HOW TO SURVIVE A HEART ATTACK WHEN ALONE Let’s Say It’s 6.15pm And You’re Going Home (alone Of

Yo what about good omens things hm?

SH IT SHIT I FORGOT GOOD OMENS THROW ME IN THE TR A S H

gemsona for @shadowflameswords

0______o

That….is sick

dont worry, if youre just NICE enough to your opressor SURELy theyll just, GIVE you freedom, out of the kindness of their wonderful filthy shit hearts, just as long as you comply perfectly with their ideations/expectations of you whilst simultaneously and constantly expressing your IMPRESSIVE and UNDYINGgratitude for the GREAT WAYS your oppressor has thrown you a scrap or two and called it equality 

grantaire is in love with enjolras and enjolras is just wondering what this gremlin man is doing hanging around the friends of the abc so dang much and this upsets me greatly but not because i want them to kiss: an essay.

part two: “the back room of the café musain” – or, grantaire is a VERY sad gremlin man, but he has good friends.

read part one here. we’re gonna go through ... all the grantaire scenes, actually. yeah. next up on the docket is gonna be ole R interacting slightly with marius, and interacting with enjolras in the barrière du maine sequence. but for now --

-- action intro! the first time we see grantaire actually interacting with other characters, versus a prose description. basing the analysis off hapgood’s translation here.

we're going sentence by sentence, or handful of sentences, because my boy grantaire doesn’t know what ¶ means. he’s never heard of it. never seen it before in his life. is that like, an indie band? how do you even pronounce it?

anyway.

we’ve been given the groundwork for what to expect in his prose intro, and now: lights, camera, action ...

Grantaire, thoroughly drunk, was deafening the corner of which he had taken possession, reasoning and contradicting at the top of his lungs, and shouting: --

of course he’s commandeered a corner of the room. of course he is shouting at the top of his lungs. my garbage son is a nerd, and a dramatic nerd at that.

“I am thirsty. Mortals, I am dreaming: that the tun of Heidelberg has an attack of apoplexy, and that I am one of the dozen leeches which will be applied to it.

you know, when i went to look this up, i don't rightly know what i was expecting. maybe something poetic.

nope.

the heidelberg tun is a wine cask in a castle in germany, constructed in 1751, which has the capacity to store nearly 60,000 gallons of wine.

grantaire. honey. you overdramatic dumpsterfire. darling.

no.

I want a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is worth nothing. One breaks one’s neck in living. Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an antique reliquary painted on one side only.

sound familiar to anyone?

“tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace from day to day, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. out, out, brief candle! life’s but a walking shadow: a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

cripes, now i want a drink.

Ecclesiastes says: ‘All is vanity.’ I agree with that good man, who never existed, perhaps. Zero not wishing to go stark naked, clothed himself in vanity. O vanity! The patching up of everything with big words! a kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is a professor, an acrobat is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artist, a hodman is an architect, a jockey is a sportsman, a wood-louse is a pterigybranche.

wow, what set my dude off? he’s pretty clearly got an axe to grind about vanity. oh wait --

“aucune femme n’était admise dans cette arrière-salle, excepté louison, la laveuse de vaisselle du café, qui la traversait de temps en temps pour aller de la laverie au « laboratoire ».”

“a kitchen is a laboratory.”

... honey. honey. leave louison alone. let her have her fun. this is not a reason to start monologuing to all and sundry.

Vanity has a right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is the negro with his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the philosopher with his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the other. What are called honors and dignities, and even dignity and honor, are generally of pinchbeck. Kings make playthings of human pride. Caligula made a horse a consul; Charles II. made a knight of a sirloin. Wrap yourself up now, then, between Consul Incitatus and Baronet Roastbeef.

you know the saying about even broken clocks being right twice a day?

sometimes skepticism is toxic crap, but sometimes it lets you see through the crap too. grantaire sees the way people try to elevate their lives with fancy words, and he sees how different motivations play into that vanity, and, well ...

... he weeps at poor people's efforts to dress up their circumstances with a little prettiness. he laughs at rich people’s affectations of more virtue than they actually possess. and he wraps himself back up in sarcasm.

and puns, too, oh my God. it’s impossible to translate it properly into english, but this is what he does in french:

“caligula faisait consul un cheval ; charles ii faisait chevalier un aloyau.” (emphasis mine.)

