@gauzyreads / gauzyreads.tumblr.com
‘It happened sometimes that Jean Valjean would take [Cosette’s] small,red hand, still roughened by chilblains,and kiss it. More accustomed to being beaten, the poor child did not know what to make of this and was plunged in embarrassment.’
I had to read Les Justes a couple of weeks ago for my Camus module, and there’s this line in it that’s stayed with me because it reminded me so much of the scene in the brick with Le Cabuc
Just in case anyone hasn’t read/heard of it, Les Justes is based on the real life…
These are some really great points to consider, and yes, I quite agree on that additional factor as well. There was only that choice that could be made, to prove the rightness of the cause and of the revolution.
It’s my favorite moment for the reasons discussed here. That Enjolras knows what he has to choose, that he does it, because it needs to be done, and that he damns himself in the process, but accepts that damnation on behalf of the world that it will bring about. I cannot think that he would accept anything but justice for that action, even if he HAD survived the barricades somehow.
Which has a (slightly tenuous) connection to the recurring theme elsewhere in the book about how there can be virtue—sometimes the greatest virtue of all, even—in sinning and accepting the consequences for one’s sin in order to save somebody else.
I say slightly tenuous because Hugo is far more adamant about the sin not even being a sin at all but a virtuous act when it harms nobody except the person doing it—Fantine becoming a prostitute to save Cosette, Simplice lying to protect Valjean. When it comes to something like Valjean stealing to feed his sister’s children, the theft doesn’t become a good thing, but it’s a mitigating circumstance and there is still an element of noble sacrifice in giving up your own claim to morality in order to save somebody else’s life. Hugo’s feelings on violence and especially capital punishment were much stronger than his feelings about petty crime, and devotion to another person is more important throughout the book than devotion to an abstract ideal or collective, but a lot of the poignancy of the Cabuc scene comes from the fact that even then, Hugo retains an element of sympathy for the sacrifice of your own moral purity to protect what you hold dear.
(And just as the gut-wrenching “Javert’s drowning, everything in Tome IV, and Cosette’s separation from Valjean are all Hugo spewing Léopoldine feels all over the page” meta ended in “conclusion: Valjean/Javert fix-it fic,” the srs Cabuc meta is going to end in “conclusion: Enjolras and character of your choice have to make a great sacrifice and do sexings For The Revolution fic.”)
"Shortly after the 1832 revolution, the government noted an increase in the number of cholera victims. The idea that intense emotions served as a predisposing cause of cholera was common at the time; consequently, some physicians saw a correlation between the revolution and the increase in cholera…
okay lmao i’ve been sitting on my little canardier/thénardier theory since like may or whenever i posted that initial canard post and new years eve probably isn’t the best time to start trying to explain it, esp since my laptop is broken and i dont have access to the quotes/source material which imo back up my argument but like for starters see if you can tell the canardiers from the thénardiers in the above pictures
(canardiers were the people who sold canards on the streets of paris during the nineteenth c btw, and as parisians were p besotted with creating taxonomies of urban archetypes they had a number of {unflattering} stereotypes associated with them ~*many of which sound suspiciously familiar*~
also thénardier is not afaik a legit french surname whereas thénard is, hat tip to punforrestpun for that deet)
(i can and will wax lyrical about this when my laptop is fixed :) happy new year for now!)
please don’t reblog this its just spoilers because ppl were interested, if i’m gonna unleash a canardier/thénardier post on tumb i want it to be a lot less slapdash ty ty ty
cheers chickens (and real birds) again have great new years :)
So there’s a fanon that’s been knocking around for a while that Jean Prouvaire was into the whole Medieval aesthetic that gripped the French Romantic movement from the late 1820s into the early 1830s. I think Mme Bahorel first speculated about the idea (?), and people like edwarddespard and nisie have explored it since (ps the excellent art top right is c/o of nisie, you can find the original post here :3). The basis for the hc is that jehan is described as both taken by “that petty momentary freak which mingled with the powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study of the Middle Ages.” and “dress(ing) badly”… and there’s also the fact that this movement (which involved dressing in Medieval inspired fashions, obsessing over Medieval literature and poetry and decorating your living quarters with Medieval accoutrements - as well as generally advocating Medieval morals and values etc). This was part of a broader trend towards dressing theatrically and ostentatiously which was incredibly popular among the Romantic youth -
Young men were to be seen everywhere, sporting Venetian outfits from the sixteenth century, Polish military uniforms from Brandenburg, Hungarian hussars’ mantles, oriental robes of all kinds, which were worn as markers of artistic identity and personal distinction. The young artists in historical costumes carefully distinguished themselves from the fashionable dandies or “lions” of the time, who dressed according to the latest fashion imported from England. After 1830, the taste for exotic costumes among young people became so pervasive that visitors to Paris invariably commented on it as a central feature of the city’s cultural landscape. Frances Trollope, writing of Paris in 1835, repeatedly returns to the spectacle of the “jeune gens de Paris” (young people of Paris) who were visible everywhere and whose gestures were seen by everyone as “something great, terrible, volcanic, and sublime.” The theatricality of these costumes prompted another visitor in 1835 to comment, “One would have thought that certain of the newer plays had sent out their characters into the street.”
