Brick Club 5.8.1, 5.8.2
I truly donât understand how Valjean still looks Cosette in the face. She is giving him every opportunity, every sign and all without being allowed to know what is going on. I genuinely canât imagine what she might be feeling and how confused she must be. Itâs really obvious how hurt she is! I could tolerate this all a lot more if there was any real indication that the supposed danger Valjean poses wasnât entirely hypothetical. I just watched a video about âperpetual warâ and it seems like Valjean is stuck in his own internal perpetual war. The cost he pays is always steeper than the unclear but definitely forthcoming benefit and no matter how circumstances change, he always perceives a threat that is just close enough to worry about, whether it arrives or not.
And, just as in perpetual war, he isnât the only one to suffer the effects. âYou do not stir. I see it. You act guilty. But it is all the same, I forgive you,â she says and then asks, âWhat have I done to you. I declare am confounded. You owe me amends.â He at least owes her an explanation, which doesnât pose any material threat to her at all! And we already know she accepted the fact that he wasnât her real father, she deserves the truth. âI have no need of a father! To things like that which have no common sense, one really doesnât know what to say!â She (rightfully) gets angry, âSince yesterday, you all make me rage. Everybody spites me. I donât understand. You donât defend me against Marius. Marius doesnât uphold me against you, I am all alone.â I like this in Hapgood slightly more actually as she says this âwith supreme graceâ while in Wilbour she speaks âwith a bewitching sauciness.â I think the former gives her distress the validity and weight it deserves.
This is really an awful thing to do to a girl who already has issues with abandonment, to have a mother and a father leave her, for her own good perhaps, but it leads her to this: âSo you donât like it that I am happy?â To her, everyone is abruptly pulling away from her, keeping secrets, quickly ending conversations when she walks in the room and she canât understand why. Cosette is a very empathetic person, she wants the people around her to actually be happy, not just to make her happy. She is not being treated well, Iâm salty.
Another translation note, Wilbour skips both exchanges where Valjean calls Cosette tu and then catches himself, only including him calling her âmadameâ rather than Cosette. In Hapgood the word lubies is translated as âfreaks,â which I very much dislike, which Wilbour much more palatably translates to âwhims.â
âMany men have thus a secret monster, a disease which they feed, a dragon which gnaws them, a despair which inhabits their night. Such a man resembles other people, goes, comes. Nobody knows that he has within him a fearful parasitic pain, with a thousand teeth, which lives in the miserable man, who is dying of it.â A rather aggressive analogy for depression run rampant. Valjean has always been this way, even from the little we hear of his life in Faverolles. Many things about this characterization also ring true for Marius, despite the two coming from vastly different backgrounds and circumstances. I think the difference is these feelings surface in Marius much more often. Valjean is every bit âstill waters run deep,â he hides away while Marius gets propelled to reaction.
Iâm really fuming that Hugo is portraying Valjeanâs, letâs be honest, abandonment of Cosette as a seamless transition that Cosette becomes almost complicit in. Obviously, their relationship has changed, Cosette isnât a child, she has her own life separate from Valjean and there are new people in it, but thereâs no reason that would lead to her losing affection for Valjean, her father. The gradual divergence of their lives together is completely reasonable and even healthy if Valjean didnât have ulterior motive to push her away, but every new step back is presented as being a result of Cosetteâs growing detachment. Plus, such a divergence is eventually intended to stop at a point Valjean has already pushed past. When I moved out of my parentsâ house, obviously I stopped seeing them as much, but I didnât also start calling them by their first names and they didnât insist I should try and forget them.