MY GARBAGE SON IS A NERD.

As for the intrinsic value of people, it is no longer respectable in the least. Listen to the panegyric which neighbor makes of neighbor. White on white is ferocious; if the lily could speak, what a setting down it would give the dove! A bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous than the asp and the cobra.

here we go, cutting through the crap yet again.

please. please. this is fantine’s story from beginning to end. grantaire, without knowing her, has described her tragedy and her victimhood in its entirety.

and, unaware of how he is speaking precisely about the suffering of a single person (a symbol for all women), he uses an example of human meanness to condemn all of humanity.

It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing.

????????????????

self deprecation much??

even if he’s being sarcastic here (signs point to yes), it’s still a baffling statement. already we’ve had references to five separate events, people, or things outside what turns up in ordinary conversation, and all of this right off the top of his head.

For instance, I have always been witty; when I was a pupil of Gros, instead of daubing wretched little pictures, I passed my time in pilfering apples; rapin[24] is the masculine of rapine.

[24] The slang term for a painter's assistant.

alright. i’ve already addressed his impatience in drawing apples from still life in part one -- let’s take a look at that play on words there, rapin and rapine.

rapin: painter's assistant. rapine: direct cognate with the english ...

rapine: plunder: thievery.

in stealing apples from the still life he was supposed to paint, he was a rapin who committed a rapine.

DID I MENTION THAT MY GARBAGE SON IS A HUGE NERD?

So much for myself; as for the rest of you, you are worth no more than I am. I scoff at your perfections, excellencies, and qualities. Every good quality tends towards a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous man is next door to the prodigal, the brave man rubs elbows with the braggart; he who says very pious says a trifle bigoted; there are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes’ cloak.

from “javert satisfied”:

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues which have one vice, -- error. The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously venerable radiance.

HELLO??? HELLO?????

grantaire has summed up fantine; now he sums up javert.

hey. hugo.

hey. hugo.

vicky.

i got a question.

if you’re trying to make grantaire so obnoxious, why do you keep having him say things that support your previous plot points??

back to “the back room of the café musain.”

Whom do you admire, the slain or the slayer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally men are in favor of the slayer. Long live Brutus, he has slain! There lies the virtue. Virtue, granted, but madness also. There are queer spots on those great men. The Brutus who killed Caesar was in love with the statue of a little boy. This statue was from the hand of the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also carved that figure of an Amazon known as the Beautiful Leg, Eucnemos, which Nero carried with him in his travels. This Strongylion left but two statues which placed Nero and Brutus in accord. Brutus was in love with the one, Nero with the other.

here my boy is trying to connect vice and virtue again, but this is more of a “six degrees of kevin bacon” thing, not the overextension of virtue that he was talking about previously. and uh, this particular argument here is ... kinda weak? i think?

the thing is, you are never more than five feet away from a spider at any given moment. this is a literal fact and a metaphorical fact. there’s immorality in the world, and since it is in the same world as goodness, they cannot be completely divided from each other. but that doesn’t mean the evil isn’t still evil, or that the good isn’t still good. it just means you have to look at the whole picture.

(this reminds me a little of the theme that hugo tries to hammer in his comparison of enjolras to the bird which soars and grantaire as the earthbound toad. the one is connected to the other. does that mean that the bird elevates the toad? or that the toad drags the bird down? not sure what hugo grantaire is going for here exactly, but not liking the implication much ...)

All history is nothing but wearisome repetition. One century is the plagiarist of the other. The battle of Marengo copies the battle of Pydna; the Tolbiac of Clovis and the Austerlitz of Napoleon are as like each other as two drops of water.

and this is the guy who said he knew nothing.

“repetition” is the term hapgood uses, which is one translation of the original rabâchage. but it can also be translated as “regurgitation.”

y’all: he has been educated in history, and he looks around and sees it repeating itself, and it wearies him, and it disgusts him, and it saddens him.

also -- i hate to keep harping on translations but y’all:

“le tolbiac de clovis et l’austerlitz de napoléon se ressemblent comme deux gouttes de sang.” (emphasis mine.)