(From a longer piece of writing which I’m going quote in full under the cut :) )
This youth movement was actually really influential on Hugo’s early career - his groundbreaking play ‘Hernani’, which opened in Paris in 1830 (when he was 28) was met with a lot of opposition from Classicist critics, but enthusiastically supported and defended by the Romantics, to the extent that the ‘Battle of Hernani’ broke out in the audience during the performance, with the flamboyantly dressed Romantics literally scuffling/brawling with Classicist hecklers and detractors, causing the play to be interrupted several times. (Edwarddespard writes about it in the post linked above!)
So, anyway, the reason I’m posting is because I stumbled on a few passages in the chapter The Romantic Bohemian and the Performance of Melodrama in Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth Century Paris by Mary Gluck. There’s a bunch of cool (well, imo!) details in if you’re interested in this particular Jehan headcanon, and it’s a nice little exploration of 1820s/30s Romantic culture in general. Particularly interesting to me are the descriptions of the reaction of the bourgeoise to this emergent, publically bodacious youth culture (n.b. Rather Perplexed), and the fact that there’s a precedent dating back to the Barbus group of artists who rejected the neoclassical style and teachings of David (to whose studio they had formerly belonged), and who (wiki.fr) “chose an unconventional lifestyle, dressing in ancient Greek clothing that drew jeers from the crowd in the streets.”
One final thing before we delve in - among the many dumb books I’ve picked up over the last 8 or so months is the v. frustrating volume The French Romantics’ Knowledge of English Literature by Partridge - frustrating because it seems fascinating, yet packed with quotes from French writers in untranslated French and (to my eternal regret) I do not speak French. But! Here are a few interesting quotes not involving French giving a bit more insight into the Romantics’ Whole Medieval Thing. Walter Scott was a huge influence apparently?
Armans se Pontmartin fixed “la phase brilliante” of Scott’s vogue at 1820-1835 in a passage that must be quoted: -
'It was not a studious and curious group, passionately interested in a foreign literature: it was the whole of France, from the academician to the little provincial bourgeois, from the great lady to the grisette, which was alire for the stories by this Scotchman, more popular in our country than his own. He had taken possession of our drawing-rooms, our theatres, our studios, our exhibitions of painting. He coloured with his hues history and the novel; he extended his influence over the fantasies of fashion, over furniture, costumes and all the varieties of Middle-Ages bric-a-brac which dates from him. This was because the author of “Waverly” arrived at the right moment, for he suited wonderfully a period when our Romantic school was seeking its way, reviving the cult of the past. He was associated with a revolution that still maintained an aristocratic appearance; he gave us Romanticism in doses strong enough to satisfy our appetite, moderate enough not to frighten our forebears.
Andd here’s another quote from some guy (I forgot to note the author SORRY)
"History has been different in France since Scott became known. The ‘Picturesque School’ dates from that time. One is no longer an historian for having reflected on generalities… it is necessary to depict the men of bygone periods in the light of their thoughts, speech, actions, with their passions, costumes, countenances. To pretend that the ablest men of our epoch would not have arrived at that point without the compelling influence of the Scotch novelist, would be a piece of prospectus flattery; but how would the majority have become infatuated with the chronicles, how would they have thrown themselves into the Middle Ages, if they hadn’t been attracted by that vivacity of colour and that variety of characters of which Walter Scott seems to have found the secret?”
So far as I can recall, there aren’t any British poets/authors/thinkers listed among the People Prouvaire Is Into, so idk speculating about his thoughts on Scott’s influence might be interesting??
Okay anyway here’s the main essay :3c
Okay, this is a brick!question raised by my good friend (AnxietyIsFreedom over at AO3); what exactly is in the bottles we see being hurled at the National Guard by the cornered insurgents during the final storm on the Corinthe? As she says;
“This is more or less how all the translations I can remember reading describe the insurgents’ last stand (in ‘Close Quarters’):
Those were the last cartridges. When they had been fired, when these formidable men on the point of death had no longer either powder or ball, each grasped in his hands two of the bottles which Enjolras had reserved, and of which we have spoken, and held back the attack with these most fragile cudgels. They were bottles of brandy.
There is however apparently a translation which has:
When [the cartridges] were gone, when these terrible men in their death agony had no more powder or ball, each took two of those bottles reserved by Enjolras, of which we have spoken, and they defended the ascent with these frightfully fragile clubs. They were bottles of nitric acid.
… fuck, were they really?”
The passage is powerful either way, but it becomes much more powerful if we’re to believe that, like, the insurgents are literally raining acid down on the national guard below rather than, y’know, brandy. The sentence which follows is this;
We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred. The besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire did not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it
For which, as AIF again says;
“The level of defensiveness (….) makes me think that we as readers are meant to disapprove hugely of what’s happening or at least be vaguely shocked by it, and showering one’s enemies in broken glass and acid is exponentially more shocking than simply launching bottles of wine (or brandy???) at them in last-ditch desperation. If the former is premeditated, even more so.”
So: booze or acid?? Speculation abounds under the cut, and other thoughts/theories very much solicited!
