Brick Club 4.3.7
Another terrible, if amusing, chapter title translation. “À tristesse, tristesse et demie” or “To Sadness, Sadness and a half.” Trust Wraxall to lose all the nuance of that line...
“In short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man.” Yeah, yeah, very fair. If a strange young man with “equivocal prudence and an awkward boldness” started hanging around really suspiciously without ever having spoken to them or introduced himself, I’d be on edge too.
“Ten years later, with the love of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: ‘Pedantic and insupportable to the sight! you are quite right!’” Oh no, I’m laughing and crying. Cosette: this is my pedantic husband, he’s utterly insupportable and I love him very much.
I think Hugo tries to make some generalizations that honestly just come across as very Cosette/Marius specific tropes. “The young girl does not allow herself to be caught in any toil, the young man falls into all.” First of all, this is just what happens when a disaster alignment and a distinguished alignment are in a romance. Second of all, Cosette was raised by a great dad and is possessed of self-confidence and Marius has never had a decent parental figure in his life ever and thinks girls laugh at him on the street. “This booby is madly in love with Cosette, but Cosette does not even know of his existence!” Every Luxembourg trip is now a spec-ops mission for Jean Dadjean. He’s drawing his battle maps, planning his tactics, gathering intel. Oh, Valjean, what were you going to do, have her live with you forever? Become like Gillenormand and his daughter? “Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and harrowed by this gentleness.”
Cosette’s experiences are diverging from what Valjean is reasonably familiar with. I imagine this is a very common thing that any parent might experience with a teenaged child, they start becoming individuals outside your sphere of influence, you can no longer track their development of self. This feeling can only be exacerbated for Valjean and Cosette because they have a connection beyond blood, forged within some shared sense of hardship. And while Valjean feels he himself is past the point of recovery, Cosette is still growing and changing and needs exposure to experiences he doesn’t have and an understanding of a world he is a stranger to. “Jean Valjean had no experience of this misery, the only misery which is charming, and the only misery which he did not know.” Cosette needs friends, peers her age who feel the tribulations of adolescence with the same urgency she does. And Valjean needs someone who can tell him that this is all normal.