SANG! BLOOD! NOT WATER!

WHAT THE FUCK, HAPGOOD?

I don’t attach much importance to victory. Nothing is so stupid as to conquer; true glory lies in convincing. But try to prove something! If you are content with success, what mediocrity, and with conquering, what wretchedness! Alas, vanity and cowardice everywhere. Everything obeys success, even grammar. Si volet usus, says Horace. Therefore I disdain the human race.

“rien n’est stupide comme vaincre ; la vraie gloire est convaincre.”

here’s my boy, back at it again with the untranslatable word play.

he isn’t staying on topic, really. what we’ve got here is full stream-of-consciousness ramble. we’ve gone from vanity, to virtue becoming vice, to the inevitable ties between horror and hero, to the awful repetition of history, and now to victory. and thence ...

Shall we descend to the party at all? Do you wish me to begin admiring the peoples? What people, if you please? Shall it be Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of days gone by, slew Phocion, as we might say Coligny, and fawned upon tyrants to such an extent that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus: “His urine attracts the bees.” The most prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas, who was so small and so thin that he was obliged to load his shoes with lead in order not to be blown away by the wind. There stood on the great square in Corinth a statue carved by Silanion and catalogued by Pliny; this statue represented Episthates. What did Episthates do? He invented a trip. That sums up Greece and glory. Let us pass on to others.

... to phocion, who was an athenian politician quite popular with the people and who seemed to rule quite fairly for several decades, until the macedonians came along invading as macedonians do, and the athenians killed him for not capitulating. grantaire then ferociously condemns the athenians with that little, uh, vulgar quote right there.

in five words, a single breath, grantaire compares phocion to coligny -- presumably gaspard ii de coligny, a prominent huguenot in the mid-to-late 1500s. coligny worked to establish huguenot colonies in brazil and spanish florida, fought in a series of wars, fell in with charles ix, and was ultimately ordered assassinated by henri de navarre’s mother-in-law the queen mother catherine de medici. all this leading up to the war of the three henrys.

(yaaaaay for wikipedia.)

thus R links the two ideas together: assassination for refusing to admit to a conquering nation, and assassination for trying to protect religious freedom. and all this, again, in just five words.

BUDDY.

not much to say regarding philetas -- the fella apparently didn’t do much all else besides write, and teach, and practically starve to death because he was too busy doing the first two things.

episthates flummoxed me for a hot second, i must admit. the only references to him i could find were in les mis. but the original french is “épisthate,” which, while not a word, can be turned into “épistate,” which is not a proper name but the french term for an ancient greek magistrate.

which magistrate does grantaire mean? well, the only statue carved by silanion and catalogued by pliny that’s associated with athens is a bust of plato.

and what says grantaire of plato? that he invented a trip. literally. croc-en-jambe, the act of tripping someone.

and that’s that on greece!

Shall I admire England? Shall I admire France? France? Why? Because of Paris? I have just told you my opinion of Athens. England? Why? Because of London? I hate Carthage. And then, London, the metropolis of luxury, is the headquarters of wretchedness. There are a hundred deaths a year of hunger in the parish of Charing-Cross alone. Such is Albion.

i’ve mentioned it already, but ... this bit right here ... this is it.

this is, essentially, grantaire’s thesis. (not MY thesis but there you have it.)

he hates the world because of how much misery it contains.

I add, as the climax, that I have seen an Englishwoman dancing in a wreath of roses and blue spectacles. A fig then for England!

i have looked and looked and i cannot find out what the hell an englishwoman dancing with a crown of roses and blue glasses is supposed to mean. if anyone knows, please tell me. i am profoundly confused.

If I do not admire John Bull, shall I admire Brother Jonathan? I have but little taste for that slave-holding brother. Take away Time is money, what remains of England? Take away Cotton is king, what remains of America?

GOD BE GOOD. LOOK AT THIS. LOOK AT THIS!!!

what is it the kids say nowadays when you read someone for filth? “wig”? is that what you say? that’s what grantaire just did to england and the united states.

les misérables was published in 1863. smack dab in the middle of the american civil war. if we didn’t know hugo’s opinions about it before, we sure do now!