No, it’s acid. Here’s Hapgood from Corinthe ch. 4, “An Attempt to Console the Widow Hucheloup”:
“The rain had ceased. Recruits had arrived. Workmen had brought under their blouses a barrel of powder, a basket containing bottles of vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket filled with fire-pots, “left over from the King’s festival.” This festival was very recent, having taken place on the 1st of May. It was said that these munitions came from a grocer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine named Pepin.”
Pépin, by the way, is a historical namedrop: this is the guy who was guillotined a few years later for helping to mastermind Fieschi’s plot to assassinate Louis-Philippe with an “infernal machine.”
As the originator of this query, I’m pleased both to have a definitive ruling on this and to note where the bottles of acid originally come from. Thank you!
Although I’m still attached to the idea of Enjolras somehow having the mystical ability to transform brandy into vitriol. Possibly just by glaring at it.
Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there was one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. This sceptic’s name was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything. - Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
Amidst all these false skeptics Rodolphe was the only one who dared to talk of love with some reverence, and when they had the misfortune to let him harp on this string, he would go on for an hour plaintively warbling elegies on the happiness of being loved, the deep blue of the peaceful lake, the song of the breeze, the harmony of the stars, etc., etc.- Scenes from the Latin Quarter, Henri Murger
So, I’m completely new to Scenes from the Latin Quarter (I hadn’t even watched Rent until a few weeks ago!), and have yet to actually embark on a cover-to-cover readthrough, but… is this a thing? Is Hugo inverting the idea of a lone idealist amid a gang of young cynics (Rodolphe) in his imagining of Grantaire as a lone cynic amid a gang of young idealists? I really haven’t read much of Scenes from the Latin Quarter at all (literally just flipping through, picking out a passage or two here or there), so don’t know much about Rodolphe as a character (like, I remember his counterpart in Rent but don’t actually remember what happens to him?), or his group of friends generally, but I get the impression that the idea of love, in a romantic sense, is the focus of their cynicism/Rodolphe’s idealism, rather than… revolutionary politics, social justice & advancement and the human capacity for goodness. It’s interesting that Rodolphe’s friends are described as ‘false skeptics’, too… reminiscent of Grantaire’s ‘trying very hard not to believe in anything’., kind of?
… I’m just doodling, really; I need to actually sit down and read the book and find out about the characters I guess, but it seems like a bit of a parallel to me? Ho and hum.
(Here’s the French - the wordings are similar but not identical?
Parmi tous ces cœurs passionnés et tous ces esprits convaincus, il y avait un sceptique. Comment se trouvait-il là? Par juxtaposition. Ce sceptique s’appelait Grantaire, et signait habituellement de ce rébus: R. Grantaire était un homme qui se gardait bien de croire à quelque chose.-Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
Au milieu de tous ces faux sceptiques, Rodolphe était le seul qui osât parler avec quelque révérence de l’amour; et quand on avait le malheur de lui laisser prendre cette corde, il en avait pour une heure à roucouler des élégies sur le bonheur d’être aimé, l’azur du lac paisible, chanson de la brise, concert d’étoiles, etc, - Scenes from the Latin Quarter, Henri Murger
hrm!)
Okay, my copy of 'the Wretched' should be arriving today, and I'm kind of fascinated to see whether or not i. 'the canard thing', or ii. 'the flesh of a chicken' thing have been picked up by the translator - of all the meta I've produced, those are the two most blatant instances of 'yeah, no, Hugo is Doing A Thing here and it's been skimmed over' that I've personally noticed so far. We'll see!
Grantaire’s Preliminary Gayeties speech, taken from Hugo’s handwritten manuscript (found here). He made some fairly hefty revisions while writing out this draft - the first section of the speech originally had the ”On s’y évertue, on s’y destitue, on s’y prostitue, on s’y tue, on s’y habitue!" line that now closes the speech, and the "Oh what eagles! I have the flesh of a chicken.” line appears to have been added as an afterthought!
I’m almost certain there’s a bunch more fascinating stuff to be found in there, especially in the crossed out parts, but my limited french (and Hugo’s slightly illegible handwriting) are kind of hampering me at the moment. If any French speakers would be interested in doing some linguistic detective work with me on this that. would. be. rad. Otherwise, enjoy!
(eta: *most* of the french is word for word how it exists in the published text, but some of the crossed out stuff looks different so that's what I'm dying to get translated :) )
Here’s a resource for anyone tired of relying on Hapgood’s slightly haphazard translation of Les Mis for their analysis of Grantaire’s big Preliminary Gaieties rant - beneath the cut are the Rose, Fahnestock & MacAfee, Denny, Wraxall, Hapgood and Lee translations of his speech written up in full, plus the original French text (scabbed from the Intratext website - I also checked here and here, and there don’t seem to be any variations in those different French editions) and something I always find useful - a copy of Google Translation’s interpretation of the original French (v. helpful for spotting puns). Yes, this all took me a while. Something I noticed while typing up that I’d utterly missed before - the French line:
Et il paraît qu’ils vont se battre, tous ces imbéciles, se faire casser le profil, se massacrer, en plein été, au mois de prairial, quand ils pourraient s’en aller, avec une créature sous le bras, respirer dans les champs l’immense tasse de thé des foins coupés ! Vraiment, on fait trop de sottises
Translates in some versions as
And it seems they’re going to fight, all these half-wits, bash each other’s heads in, slaughter each other, in the middle of summer, in the month of Prairial, when they could be going off to the countryside with some luscious creature on their arm to breath in that great cup of tea of freshly mown hay! They really are too silly for words.
