Le Rant de Les Misérables, part 12

Last time, on Les Misérables…

– Thénardier went corpse robbing post-Waterloo.
– But the corpse he robbed was still alive.
– Whoops.
– Fortunately the alive-corpse mistook Thénardier’s pickpocketing for medical aid and swore eternal loyalty, etc.
– Then Thénardier ran away.

…and now, the thrilling continuation!

COSETTE, Book Two: The Ship Orion

Chapter I: Number 24601 Becomes Number 9430

pg. 359: Jean Valjean had been retaken.

Already? He really is the worst at escapes.

Hugo tells us what happened by presenting us with two contrasting newspaper articles on the event. The first, from the Drapeau Blanc, paints Valjean in a more sympathetic light and points out that he kind of singlehandedly revived the economy of Montreuil-sur-mer. The second article, from the Journal de Paris, is less complimentary.

pg. 360: This villain had succeeded in eluding detection by the police; he had changed his name and managed to procure the position of mayor in one of our small towns in the North. he had established a very considerable business in this town, but was ultimately unmasked and arrested, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the public authorities. He kept as his mistress a prostitute, who died of the shock at the moment of his arrest.

It also tells us that three days after Valjean escaped from prison in Montreuil-sur-mer, he was recaptured near Montfermeil. Prior to his capture, he managed to take roughly a half-milllion francs out of his bank account and stash it somewhere unknown. And so Valjean is sentenced to hard labor for life and sent off to Toulon.

But what happens to Montreuil-sur-mer without Valjean?

pg. 361: that fatal carving up of prosperous enterprises, a hidden daily occurrence in human society and one that history has noted only once, and then because it too place after the death of Alexander.

Or, less poetically, it falls apart. All the factory foremen become factory owners and start competing with each other, product quality falls, orders stop coming in, and soon everything is back to the miserable, bankrupt place it was before Valjean showed up. So it goes.

Chapter II: In Which Several Lines Will Be Read That May Have Come From The Devil Himself is the most promising chapter title I’ve seen yet.

In Montfermeil, there’s an urban legend where the devil wanders around at night digging holes. You can tell it’s the devil because he’s got horns. Once you spot him, there are three potential ways for the encounter to go.

pg. 362-363: The first is to approach the man and speak to him. Then you realize that he is just a peasant, and the looks black because it is twilight, that he is not digging a hole at all but merely cutting grass for his cows, and that what had been taken for horns is his pitchfork, which he carries on his back and whose prongs, thanks to night vision, seemed to grow out of his head.

Whew, that doesn’t sound so bad.

pg. 363: You go home, and you die within a week.

Wait, what?

pg. 363: The second method is to watch him, wait until he has dug the hole, filled it in, and gone away, then, running quickly to the spot, open it and get the “treasure” that the grim man, has, of course, buried there. You die within a month.

Uh…

pg. 363: The third alternative is not to speak to the dark man or even look at him, and to run away as fast as you can. You die within the year.

Option number four: never, ever leave your house after dark. This seems to be the only way to survive in Montfermeil.

According to Hugo, most people choose the second option because hey, treasure! What kind of treasure does the devil offer? According to the Norman monk Tryphon, whose grave is, and I quote, “a major producer of toads”:

pg. 363: A penny––sometimes a crown; a stone, a skeleton, a bleeding corpse, sometimes a ghost folded twice like a letter in an envelope, sometimes nothing.

Totally adding “a ghost folded twice like a letter in an envelope” to my Christmas list.

But that’s not all the devil has to offer!

pg. 363-364: It seems that nowadays they also occasionally find a powder horn with bullets or a dirty pack of greasy old cards evidently used by the Devil. Tryphon never mentions these articles, since Tryphon lived in the twelfth century, and it does not appear that the Devil was clever enough to invent gunpowder before Roger Bacon or playing cards before Charles VI.

Besides, whoever plays with the cards is sure to lose all he has, and as for the powder in the flask, it has the peculiarity of making your gun explode in your face.

Oh, Hugo.

Also in Montfermeil is an old drunken road worker and ex-con named Boulatruelle. At around the same time of Valjean’s recapture, Boulatruelle picks up the habit of wandering around the woods after dark and sometimes digging holes.

pg. 364: The housewives who passed that way took him at first for Beelzebub, then they recognized Boulatruelle, which was no more reassuring.