Germany is the lymph, Italy is the bile. Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia? Voltaire admired it. He also admired China. I admit that Russia has its beauties, among others, a stout despotism; but I pity the despots. Their health is delicate. A decapitated Alexis, a poignarded Peter, a strangled Paul, another Paul crushed flat with kicks, divers Ivans strangled, with their throats cut, numerous Nicholases and Basils poisoned, all this indicates that the palace of the Emperors of Russia is in a condition of flagrant insalubrity.

the lymph: a source of phlegm, in terms of the four humors. to be phlegmatic is to be cold and wet and to flush out illness. and that’s that on germany.

 the bile: black bile as melancholy, which thickens, or yellow bile as choler, which consumes. and that’s that on italy.

grantaire is not having it with the elevation of europe over everyone else. or at least, the elevation of western europe.

but then he turns east towards russia, and basically this whole bit right here is just grantaire looking at the history of imperial russia and going “yikes.”

All civilized peoples offer this detail to the admiration of the thinker; war; now, war, civilized war, exhausts and sums up all the forms of ruffianism, from the brigandage of the Trabuceros in the gorges of Mont Jaxa to the marauding of the Comanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass.

“trabuceros in mont jaxa” has a similar problem as “episthetes”: the only english references are to les mis, or to advertisements for various latin bands or commercially produced products. but the original french is “trabucaire,” which larousse defines as either members of the spanish army or brigands in the pyrenées.

comanche in the doubtful pass is an error on hugo’s part: it was actually apache natives who carried out the raids in the doubtful canyon. so called, actually, because the apache made white settlers doubt whether they would pass through it safely.

sounds like the apache were pretty justified in those skirmishes, though, i’d say, especially given, oh, i don’t know, everything about u.s. history. comparing the skirmish in the doubtful canyon to trabucaires’ pillaging seems pretty disingenuous to me.

(though it’s not like the french don’t have plenty of skeletons in the closet about colonialism themselves, either.)

‘Bah!’ you will say to me, ‘but Europe is certainly better than Asia?’ I admit that Asia is a farce; but I do not precisely see what you find to laugh at in the Grand Lama, you peoples of the west, who have mingled with your fashions and your elegances all the complicated filth of majesty, from the dirty chemise of Queen Isabella to the chamber-chair of the Dauphin. Gentlemen of the human race, I tell you, not a bit of it!

alright, trackin’, yadda yadda yadda ...

hapgood at it again with the weird translation, though, because this last sentence in french is “messieurs les humains, je vous dis bernique !”

which ... according to argoji, my other favorite translation machine, “bernique” means “i don’t want this.”

grantaire, honey ...

It is at Brussels that the most beer is consumed, at Stockholm the most brandy, at Madrid the most chocolate, at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the most wine, at Constantinople the most coffee, at Paris the most absinthe; there are all the useful notions. Paris carries the day, in short.

... honey. no.

but here he is at it again, honestly: this is in keeping with his prose description from two chapters ago. grantaire cares about things because it’s easier to care about things than about people. and he’s here for a good time not a long time, so absinthe wins out over everything else, including chocolate and coffee.

In Paris, even the rag-pickers are sybarites; Diogenes would have loved to be a rag-picker of the Place Maubert better than to be a philosopher at the Piraeus.

a sybarite: a bon viveur, a libertine, a voluptuary. in paris even the most miserable can live in style.

Learn this in addition; the wineshops of the ragpickers are called bibines; the most celebrated are the Saucepan and The Slaughter-House. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis, mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers, caravanseries of the caliphs,

as for substance, my boy isn’t saying much of anything right here. all these fun vocab words are essentially just fancy terms for types of cafés and restaurants.

but look at how it scans in french:

“donc, ô guinguettes, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis, mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines des chiffoniers, caravanséreils des califs”.

THIS TONGUE-TWISTING FOOL!

it’s a good thing he’s from the south and therefore he speaks slowly, because if he was from the north of france and was saying this in rapid ch’ti speed, nobody would be able to understand him!

I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I eat at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to roll naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it is you, Louison. Good day.”

HONEY.

it’s been five pages. and this is where he pauses. and there has been not a single paragraph break in all that time.