GREAT CUP OF TEA OF FRESHLY MOWN HAY WHAT. Is he implying that the scent of hay is as refreshing as a nice cup of tea or something? Google doesn’t seem to think ‘tasse de thé des’ is slang for anything, so no hilarious double entendres here (more’s the pity~) - unless it’s some kind of pun?
Anyway, here y’go:
Rose
“Erk! I’ve just swallowed a bad oyster. looks like my hypochondria’s back. The oysters are off, the servants are dogs. How I hate the human race. I was in the rue Richelieu just now and i went past the big public library. That great mound of oyster shells they call a library - it makes me sick just thinking about it. All that paper! All that ink! All that scribbling! Someone wrote all that! What moron once said that man was a biped without feathers? And then I ran into a pretty girl I know, lovely as springtime, a girl worthy of being called Floréal, and she was delighted, overjoyed, delirious, in seventh heaven, the poor silly goose, because yesterday some ghastly banker, pitted with smallpox, deigned to fancy her! Alas! A woman watches the quack treating her as keenly as her case of thrush; cats chase mice as well as birds. This little madam, not even two months ago, was sitting pretty in a garret, fitting the little copper rings in the eyeholes of corsets, what do you call those things? She sewed, she slept on a camp bed, she lived with a flowerpot for company, she was content. Now she’s a lady banker. The transformation happened overnight. I met the victim this morning, jubilant. The awful part of it is that the brazen hussy was just as pretty today as she was yesterday. Her financier didn’t show on her face. Roses are better or worse than women in that you can see when the grubs have been attacking them. Ah, there is no morality on this earth. I call as my witness the myrtle, symbol of love, the laurel, symbol of war, the olive, that ninny, symbol of peace, the apple that nearly choked Adam with its pips, and the fig leaf, ancestor of the petticoat. As to justice, do you want to know what justice is? The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome defends Clusium and asks them what wrong Clusium has done to them. Brennus replies: “The wrong Alba did to you, the wrong Fidenae did to you, the wrong the Aequi, the Volsci, and the Sabines did to you. They were your neighbours. The Clusians are ours. We understand neighbourliness the same way you do. You stole Alba, we are taking Clusium.” Rome says: ‘You will not take Clusium.’ Brennus took Rome. Then he cried: ‘Vae victis!’ ‘Woe to the vanquished! That’s what justice is! Ah, in this world, there are only beasts of prey! only eagles! only eagles! It makes my skin crawl.
"From the moment when M. Esquiros is your friend, as he is mine, you cannot fail to produce an excellent work, having for guide and counsellor that great and noble mind"
- and some interesting contemporary reviews, too. N.b. I came across this while trying to find an online version of Wraxall’s translation, but am not getting very far to that end - can anyone help? (Wilbour would be nice too)
So here’s a thing - spot the difference:
Fahnestock and MacAfee:
Yes, I have the spleen, in addition to melancholy, with nostalgia, plus hypochondria, and I sneer, and I rage, and I yawn, and I’m tired, and I’m bored, and I’m tormented! Let God go to the Devil!
Wilbour:
Yes, I have the spleen, in addition to melancholy, with nostalgia, besides hypochondria, and I sneer, and I rage, and I yawn, and I am tired, and I am knocked in the head, and I am tormented! Let God go to the Devil!”
vs.
Rose
"Of course, I’m suffering from spleen, complicated with melancholy, nostalgia, plus hypochondria, and I rant and rage and yawn and bore myself, I bore myself to tears, I bore myself to death! God can go to hell!”
Denny
“Yes, I am suffering from spleen, complicated by melancholy, nostalgia and hypochondria, and rant and rage and splutter and bore and irritate myself, and may God go to the devil.”
(Thankyou to pilferingapples and notquitelostnotquitefound for help with looking up translations!)
