nothing-rhymes-with-grantaire:
Okay so I wanted to meta about Le Cabuc/Claquesous so here it is.
As I was reading through the Le Cabuc section the other day I was wondering about the characterization of Le Cabuc vs the characterization of Claquesous that we get. Claquesous is mysterious, he’s stony, he’s silent. He’s a ventriloquist who changes his every aspect in order to remain anonymous. He takes orders from no one, not even Thenardier, really. He comes out only at night and is described as “coming out of a hole”. No one knows his real name, no one knows his real voice, no one knows his real anything. Even Javert mentions that no one ever sees him. He is smoke and mirrors, he is darkness, he’s a ghost. He’s barely even real. He could almost be a sort of mythical criminal made up by the crime ring of Paris, a thing to become or look up to or be warned of. Basically, he is the cold, invisible, intangible person, practically just an idea, but he is well known and everyone has heard of him.
And then we have Le Cabuc. Le Cabuc is “entirely unknown,” he “articulated and vociferated”, which is the exact opposite of the near-silent Claquesous. He is friendly(ish) and heavily drunk and drinks with others and pulls a table out of the bistro to drink with others. And then, when he wants to get in the house, he doesn’t revert to the means he might have as Claquesous, sneaky things or trickery or something like that. He goes directly to yelling, to firing his gun, to bringing attention to himself. He is angry, volatile, making a scene. And then, when he kills the civilian in the window, Enjolras is there. Enjolras pushes Le Cabuc to his knees despite the man being larger and broader and probably physically stronger than he. And even when Enjolras pushes him down, he still struggles. It’s when the revolutionaries make a wide ring around the both of them that he stops, that he “trembles in every limb”, that he asks pardon of Enjolras. When Enjolras kills him, he is writhing against Enjolras’ knees and howling (which I assume means he’s begging for his life), the complete opposite of anything we might have seen in Claquesous.
So the question is, is this really Claquesous? Is this the “real” Claquesous? Is Le Cabuc the Claquesous with the mask pulled away, Claquesous without his ventriloquism and without the cover of darkness? It’s mentioned more than once that Claquesous only ever emerges under the cover of darkness, and no one knows what he looks like. Is he a criminal by night and a “regular” citizen by day? Or is Le Cabuc just another one of Claquesous’ masks, a new ventriloquism, a great act, and one he dies playing?
*holds this meta close and cries*
LEX, I LOVE YOU
My personal belief is that the real Claquesous, the one without his “mask”, is Le Cabuc – when he reveals himself as human, he makes himself vulnerable, and so he can be killed. I see “Claquesous” as being the persona, and when he lets that slip, his whole safety-net collapses too
Oh, and these are some rambly notes I made after you first said you were going to write this (sorry that they’re a bit incoherent):
Claqusous is introduced as being really, really mysterious – in my (shitty Denny) edition, the very first thing Hugo says about him is that he is “darkness incarnate”. Things I associate with darkness: uncertainty, fear, the supernatural – he is all these things. I kinda think that Claquesous, at least at first, can indeed be seen as the physical embodiment of darkness and the night:
- Uncertainty: he’s faceless, has no concrete identity. He’s said to employ a series of masks rather than a face, and nobody knows his real name. No-one knows where he lives, and it’s doubtful that he has a permenant location anyway, as he seems to be rootless – as he’s described as “roving”, you can’t pin him down. Babet calls him “’the night-bird with two voices’“ – Les Miserables is very much concerned with the idea of giving a voice to the voiceless, and Claquesous defies that. He doesn’t want to use his real voice, as his strength lies in being enigmantic
- Fear: Hugo describes him as “frightening”, and you can totally see why
- The Supernatural: He only seems to exist at night, more of a phantom than a human being – indeed, Hugo says he “vanished like a ghost” whenever he had need to. He’s almost vampiric, said to “creep[] out of his hole at dusk” and then return “at daybreak”
Basically, the guy lives in mystery and darkness – he’s said to even evade the questions of his fellow criminals, so keen is he to maintain his air of elusiveness. It seems like his mysteriousness isn’t just his defining characteristic (if he can even be said to have one), but also his strength
Hence, as Le Cabuc, he is able to be killed as he’s lost his armour of shadows – he shows himself as a mortal man, not an intangible ghost, and so is at last made vulnerable
He “tremble[s]”, “gasp[s]”, swears and “scream[s]” before his finally laid face-down on the cobbles – he dies not just human, but human at its most base, basic level, acting solely on fear, with no regard to dignity
And another thing I find really fascinating is that when when Enjolras has shot him, he’s not even a man anymore, but a thing. Enjolras tells the other men to “Get rid of that”, referring to Claquesous’ body, and from then on he is referred to as “it”, not “he” – “three men picked it up, still twitching in its last death-throes, and flung it over the smaller barricade into the Rue Mondetour”. He’s inhuman again, but not in the same way that he was first presented
And then the last we hear of him, when Hugo confirms that Le Cabuc and Claquesous are the same person, is “his life had been lived in shadow, his end was in total darkness”. It’s as though the darkness he’s always cloaked himself in and used as his safety has at last consumed him, once again rendering him incorporeal
Oooh yes.
Claquesous embodies the confident expression and use of uncertainty and fear to subdue and manipulate others, while Le Cabuc is consumed by his fear and made base by it. He wraps himself in a character and a mask when he is with Patron Minette, but as Le Cabuc he is a man, not an idea. He is physically vulnerable, but he is also emotionally vulnerable. He isn’t cold and distant like Claquesous. He’s drunk and brash and friendly, and angry and volatile. Claquesous would never have impulsively shot the man in the window. He would not have reacted so vehemently or yelled so repeatedly at the man. He resorts to yelling, to beating the door, to open violence, whereas Claquesous would have been more subtle. And he wouldn’t have howled and struggled and screamed and begged Enjolras, either. But this is not Claquesous, not anymore. This is Le Cabuc the human, letting out all the things that Claquesous hides.
I also find it really interesting that Hugo switches over to present tense when he speaks about Le Cabuc hitting the door. I don’t know whether that’s a typo in my translation, a mistake on his part, or purposeful symbolism, though I don’t know exactly what it would mean.
Personally I like my (FMA) translation: “His life had been darkness, his end was night.” Claquesous life had been darkness. He surrounded himself with it, he made use of it, he embraced it and became it. To him, darkness was a good thing. But his death, his end? It was night. He was smothered by it, he was taken by it. It came swiftly and covered him entirely. His death was not an enveloping fog he could hide himself in, the mists of his masks and changing identity. It was above him in the form of Enjolras as an elevated figure. He is the night, the base, the violence they are fighting against, and Enjolras is the light, the sun, the thing that destroys the night, that brings end to the night. It doesn’t bring an end to the darkness: there are always going to be shadows, especially when there is sun, but it ends night.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 