Thus did Grantaire, more than intoxicated, launch into speech, catching at the dish-washer in her passage, from his corner in the back room of the Cafe Musain.

honey. no. leave her be.

and i hope he hasn’t been monologuing at her this whole time. i dearly, dearly hope he only caught her by the arm for this last bit.

actually, you know what, death of the author. since hugo didn’t spell out precisely whether or not grantaire has been harassing louison for the last five pages entirely, i am going to infer that he has not done so, and that it is only in the space of the last couple sentences that he specifically apprehended her. i can do that. i have the power.

Bossuet, extending his hand towards him, tried to impose silence on him, and Grantaire began again worse than ever: --

“Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws. You produce on me no effect with your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes' bric-a-brac. I excuse you from the task of soothing me.

“I EXCUSE YOU FROM THE TASK OF SOOTHING ME.”

this implies:

a) it has at some point become a habit for bossuet to calm him down from his tirades, and

b) bossuet doesn’t bat an eye at his rambling; he only interferes when he sees grantaire is bothering someone else, specifically louison.

good man, bossuet.

Moreover, I am sad. What do you wish me to say to you? Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a success, man is a failure. God made a mistake with that animal.

HONEY ...

A crowd offers a choice of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch.

in the french: “une foule est un choix de laideurs.”

a crowd is a choice of uglinesses -- or ugly men, i suppose. thus implying the mob without outright saying it.

Femme -- woman -- rhymes with infame, -- infamous.

... sort of on the same theme? but getting a bit incoherent now, R, despite yet another good pun. (this is the second play on words hapgood describes in her translation. well, 2/4 ain’t bad.)

but he’s on a roll now, and as we’ve seen, he’s more than drunk. i guess it doesn’t have to make any sense at this point.

Yes, I have the spleen, complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!”

“Silence then, capital R!” resumed Bossuet,

oh this part makes me sad. the first part is pretty much word for word transliterated, but once we get to the verbs it’s more complicated. let’s break down the french word for word:

“et je bisque” -- and i am furious (very old argot, as the modern literally translates to “shrimp”)

“et je rage” -- and i rage

“et je bâille” -- and i yawn

“et je m’ennuie” -- and i am bored

“et je m’assomme” -- and i am stunned/stricken/knocked out (the larousse definition has the verb used in a hunting context for all of its examples)

“et je m’embête !” -- and i bother myself!

“que Dieu aille au diable !” -- God can go to hell!

God can go to hell -- well. that sums up the last five pages pretty succinctly, i suppose.

needless to say, he’s working himself up into a real tizzy here. and whether bossuet’s still interfering on behalf of louison, or whether he’s seen how upset grantaire is now, the action is the same: he tells grantaire, in words this time instead of a gesture, to be quiet.

and it seems to work!

who was discussing a point of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist high in a phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion: --

“--And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at the most, an amateur attorney, I maintain this: that, in accordance with the terms of the customs of Normandy, at Saint-Michel, and for each year, an equivalent must be paid to the profit of the lord of the manor, saving the rights of others, and by all and several, the proprietors as well as those seized with inheritance, and that, for all emphyteuses, leases, freeholds, contracts of domain, mortgages--”

“Echo, plaintive nymph,” hummed Grantaire.

the reference to echo and narcissus is one thing, but look at the tone with which it’s delivered. grantaire isn’t antagonistic anymore. he isn’t agitated. with the single command to be silent, grantaire has mellowed quite a bit -- he’s even humming. and he relegates himself to a single sentence as an aside, instead of launching once more into a tirade.

well, would you look at that. grantaire and his friend bossuet are interacting in a constructive manner, which has a positive outcome.

grantaire is a sad guy. he disguises it with jokes, with puns, he dresses it up in long-winded comparisons and references and quick flashing asides, but he is a sad person underneath it all -- and anyone who’s really paying attention to what he says can see it very clearly.

he starts out grumpy, he works himself into indignation, and from there quite easily into true melancholy and belligerence.

yet even in that heightened state, a handful of words from a friend can bring him back to docility.

keep this in mind, when we go to the barrière du maine scene for part three. grantaire can be read just as easily as a book, if you take the time to listen and try to understand.

and he can be managed, with a little gentle brusqueness. oxymoron? not really. for some people, telling them to snap out of a spiral is the opposite of productive, but it works with grantaire.

he has a cheat code. it’s called kindness; not necessarily niceness, not necessarily softness, but kindness.

as a coda, let’s slip over to bahorel and joly’s conversation regarding winning back a sulking girlfriend.