This is something I’ve been wondering about for a while - it’s a line that comes at the end of Grantaire’s first big rant in the the chapter ‘The Back Room of the Café Musain’ (Vol. 3, Book 4, Chap 4). Grantaire is rolling drunk in this scene, and the line comes just after he lunges at Louison the serving maid and has to be pulled away by Bossuet. R snaps at B, telling him to get his hands off him, begins to list everything that’s wrong with humanity (Man is wicked, man is deformed), then just kind of miserably deteriorates into self loathing, coming out with this list of what almost seem to be ‘excuses’ for his gross, obnoxious behaviour (of COURSE I’m behaving like an asshole, what did you EXPECT, it’s ME, I’m a depressed, ranting, spluttering, hateful LOSER, this is what you GET if you choose to hang out with me, I don’t know why you even BOTHER etc etc etc). As (non) apologies go this is a particularly aggravating variety - you’re not *really* admitting responsibility or culpability for your actions, and furthermore you’re placing your own self pitying fees over the legitimate ones of those you’ve wronged (Louison) or upset (Bossuet and the others). With that said, it’s also a really classic pattern of thinking for depressives to fall into - believing you’re an intrinsically, irrevocably flawed human being, so there’s no *point* in trying to make better of yourself because it won’t work because you’re too much of a wreck and beyond improvement, blah blah blah self-fulfilling prophecy repeat til fade :/ :/)
What i’m curious about, though, is the different ways some of the translators have chosen to interpret the line, specifically the bit about being ‘bored’ vs ‘boring himself’. This is about the most direct insight into R’s perception of himself - and his baseline self loathing - that we get in the brick, but the different translations affect the weight of the line slightly -
“I rant, I rage, I splutter, I’m bored, I’m irritated,”
speaks a little differently of Grantaire’s ~inner turmoil~ than
“I rant, I rage, I splutter, I bore and I irritate myself”
In the first one he’s still kinda blaming the world around him for some of his actions (LIFE IS SO BORING AND UNSTIMULATING BLAH BLAH ENNUI ENNUI OF COURSE I ACT OUT), but the second one is pure self-loathing (UGH GOD I HATE MYSELF I CAN’T STAND TO HEAR MYSELF SPEAK I’M SUCH A MESS/WRECK/BLAH SELF PITY). The first reads more like an excuse to me, the second more of an apology (though again, not a particularly helpful one - but very blinkers-of-depression-y & relatable if you’ve ever ‘been there’ yourself).
So, which meaning was Hugo shooting for in the original text? That isn’t rhetorical, I honestly don’t know - here’s the French:
“Oui, j’ai le spleen, compliqué de la mélancolie, avec la nostalgie, plus l’hypocondrie, et je bisque, et je rage, et je bâille, et je m’ennuie, et je m’assomme, et je m’embête ! Que Dieu aille au diable !”
Google translate gives me this:
Yes, I have the spleen, complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and I bisque, and I rage, and I yawn, and I’m bored, and I knock, and I ‘m bother! God can go to hell!
Which would suggest ‘I’m bored’ rather than ‘I bore myself’ but, uh, obviously it has its limitations as a translation tool… does anyone have any better insight? Super curious to know whether Grantaire is literally tired of the sound of his own voice or simply ~bored with the world~. Both are consistent with his character, I think (though the first gives me more ;-; r feels so I’m kinda holding out for that one!)
Just finally, here’s Wraxall’s take on the line (ty again pilf!) - a little different to the others:
“Yes, I have the spleen, complicated with melancholy, homesickness, and a dash of hypochondria; and I rage, and I yawn, and I am killing myself, I make myself horribly dull.”
So, like, Grantaire’s calling himself boring rather than stating that he bores himself? Which is kinda almost the same, but not quite. Also, I’m not sure where Wraxall got ‘Killing myself’ from?! mean on the one hand… yeah, accurate :/.. but on the other, I don’t think there’s a basis for that in the Acshul Original French. Oh Wraxall, etc.
So I think I’ve spotted Hugo playing with real bird/domestic poultry imagery again, this time to make a point about sublime men and mundane men - and focusing on two characte/Rs in particular.
(Fair warning, the following contains over 7000 words of meta about e/R and a tragically overlooked pun about chickens! There’s a bullet pointed summary at the end if you just want the cliff’s notes c:)
Ahaha I just spotted another dick joke in Preliminary Gaieties~ :3
What you lot call ‘progress’ runs on two engines, people and events. But the sad thing is that, from time to time, something exceptional is called for. For events as for people, the stock company’s not enough; there have to be geniuses among people, and among events, revolutions. Great accidents are the rule, the nature of things can’t do without them, and going on the way comets appear, you could be forgiven for thinking that heaven itself needs star attractions. The moment you least expect it, God plasters a meteor across the wall of the firmament. Some bizarre star shoots out, emphasised by an enormous tail. And that’s the reason Caesar dies. Brutus strikes him with a knife and God strikes him with a comet. Hey presto! Up pops an aurora borealis, up pops a revolution, up pops a great man; ‘93 in big letters, Napoléon in the starring role, the comet of 1811 at the top of the bill - Grantaire, Preliminary Gaieties.(Rose translation)
Again for exposition: this is an excerpt from Grantaire’s ranting speech to Joly and Bossuet in the first floor of the Corinthe wineshop on the morning of Lamarque’s funeral. We’re into the ‘God is bankrupt’ phase of his rant, where he argues that the fact that revolutions occur at all proves that God is incompetent, and that the fate of the universe has slipped beyond his control - God has to call on human beings to attempt to change the course of events, because he lacks the power to intervene directly.
In this particular passage, Grantaire is snarking about the popular belief that celestial phenomena are sometimes sent as ‘messages’ by God - he refers specifically to Caesar’s Comet of 44BC, which was an exceptionally bright comet believed to have been sent to signify the deification of the recently dead emperor, and also to the Great Comet (‘Napoleon’s Comet’) of 1811, believed by some to have portended Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Grantaire accepts that God does have a hand in producing these apparitions, but sees them as ‘smoke and mirrors’ theatrics intended to persuade us that particular men are great, or that particular events are fated, rather than legitimate evidence of divine authority. God is a showman who needs to convince us that his ‘star players’ are important, because he has no other way of influencing destiny than through their actions - so, Grantaire argues, he uses the heavens as billboards and celestial phenomena as advertising flyers - cheerleading, basically, with the aim of persuading the general populace to latch onto one of these ‘great’ men, or throw their support behind a given social movement or military campaign, and in this way - hopefully - alter the course of human history to God’s own satisfaction. Grantaire is incredibly scathing of both God - for having to resort such cheap tricks - and humanity in general, for falling for them. (His ‘badaud’ condemnation comes a few lines later).