Eventually Boulatruelle gives up on whatever mission he had, but certain persons remain curious, including the schoolmaster and the tavernkeeper Thénardier. Together, these two come up with a cunning plan to get Boulatruelle to tell them what’s up.

pg. 365: One evening, the schoolmaster remarked that, in another era, the authorities would have inquired into what Boulatruelle was up to in the woods, and that he would have been forced to speak––answer, even tortured, if need be––and that Boulatruelle would not have held out, if he had been put to the question by water, for instance.

“Let’s put him to the question by wine,” said Thénardier.

So they get the notorious drunk Boulatruelle even drunker, and after a long interrogation, Thénardier and the schoolmaster get their answer.

Once upon a time Boulatruelle was wandering around the woods at dawn when he saw a guy not from ’round these parts but whom he nonetheless recognized, with a pickaxe and a spade and a big box. It didn’t occur to Boulatruelle to follow him until it was too late to see where the man put the box. Since then, Boulatruelle has been bumbling around trying to dig up whatever the mystery man buried.

In Chapter III: In Which We See That The Shackle Must Have Undergone Some Preparation To Be Broken By One Hammer Blow, we see that the shackle must have undergone some preparation to be broken by one hammer blow.

Late October, 1823, in the city of Toulon, the ship Orion returns to port. But first, Hugo takes a moment to remind us that he has an agenda in writing this book.

pg. 366-367: [The Orion] flew a pennant that entitled it to a regulation salute of eleven guns, which it returned shot for shot––in all, twenty-two. It has been estimated that in salutes, royal and military compliments, exchanges of courteous hubbub, signals of etiquette, roadstead and citadel formalities, rising and setting of the sun saluted daily by all fortresses and all vessels of war, the opening and closing of gates, etc., etc., the civilized world, in every part of the globe, fires off daily one hundred and fifty thousand useless canon shots. At six francs per shot, that amounts to nine hundred thousand francs a day, or three hundred million a year, gone up in smoke. This is only one item. Meanwhile, the poor are dying of hunger.

We also learn a bit about “the Spanish War“, which Hugo describes thusly:

pg. 368: It was war grown petty indeed, where Bank of France could be read on the folds of the flag.

A bit cynical, perhaps. Back to the Orion. Its arrival in port attracts a huge crowd, because, as Hugo takes several pages to explain, warships are really, really cool. But sometimes the ocean is even cooler than warships, and when that happens the warships get busted up and have to go home for repairs. Hence the return of the Orion, and the big crowd gathered around to stare at it. Thanks to said crowd, there’s plenty of witnesses for the accident that occurs one morning during repairs.

There’s a dude up in the rigging doing a thing, when suddenly OH CRAP he slips and falls and is dangling by his arms from some rope at the end of a beam. He can’t climb up, he can’t let go, and it’d be stupid-dangerous for anyone to try and rescue him. Anyone, that is, except––

pg. 372: Suddenly, a man was seen clambering up the rigging with the agility of a wildcat. He was dressed in red––a convict; he wore a green cap––a convict for life. As he reached the round top, a gust of wind blew off his cap revealing an entirely white head: He was not a young man.

Gee I wonder who this could be.

Hugo tells us this convict saw the accident happen and asked his guard for permission to go save the sailor’s life. The guard says okay and the convict breaks his chains with the single hammer blow referred to in the chapter title before leaping away into the rigging. He runs along the length of the beam, Hugo makes one of those infamous spider/fly comparisons, and the convict lets down a rope and pulls up the sailor. Since the sailor is exhausted from holding himself up for so long, the convict picks him up and carries him back across the beam and to the ground, like some kind of French Queequeg.

pg. 373: Then the throng applauded; seasoned prison guards wept, women hugged each other on the wharves, and on all sides voices exclaimed, with emotion-choked enthusiasm, “This man must be pardoned!”

Unfortunately, while running his victory lap, the convict slips off the wharf, falls into the water, gets sucked under the ship, and is presumed drowned.

pg. 373: The next morning, the Toulon Journal published the following item: “November 17, 1823. Yesterday a convict at work on board the Orion, on his return from rescuing a sailor, fell into the sea and was drowned. His body has not been recovered. It is presumed that it was caught under the piling at the pier head of the arsenal. This man was registered under the number 9430, and his name was Jean Valjean.”

Quelle surprise.