“In your place, I would let her alone.”

“That is easy enough to say.”

“And to do. Is not her name Musichetta?”

“Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled, with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her.”

“My dear fellow, then in order to please her, you must be elegant, and produce effects with your knees. Buy a good pair of trousers of double-milled cloth at Staub’s. That will assist.”

“At what price?” shouted Grantaire.

first of all: bahorel knows what’s up.

and second, and last:

grantaire, overhearing his friends speaking about a panacea for relationship trouble, jumps into the conversation -- from across the room -- to ask how much these magical trousers cost, with an implication that he wants to buy them.

God bless.

READ ON AO3 • 3,341 / 20,834 WORDS

"Okay, let's go steal the Magisterium."

~

leverage s3 & his dark materials s1 ; alec hardison/parker/eliot spencer ; multichapter ; rated T.

part six: a few more of the whys and the hows.

@fantineweek 2018 - day two: gold.

once more we are going off the hapgood translation available here.

i guess i could technically put this under the “sacrifice” prompt, but ... i honestly think that her hair alone is its own category.

two things related to fantine’s hair which account for a lot of symbolism in her story: the fact that it is gold, and the fact that she sells it.

so starting off with the fact that it is gold --

i haven’t seen many of the movie adaptations -- in fact i am avoiding the liam neeson & uma thurman one like the plague, for probably obvious reasons -- but in lm 2012, and the 25th anniversary cast, we basically see that cosette’s hair color and fantine’s hair color is switched. the same thing will be true of the bbc miniseries. it’s basically only staged productions that i’ve seen that stay true to the book.

this bothered me for a while, and at first i thought the only reason it bothered me was because i am a stickler for details. marius ought to have dark hair, grantaire ought to be ugly, the barricade is on rue de la chanvrerie not rue de villette, musical, i don’t care if it doesn’t rhyme.

except ... well, hugo writes these things, even the smallest of details, for a reason. marius has dark hair because he is a Romantic, which is associated with melancholy, and you can’t very well have a byronic brooding sort of fellow with golden hair. and you can see the same care for details with his physical descriptions of grantaire, enjolras, éponine, et cetera. there’s an element of symbolism involved.

he writes the fallen woman, fantine, with long golden hair.

this being western society, and all the issues that it entails, blond hair is associated with not only beauty but purity. we give princesses like rapunzel and cinderella blonde hair; we give prince charming blond hair; we give stained glass angels blond hair. 

in the picture of dorian gray, oscar wilde gives dorian blond hair to emphasize the fact that he hides under an image of purity to conduct his evil deeds. he uses the trope of blond hair = purity to turn our character expectations upside down.

hugo gives fantine blonde hair, and tells us she is innocent; tells us she works hard; tells us she is good. then he shows us how society devours her, starting with her blonde hair. he uses the trope, and the expectations that follow that trope, to show the reader (who at that time would have been a bourgeois not unlike tholomyès or bamatabois) that despite her abasement, fantine never deserves what happens to her.

hugo is intent on hammering it into our heads that she never actually did anything wrong, and he uses her hair as a symbol for her purity and innocence.

she sells that pure golden hair herself.

-- which brings me to my second point.

in the musical, it is the wigmaker who approaches fantine. it is the wigmaker who tells her what pretty hair she has, and how much money she can make by selling it. fantine is reluctant -- she stubbornly digs in her heels at first, she is horrified by the prospect (and rightly so!). it is only the thought of cosette which forces her to accept the wigmaker’s offer.

i can’t find a picture of it, so let me describe what i saw at the us tour:

fantine, wrapped in a shawl, on the left. the wigmaker, stage center, a crone, hunched over -- and at the words “ten francs may save my poor cosette,” she raises her right hand in a slow arc towards the ceiling, holding her shears aloft -- the shears are open, the moment is predatory triumph, and as soon as the note ends she practically leaps upon her victim to drag her offstage.

this scene gives us the hungry jaws of society which devour fantine. it’s horrible. but the book gives us something even more horrifying, for all that it’s brief.

from “result of the success” :

One day they wrote to her that her little Cosette was entirely naked in that cold weather, that she needed a woollen skirt, and that her mother must send at least ten francs for this. She received the letter, and crushed it in her hands all day long. That evening she went into a barber’s shop at the corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her admirable golden hair fell to her knees.