So: dick joke? Here’s the key line:
“The moment you least expect it, God plasters a meteor across the wall of the firmament. Some bizarre star shoots out, emphasised by an enormous tail.”
In French:
“Au moment où l’on s’y attend le moins, Dieu placarde un météore sur la muraille du firmament. Quelque étoile bizarre survient, soulignée par une queue énorme.”
If you google “une queue énorme”, the first links which come up are porn sites - that’s because ‘queue’, which ordinarily means ‘tail’, is also a slang word for penis along the lines of dick/cock/etc. So, “Un queue énorme” is a slangy way of saying “a big dick” - meaning Grantaire’s line can be interpreted in two different ways:
“Some bizarre comet appears, distinguished by its long tail.”
“Some bizarre actor appears, distinguished by his massive cock.”
The word ‘étoile’ has the same dual meaning in french that it does in english - a ‘star’ can be of the sky or of the stage - so this ostensibly puerile bit of wordplay is actually (imo, at least) relatively sophisticated linguistically-speaking, in that it manages to draw together quite neatly the different themes Grantaire has been playing around with so far. The heavens are the billboards God-the-showman uses to muster up support for his ‘star players’, and comets are the equivalent of the dazzling billboard flyers he plasters there to command our attention in the direction of these ‘great men’.
If anyone’s interested, here’s the extended passage from the original french - it’s perfectly possible (probable, even!) that there are even more penis/actor/comet/whatnot punnes going on in here that I’ve completely missed, so yeah - cast your eye and see if you can spot any more dickishness?
“À sa place, je serais plus simple, je ne remonterais pas à chaque instant ma mécanique, je mènerais le genre humain rondement, je tricoterais les faits maille à maille sans casser le fil, je n’aurais point d’en-cas, je n’aurais pas de répertoire extraordinaire. Ce que vous autres appelez le progrès marche par deux moteurs, les hommes et les événements. Mais, chose triste, de temps en temps, l’exceptionnel est nécessaire. Pour les événements comme pour les hommes, la troupe ordinaire ne suffit pas; il faut parmi les hommes des génies, et parmi les événements des révolutions. Les grands accidents sont la loi; l’ordre des choses ne peut s’en passer; et, à voir les apparitions de comètes, on serait tenté de croire que le ciel lui-même a besoin d’acteurs en représentation. Au moment où l’on s’y attend le moins, Dieu placarde un météore sur la muraille du firmament. Quelque étoile bizarre survient, soulignée par une queue énorme. Et cela fait mourir César. Brutus lui donne un coup de couteau, et Dieu un coup de comète. Crac, voilà une aurore boréale, voilà une révolution, voilà un grand homme; 93 en grosses lettres, Napoléon en vedette, la comète de 1811 au haut de l’affiche. Ah! la belle affiche bleue, toute constellée de flamboiements inattendus! Boum! boum! spectacle extraordinaire. Levez les yeux, badauds. Tout est échevelé, l’astre comme le drame.”
BOOBIES.
Right; as most of you know, the lulzy word ‘booby’ comes up quite a few times (seven) in Hapgood’s translation of Les Misérables. ‘Booby’ has a couple of different meanings in English, one of which is ‘idiot’ and another of which is ‘ridiculous looking species of pelican’. Pelicans are a little bit relevant to my interests at the moment (sup saintjustified!), so I was idly wondering whether there was any chance that the French word for ‘Booby’ (as in ‘idiot’) has the dual meaning of ‘pelican’ that it does in English. Turns out (unsurprisingly tbh) that it doesn’t - but in my nerding I did learn something new about a line in Grantaire’s final Corinthe!rant! (and picking through Grantaire’s final Corinthe!rant is like my favourite hobby so this was very exciting).
Although Hapgood uses ‘booby/ies’ seven times in her translation, she isn’t actually using it to translate the same word each time - in fact there are six different words she interprets as ‘booby/ies’; ‘bêta’, ‘cruche’, ‘jobards’, ‘dadais’, ‘niais' and 'badauds' - all of which have subtly different shades of meaning which are certainly not encompassed by the word 'booby'. Fahnestock & McAfee are a little more inventive, using a broader range of vocabulary to translate the different words, but they still don’t capture the nuances perfectly imo. Here, have a horrendously nerdy table to compare all these boobies (ugh I just realised I put Denny when I mean F & McA, pls excuse)
All interesting (right? :c), but there are two words I’d like to dwell on a little bit.
i. ‘Dadais’ (used dismissively by Thénardier/’Jondrette’ to describe Marius) specifically means ‘clumsy child/awkward youth’ - much narrower, semantically, than ‘Booby’ or ‘dolt’ and (lbr) more directly applicable to Marius, especially at this moment in the book - Marius is living in the Gorbeau tenement, mostly preoccupied with moonmooning about Cosette (‘Ursula’) and listening to his neighbours through walls. N.b he is listening to the Jondrettes at the time that he is described as a ‘Dadais’, so there’s some more sad-potato fodder if you are in need of such.
