#chenildieu

He’d never even gotten to eat it.

That was the worst part.

He’d stolen to put something good and nourishing and warm with calories into his pained, spasming stomach, he’d thieved for his seven little nieces and nephews, between whose lips food had not passed for several days, he had lacerated his arm and bruised his fist––and he had not even gotten to eat it, nor his family to taste it.

In general, the way I wrote this whole opening was by studying the chapter "Jean Valjean" very carefully, and then imagining his mental state based on that. What is very, very odd is that I didn't give the next chapter the same attention—and yet I ended up saying much of the same stuff Hugo does. Basically, Hugo sets it all up so well in "Jean Valjean" that you can accurately predict the content of "The Interior of Despair."

Anyway, I asked myself, what stings the most for Valjean? What things is he bitter about, in particular? And I realized that while his list of sorrows and regrets is a mile long, he surely must be bothered by the fact that he didn't even get to eat the loaf of bread he stole. He got the full rap, without reaping any benefits. At this point, whether he and his family got to eat the bread is the least of his worries, but it's one of those small, petty things that are really quite big when you think about it. It's not that giving the loaf to his family would have made his imprisonment worth it, but the fact that he didn't even do that just adds insult to injury. And just physically speaking, he's still hungry when he's arrested. He's bleeding, he's exhausted, and he's still starving. There's not even that small consolation of having taken the edge off his hunger.

They did not even know that he was going to steal; they did not know about the existence of the loaf; they would never truly know of it, not in the way Valjean had in the moment between his breaking of the glass, and his seizure by the hand of fate––made flesh in the sturdy appendage of Maubert Isabeau.

The definition of theft is taking that which belongs to someone else. It is true that Isabeau was a baker by profession, with a right to sell his bread for a profit. But did not Jean Valjean, too, have a right to eat? He and his sister worked; they toiled. It was not their fault that their labor was fruitless. Had he not earned the right to the loaf, for the sake of whose market value he was now a drudge of the law?

This is what I mean when I say that even without studying "The Interior of Despair" just before writing—and indeed, practically forgetting its contents—I somehow ended up practically quoting it all the same. The above passage sounds almost exactly like "Then he asked himself: whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history. Whether it was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work, that he, an industrious man, should have lacked bread."

Jean Valjean was now past these thoughts. A dull anger had succeeded them, an anger that melded itself with his natural strength, coiling in with his muscles in an unconscious bond: hate, work, and muscle memory. Valjean’s brain was distributed in his biceps, his pectorals, his mighty legs, not to the diminishment of his true cerebral worth, but in auxiliary capacity; a dormant rage that substituted for thought.

Here I wanted to get across the idea that Valjean's rage has become a part of him—so deeply engrained it's almost physical. It sounds a lot like Hugo talking about the "science of muscles" needed for escape in "The Interior of Despair," but again, I'm pretty sure I wrote this before (re)reading that chapter.

Jean Valjean didn’t have a name––not really. His surname was a mockery of a patronymic, further mutilated by the contraction and the idiom. His father was a ghost of a ghost, a shadow left behind by a common name that belonged to scores of unremarkable, indistinguishable people. His father was nothing; so he, Jean, was thus the issue of nothing. Valjean, for all its phonetic hints of valeur, was merely a false coin, a cheap homespun facsimile: voilà Jean. Who would care enough about his father’s entrance to proclaim it? There’s Jean––what rot!

This is pretty harsh, I know. What it comes from is me examining the associations I have with the name. I realized I've subconsciously associated the name "Valjean" with positive things because the "Val-" part reminds me of words like "valor" (or "value," which is etymologically related). But, of course, that is not what the "Val-" means; it's simply a corruption/contraction of "Voilà." So it's like he's set up as "valorous" or "valiant" or "valuable" and then the rug gets pulled out—no, that's not what the name means at all. So I just decided to be really harsh, like someone who's invested in counterfeit money—he's a false coin, and why the hell was his father even called Vlajean, who exactly was going around saying "Voilà Jean"?, etc. Not only is the name not special, he shares it with his father. He's utterly unimportant.

A man with a punny surname had recently been coupled to the man with none.

I decided to use the idea of names as a transition between the two characters, both their names are so important. It seemed utterly fitting to draw attention to Chenildieu's nickname, to have it be the first thing you see about him, because it is such an attention grabber in the book—really, it's one of the reasons I decided to write about him (although I have a whole list here). "The man with a punny surname" seemed like a good epithet for him.

Chenildieu was a short, agitated man, willowy but weak in frame, with a crop of chestnut hair that, when closely shaven, looked red. He was squatting on the dusty ground, with fluttering hands, while his partner, the man to whom he had been “married," was leaning pensively against a rock wall in the quarry. Jean Valjean had once, long ago, been the younger of a pair; now he was an inveterate convict. If Chenildieu was febrile, Valjean was phlegmatic, his skin beaten by the sun, his shoulders broad, his shorn hair dark, his gaze darker.

Here I was trying to set up a contrast between the two characters, an exercise that serves not only to highlight their differences, but also to give each of them a description in his own right. I also tried to give a brief but potent sketch of Chenildieu's personality, emphasizing how ill at ease and restless he is; I contrast this nervous energy with Valjean's gloominess, using a sort of humorism/medicine topos ("phlegmatic" and "febrile"). I should note, however, that Valjean isn't calm enough to be phlegmatic; he's more melancholic. And really, neither he nor Chenildieu can be classed into the four humoristic temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic) anyway, so it's a really loose metaphor. A mixed one, actually, since I don't associate Chenildieu with a humor at all—just a medical condition, fever.

I had a lot of fun deciding what a young Chenildieu would look like. Hugo gives quite a vivid description of fifty-something Chenildieu, but there is a still a good deal that's left open—for instance, hair color. I'm not sure why I decided to give him chestnut hair; it might be a nod to the friauche in The Last Day of a Condemned Man, who complains about having his lovely chestnut hair cut off in Toulon. And it changes color when it's shorter, as hair is wont to do—red, to hint at a sort of "fiery" transformation. Chenildieu's burning up; we know he tries to burn his brand off, and by the time we meet him in Arras in 1823, he's "feverish." (This is another contrast with Valjean, who's "dark.")