she was dying. Eponine is both dying and is aware of how much she is ‘a specific sort of woman’ yet with the kindness to Mabeuf and the kindness to Marius, all she is asking for is, in my view, some form of sympathy, kindness and friendship in return. 

She is compared to Ophelia without being driven mad by her love of Hamlet, so Hugo too rejects the angle of love perhaps.  Also, in this chapter she is painfully aware of the difference/distance between their social situations because she talks about Marius being a Baron and therefore an important person. 

But she did not have to help Marius by giving him Cosette’s address and she does. Despite her being described as supernatural and outside society, she still is making an effort to separate herself a little from Patron Minette and especially her father.

She is moving towards goodness whereas for P-M, I don’t really think there is any hope at this point that they could be rehabilitated into better people, they have sunk too low among the mines.

Eponine’s excited chatter much like in the chapters on the Gorbeau House is heartbreaking and also in that same vein she asks to mend his shirt and wants him to laugh because she wants to see him happy. 

Marius is distant and standoffish using vous and then reluctantly tu. She is so pleased when he remembers her name but the way that she tells Marius to keep his distance is so much heartbreaking once again.  

This coupled with the fact that @akallabeth-joie mentioned that Eponine is barely a minor and that things would get grim in a couple of months, if she finds herself arrested after she turns 16 and my heart breaks all over for her.  

Marius cuts quite the profile here, aquiline nose, noble brow, pouty lips, and of course the nostrils, so passionate. Can’t forget the nostrils.

God, it’s so obvious, please someone get Marius an antidepressant, it’s really hitting a little close to home.

“He had gone ‘to take a little walk,’ hoping that it would enable him to work on his return. It was eternally so.”

“He found no means of tying a single one of the broken threads in his brain”

Oof, okay, that’s agonizing, let’s move on and talk about Eponine, because this is her book, after all. By this point, Eponine has no illusions about her value to Marius. He’s switched back to ‘vous’ and is clearly not interested. I feel like there’s a very indicative parallel to their last conversation. After noting that Marius speaks to her unkindly, Eponine volunteers the information she has about Cosette, unlike their previous meeting in which, after she makes the same observation, it’s Marius that then asks for her help to find Cosette. It puts Eponine in a more active role in moving the story, but also highlights her increasingly disadvantageous position. “She bit her lip; she seemed to hesitate, as if passing through a kind of interior struggle.” She makes the choice in that moment to give Marius what he wants despite him repeatedly shown that he doesn’t really consider her to be much more than a source of information. It’s very much framed as something she decides while being wholly aware of where she stands (literally) in regard to him. It’s an impressive level of agency, but very much a bummer to see it from Marius’s oblivious point of view.

I’m going on a tangent now because Eponine says this: “They have let me out! seeing that there was nothing  against me and then I was not of the age of discernment. It lacked two months.” I went searching and found the clause that allows this in Article 66 the French Penal Code of 1810, Book the Second, Chapter I which states “When the accused is less than sixteen years old, if it be decided that he has acted without a competent knowledge of right and wrong, in the commission of the action (sans discernement), he shall be acquitted.” This article is a holdover from the French Penal Code of 1791 which was put into place by the National Constituent Assembly. It was France’s first penal code and actually eliminated life imprisonment and capital punishment. The French Penal Code of 1810 was adopted under Napoleon and while it maintained most of the structural foundation of the 1791 code (including the age of discernment provision), it reinstated life imprisonment and the death penalty by beheading. This is mostly useful because it pins down an exact age for Eponine, about two weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday (allowing for the six weeks that passed after she left prison).

Finally, Eponine recalls to Marius that he promised her something. In 3.8.11, Marius promises Eponine, “Anything you wish,” if only she’ll find the address of the father and daughter she led to the Gorbeau house. This feels like a last ditch effort on her part to get Marius to genuinely engage with her. He instead offers her money and she realizes he only views their relationship through the lens of an exchange of services, a system of favors and recompense.

Today was the end of Vol 4; Book 2!

232 chapters read, 133 chapters left

New Post has been published on https://www.allmoddedapk.com/gunship-battle-total-warfare-mod-apk/

Gunship Battle Total Warfare Mod 4.2.5 Apk [Unlimited Money]

Gunship Battle Total Warfare 4.2.5 Mod Apk – Interesting strategy game “Warplane Battle” for Android Another popular game from the Gunship Battle series with over 1 million downloads on Google Play tested online

Gunship Battle Total Warfare: Full- featured combat is a very interesting title from the popular Gunship Battle game series, which is produced by the famous JOYCITY Corp studio in South Korea and is offered completely free of charge with in-app payments. This game is after the million popularity of the famous game Gunship Battle: Helicopter 3DWhich has been downloaded and published nearly 100 million times, so that JOYCITY will once again delight users and fans of war games with a game from the Gunship Battle game series! Although Gunship Battle Total Warfare is actually a game from this series, its style and gameplay are different. In this game you have to take part in strategic and huge battles. The superpowers of the world have entered into a war with each other and a great battle has taken place. Much of this great war is being waged in the oceans.

Marius tries to focus on his translation work, but he keeps finding himself pulled outside to the Lark’s Meadow. 

“there was no means of re-knotting a single one of the threads which were broken in his brain”

One day, Eponine appears in the meadow. She tells him that she was in prison for a while, but that they let her go because they couldn’t prove any charges against her and she was too young.

Then she tells him that she has the address.

Marius tries to make Eponine swear to not give the address to Thenardier, but she cares more about the fact that Marius knows her name. She starts to lead Marius to the house.

““By the way, you know that you promised me something?”

Marius fumbled in his pocket. All that he owned in the world was the five francs intended for Thénardier the father. He took them and laid them in Éponine’s hand.

She opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground, and gazed at him with a gloomy air.

More fodder for the Marius/trees crack!ship Any takers?

Éponine, having got the site from M. Mabeuf, tracks Marius down at Tree #7 in the Field of the Lark, and agrees to lead him to Cosette’s present abode. Marius has just enough presence of mind to extract a promise that Éponine won’t tell her father the address, but otherwise is rolling a bunch of 1′s on ‘sense motive’ and ‘comprehend subtext’. Fun fact: in 3rd Ed the latter task fell under a skill called ‘innuendo’ because that was a thing that existed.