ii. More intriguing to me, though, is Grantaire’s use of 'Badaud' in his final ‘Grand Rant’ to Joly and Bossuet while drinking in the Corinthé on the morning of the insurrection. Badaud is a very specific, peculiarly Parisian term, which is (according to wiki)
“An important urban type from 18th and 19th-century French literature (…) and has the basic meaning of “gawker”, or more neutrally, “bystander”. The term usually carries the connotation of idle curiosity, gullibility, simpleminded foolishness and gaping ignorance (…) The term came frequently to describe the crowds that gathered in the street at any remarkable sight. From the 17th century and after, the term was associated with Parisians.”
Here’s a definition from the Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Siècle (1867 - remember, LM was published in 1864)
“The badaud is curious; he is astonished by everything he sees; he believes everything he hears, and he shows his contentment or his surprise by his open, gaping mouth.”
Grantaire uses the word in the middle of an impassioned rant in which he argues that, among other things;
- Progress is an illusion
- Revolution achieves nothing - history moves in circles (literally ‘revolves’), and society ends up exactly where it began
- Humanity has been hoodwinked into believing in pattern, purpose and providence by a God who is, in reality, utterly incompetent and who has lost control of fate/events/the world/the universe/everything.
Grantaire rages about God - he compares him to a merchant who is falling bankrupt but still throws extravagant balls to ‘keep up appearances’ in society; he sees the world as threadbare and literally falling apart at the seams (there are ‘spots on the sun’ and ‘holes in the moon’; the dewdrops on grass are ‘fake pearls’, the beautiful colours of sunrise are ‘tattered’). God’s machinery is always failing (and fff there’s a whole nother post to be written about this, but just remember whenever R talks about cogs/machinery etc that this is all taking place during the Industrial Revolution~), and when the cogs grind to a halt (stop revolving if u will) God throws up his hands and sanctions another revolution to ‘grease the wheels’ - again; God is incompetent, and has to rely on men to literally do his dirty work for him. If God were competent, he could easily solve the world’s ills on his own - he would not need to call on men to try and force the hand of fate through revolution.
In addition to God, though, Grantaire also directs a lot of his anger - or frustration, perhaps more accurately - towards human beings; to the thronging masses who delude themselves that God is in control of anything, let alone fate; that there is such a thing as providence; that there is glory or worth to be found in revolution; that revolution plays any part in progress - that there is such a thing as progress. The stars are tarnished, the sky is bleached out, the fabric of the universe is literally wearing thin and God is losing his grip - and it is driving Grantaire crazy that nobody else around him seems to notice. It isn’t that the Emperor has no clothes, it’s that the Emperor’s clothes are threadbare (napoleon in rags is what im saying)
Anyone who thinks Grantaire is indifferent to the world around him needs to read his final speech until their eyes bleed, these lines in particular;
“To see so much discomfort above and below, so much pettiness and meanness and stinginess and distress in the heavens and on the earth, from the bird without a grain of millet to myself who hasn’t a hundred thousand livres of income, to see human destiny, much worn out, and even royal destiny, which is showing through to the warp (…) to see so much misery everywhere, I suspect God is not rich.”
I mean lol he is still trollan’ with the ‘hundred thousand livres’ comment, but even so; Grantaire is just as attuned to the suffering around him as the rest of the amis, he just doesn’t see revolution as the solution because there isn’t a solution - the universe is bankrupt to the core, and always will be, so why not spend your summer days rolling in the hay with a pretty girl and making the most of it that you can…?
…Back to boobies. Grantaire uses the word ‘badaud’ once, mid rant, when he is making a point about comets and the popular belief that they herald significant historical events;
"What you fellows call progress moves by two motors, men and events. But, sad to say, from time to time the exceptional is necessary. For events as well as for men, the stock company is not enough; you need a few geniuses among the men, and revolutions among events. Great accidents are the law; the order of things cannot get along without them; and, seeing a comet, one would be tempted to believe that Heaven itself is in need of star actors. At the moment you least expect it, God placards a meteor on the wall of the firmament. Some strange star comes along, underlined by an enormous tail. And that makes Caesar die. Brutus strikes him with a knife, and God with a comet. Snap, there’s an aurora borealis, there’s a revolution, there’s a great man; ‘Ninety-three in big letters. Starring Napoleon, the comet of 1811 at the top of the poster. Ah! The beautiful poster, all studded with unexpected flourishes! Boom! Boom! Extraordinary spectacle. Look up, loungers. Everything’s disheveled, the star as well as the drama. Good God, it’s too much, and it’s not enough. These emergency resources seem magnificence and are poverty.” - Fahnestock & McAfee
Grantaire uses a lot of theatrical imagery here - comets are ‘actors’ and celestial events are theatre posters pasted up by God to be gawped at by man; the sky erupts into a light show, humanity stirs into action, too dazzled to see that the theatre itself is shabby and ‘disheveled’….
(Like just a little aside but
- note that Grantaire called Bossuet out just a few moments earlier for wearing a threadbare jacket with a hole in the elbow
- note also that in his first big rant at the Musain he throws out his “there are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes’ cloak” line, which I’ve talked about a little here and here.
