Tag: les mis

pilferingapples:

honestly the slow horror of Fantine’s Descent is so overwhelming every time I read it 

Valjean Falls in a single moment of reckless desperation; he makes one bad call and is cast out of society before he can blink, and that’s one kind of horror; the awful fractured feeling of a life changed irrevocably before there’s time to even protest.

But Fantine has to choose, over and over and over and over, to carve herself up bit by bit. She gets  the choice, she has to make the conscious effort to sacrifice first every piece of her happiness and comfort– and comfort  sounds so superfluous but god it’s so essential, people need  fire in the winter and warm clothes and clean living space and enough food and sleep  to be comfortable and she gives it all up– and then literally cutting herself up, piece by piece– 

and she could stop. She could always stop, right up until her arrest. She could live, herself , on what she gets for shirts, never mind the relatively larger income she gets from prostitution.  Every time, even after she’s sold her teeth and hair and become a prostitute–she could just stop sending Thenardier money, and start climbing back out of debt. She has to choose, every single day, every minute, to keep destroying herself, for a daughter she doesn’t even know is still alive– all she has to go on is Thenardier’s word, and even Fantine realizes, in time, that he’s not at all to be trusted. It wouldn’t even be unfeeling for her to give, it would be a totally logical sort of despair if she came to believe Cosette had died, that Thenardier was just extorting her (he would. We all know he would. Even Fantine surely knows he would.).

But she walks clear-eyed into hell, for years,  because the one thing she really can’t survive without is her hope for Cosette.  And every day the escape hatch is right there, and every day she chooses to ignore it. She’s got more conviction than all Napoleon’s doomed army at Waterloo, because she has to step into that abyss on purpose  and with no hope of glory, believing it makes her worth less. 

And she does it anyway. 

Les Amis as people I’ve met while travelling

thepiecesofcait:

Enjolras: the girl in Reykjavík that coordinated a venue which served as a halfway house and somewhere non-profits could meet free of charge, who I met at the fundraiser she’d organised to help get an unfairly deported refugee back with his family.

Combeferre: the guy in Munich who smuggled me into his 3hr Anatomy lecture despite the fact that I understood maybe three German words.

Courfeyrac: the boy at my London hostel who managed to talk his way into joining the game of Cluedo my friend and I were playing, and charmed unsuspecting fellow hostel-dwellers into reenacting ridiculous scenes like a CSI flashback.

Jehan: The Book Shop owner in Wigtown who had built a reputation of being a savagely unhappy and impolite rouge but was actually the nicest person ever (and even drew me a map with directions to the best nearby stretch of coast)

Joly: the guy at the Boston Public Market who immediately raced off to fetch me a bag of ice when I snapped a ligament in my ankle and crashed into his friend.

Bousset: the friend I crashed into.

Bahorel: the guy from the hostel in Würzburg who joined my friend and I in exploring the city and had no qualms about duetting the entirety of “A Whole New World” in the main square with me.

Feuilly: the girl in my hostel room in Boston who was exhausted from attending two separate overlapping conferences that week and still went out of her way to make sure I settled in ok and knew where to find the nearest laundromat and best cafe.

Marius: the man in line at the Eiffel Tower who, upon finding shelter with us from a sudden downpour, proceeded to shake his umbrella so that it saturated my music teacher in the process.

Grantaire: the couchsurfer I’d hosted from Sweden who had appeared every bit the uninterested student-on-a-gap-year I’d expected, but when I caught up with him on his own turf I discovered he was an actual qualified nuclear physicist.

What she says: i’m fine
What she means: the finale of Les Mis is really powerful and important when the ‘Do you hear the people sing?’ theme returns and it really speaks to the theme of the book. In the early version of that song, the revolutionaries and Les Amis are hopeful and determined. They believe that they can achieve their goals of freedom and equality, and they have faith that the people of France will fight with them for the ideals of the revolution. They sing about tomorrow coming and they mean a future with equality and freedom, and they mean the same thing when they talk about a world beyond the barricade, a world you long to see- a world with equality, past the politics and the fighting. But then they die, and it is tragic and terrible, and worst of all, it seems pointless. The viewer is left asking along with Marius, what their sacrifice was for? The world isn’t any better. They’re just dead. But then, the finale comes. You have hope again, and you hear the inspiring theme begin to play.
This time, the revolutionaries are in heaven, but they’re still singing about a fight and about a new world being the barricade. But this time, they’re singing about the fight that is life. They counter the pointless despair of the people who gain nothing from life in ‘at the end of the day’. They argue that there is a world beyond this barricade-a world beyond this life, with true freedom and happiness, that can only be achieved through the struggle and hardship of fighting for your beliefs. Tomorrow comes, the eternal tomorrow Victor Hugo references so often in his book. Because the true meaning of Les Mis is not that life is miserable, but that goodness, in the end will give you joy in the next life. The revolution is redeemed, and the viewer, along with Jean Valjean, suddenly understands and hears the people sing.