“What splendid hair!” exclaimed the barber.

“How much will you give me for it?” said she.

“Ten francs.”

“Cut it off.”

within twelve hours of receiving the letter, she has willingly given up her hair for the sake of her child.

her hair: the symbol of her purity.

okay, pretend we’re talking about an actual human being and not a character for two seconds.

she is known, earlier in the book, as fantine la blonde. part of her identity is taken up by the fact that she has this glossy beautiful hair.

this hair falls down to her knees. her knees.

this? (source)

is a LOT OF HAIR.

and it STILL doesn’t even come down to the knees. this is maybe just over HALF as long as fantine’s hair is.

my hair used to go down to the middle of my back before i had it cut off in a pixie in 2016. so without realizing it i sort of did a mini fantine ... you know, sans the rest of the trauma that goes along with her entire situation.

my hair only went to the middle of my back. call that 2.5, 3 feet of hair total. it was long enough that if it was loose, it would get caught in my armpits if i wasn’t paying attention. (super glamorous, right?) i can only imagine what having hair like that ^ would be like, let alone hair that goes down to the knees. long enough to sit on, for God’s sake!

hair that long has to be maintained daily. combing it, washing it, drying it, making sure it doesn’t tangle, making sure it doesn’t get caught in things and snap off, getting rid of split ends. braiding it, learning different hairstyles, all the little accessories like pins and combs and brushes. it’s practically its own hobby -- and when we consider that this is the only pleasure left in fantine’s life, that she spends the entire rest of her day sewing piecework ...

i had my hair cut to a pixie and everyone in my life who knew me before the pixie cut went crazy over it. part of a woman’s identity is in her hair, and there are other writers more articulate than i am who will happily talk at length about how different hair lengths make society perceive you in different ways. feminine, masculine, whatever. i’m not here to talk about that part. i’m talking about how her hair, her long hair which was a part of her identity simply because of its length, is also a part of her body.

man, i got my hair cut to a pixie on purpose, because i wanted to and because i thought it would be a cute low-maintenance haircut. there was no emotional turmoil involved in that decision. i made it willingly, and i had been looking forward to it for a few months. yet even then -- even now, two years later when my hair’s grown down past my shoulders again -- i still miss having hair down to the middle of my back.

fantine has no time to contemplate that decision. she does not want to make that decision. she is poor, she lives off practically nothing, and combing her hair is the one thing left in her life that affords her some happiness. her hair is the only beautiful thing left in her life.

one thing the lm 2012 movie did right is it showed fantine’s face during the haircut, and anne hathaway looks like she’s a split second away from bursting into tears. there is an element of trauma here. i can only imagine that fantine spends a fair few nights crying over that loss, and she would be justified in doing so.

it’s after the loss of her hair that she falls into anger and bitterness. this was the last bit of joy in her life, and she has sold it away willingly.

nobody makes the decision for her that her hair is worth selling. nobody gives her a choice to make that she can decline or accept. she comes up with the idea on her own.

to take an image from little shop of horrors, she chooses to step into the monster’s mouth.

this is a literal way that fantine sells herself, months before she becomes a woman of the town. the way she becomes a prostitute is exactly the same: no pimp approaches her, no women in the chorus tell her she’ll make easy money. she comes to the conclusion herself, and she takes that final step.

from “christus nos liberavit” :

Misery offers; society accepts.

Manwë, king of the Valar

and she lived happily ever after, the end, tholomyès and bamatabois and everyone else can go choke.

the dress is essentially a blue version of @lesmiserablesfashions’ dress here, drawn without actually looking at the reference because i like to live dangerously.

Melkor the puppetmaster.