Brick Club 4.9.1, 4.9.2, 4.9.3
Valjean discovers Marius is real enough to have carved his address into the garden wall. This is in conjunction with several suspicious happenings continuing to plague Valjean’s existence. Thenardier is back, the political climate is becoming hostile, Rue Plumet may have a stalker. A ~mysterious figure~ drops him a note telling him to MOVE (or REMOVE? not clear on the translation). I’d want to move to England too, though Lord knows if he or Cosette actually speak English. Maybe we can finally have our Les Mis adaptation in which everyone speaks with a thick French accent.
Hugo assures us that, while Marius is in a deep despair, it does not occur to him to be jealous of Theodule. “Suspicions are nothing more nor less than wrinkles. Early youth has none.” Yeah, young people in love are notoriously level-headed and rarely get wildly jealous. Friendly reminder that Marius once considered beating up an invalid old man for maybe having seen Cosette’s leg by accident.
He takes up Javert’s pistols, “it would be difficult to say what obscure thought he had in his mind in taking them with him.” Not too difficult, because we’re told a page later when he finds Cosette gone, already moved away, “since Cosette was gone, there was nothing more for him but to die.” Luckily, a ~mysterious figure~ gives him just the avenue by which to do so, telling him about the barricade.
Now, this feels like an odd thing for Eponine to do. I understand her telling Valjean to move, she has a vested interest in protecting them from her father; before, it was only for Marius’s sake and now it’s meant to split Marius and Cosette apart. But telling Marius to go to the barricades? It’s not entirely clear. Nor why she would go herself. There’s a dull answer—because plot—and a rather more twisted answer—Eponine intends them to die together there.
Listen, I love Mabeuf but...he drives me up a wall. He seems to be willfully self-destructive but in an infuriatingly absentminded kind of way. And I don’t mean in a “why won’t he sell his precious books?” way or even “why won’t he accept free sky money?” way. He just seems completely incapable of adapting to circumstances and I can’t understand the details of how he ended up in this situation to begin with. I mean, obviously capitalism is the true villain and the sole source of blame, yada yada, but....augh, you know? I’m honestly not sure if this is some deep-rooted Protestant ethic bias I still have clinging to my mind or if I have any genuine foundation here.
My reservations aside, everyone is just a total dick to Mabeuf, the same sort of astonishingly blind cruelty that the Magnon-Thenardier children experience. The most vulnerable and most unprotected members of society seem to experience this disproportionately to any other group.
This really puts Marius’s suffering into perspective as we see Mabeuf head off to the barricades as well, for maybe the same reason but with starkly different motivations.