- note also also that this calls back to the Bishop of Digne who is specifically described as wearing his cassocks until they are threadbare {note also also also that Marius too wears his clothes until they fall to holes}
- Grantaire has a lot of thoughts/feels about the facade of ‘virtue’, the hypocrisy and pointlessness of self-imposed poverty, penance/martyrdom/mortification (“Don’t talk about monks, it makes me want to scratch,” is a reference to hairshirts) and the bankruptcy of the world, both morally and otherwise - and apparently he likes to use fabric metaphors!)
… BACK TO BOOBIES THO; the line that we’re interested in is “Levez les yeux, badauds” in the original French, translated by F & McA to “Look up, loungers,” by Hapgood to “Raise your eyes, boobies,” and by Denny - in a rather inspired move, and this is why I will always stan for Denny - “Watch out, you groundlings.” (Like, groundling doesn’t really mean the same thing as ‘badaud’, and refers to Londoners rather than Parisians, but it DOES work pretty well in context and, while not exactly what Hugo/Grantaire was going for, is at least a little cleverer and more evocative than ‘Boobies’).
Oh my god this got so long let’s have a cut
Duck, Duck, Noose: On Crime, Canardiers, Combeferre, and That Whole Duck Thing (Part One)
“A theatre poster presented itself, adorned with the title of a tragedy from the ancient repertory called classic: “Down with tragedy dear to the bourgeois!” cried Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply:—
"You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and the bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score. Bewigged tragedy has a reason for its existence, and I am not one of those who, by order of AEschylus, contest its right to existence. There are rough outlines in nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies; a beak which is not a beak, wings which are not wings, gills which are not gills, paws which are not paws, a cry of pain which arouses a desire to laugh, there is the duck. Now, since poultry exists by the side of the bird, I do not see why classic tragedy should not exist in the face of antique tragedy."” - Les Misérables, Hapgood translation.
“A theatre poster, announcing a new production of a stock reperatory ‘classic’ came up for discussion, and Bahorel exclaimed, ‘To hell with these old bourgeois tragedies!,’ to which Combeferre replied:
‘You’re wrong, Bahorel! The bourgeoisie adore tragedies and they must be allowed to go on doing so. Costume-drama has its place in the scheme of things, and I am not one of those who in the name of Aeschylus deny it the right to exist. Nature contains its abortions, and its self-parodies. Take a beak that isn’t a beak, wings that aren’t wings, fins that aren’t fins, paws that aren’t paws, agonised squawks that make you want to laugh, and you have a duck. But if domestic poultry can exist side by side with real birds I see no reason why our “classic” tragedy should not exist side by side with the antique’” - Les Misérables, Denny translation.
So, a question came up on pilferingapples’ tumblr about Combeferre and ducks, referencing that weird bit in Astonishment of Marius where Bahorel makes a comment about a theatre poster and Combeferre suddenly starts talking about ducks. Ihaveleftisthoughts replied to point out that Hugo is actually making a pun, because the French for duck is canard, which has a double meaning of ‘false rumour’. So I read that, and was like ‘Oh, interesting!”, and didn’t think anything more of it - then like five minutes later, when I was checking my emails, the thought suddenly struck me that like wait
canards
haven’t I just been reading about canards :o
like isn’t the book I literally just put down and that is literally sitting right here on the table beside me literally all about canards :o :o
could this be what this pun is about :o :o :o
And so I checked and oh my god it actually is! AND NOW I FEEL LIKE A DETECTIVE :D :D :D
So, here’s the thing; canard doesn’t just mean duck, and it doesn’t just mean lie/false rumour; it’s also the word for a very specific form of Parisian pamphlet literature. Here’s Thomas Cragin in the book I’ve been reading (Murder in Parisian Streets: Manufacturing Crime and Justice in the Popular Press, 1830-1900);
“Parisians gathered around the news peddlers that late spring to discover the details of (a murder) that was briefly the talk of the French capital. The peddlers cried out the headlines, gathering crowds, and began to sing their crime report songs. Passersby stopped to listen, recognising popular old tunes with horrific new words. Many sang along and all got a better glance at the news sheets that the peddlers sold, called canards. These particular canards in May of 1835 recounted the workers’ disgust at their discovery of the body, described the wrappings in which it was found, chronicled the police investigation and the victim’s life story, and described her murderer’s arrest. Parisians gawked at the canards’ engravings showing the criminals hacking and sawing the victim’s body. Reading through the summary at the top of the page, they might have asked the peddler questions about the crime. Printed in both small booklet and poster formats, the canards were designed to meet and stimulate the public’s interests.”
In their simplest terms Canards were news-sheets, reporting crimes - murders in particular - and discussing trials, investigations and so on; sold by peddlers throughout the streets of Paris and read by citizens in their thousands (literally millions sold in the 19thC alone). However, they were also a form of public entertainment, combining crime reporting, horror writing, oral tradition/balladry, street performance and - importantly, in light of Combeferre’s remarks - theatre. Most canards contained two main written elements; the narrative - the crime report and commentary - and then the ballad or ‘complainte’; a song about the reported crimes with new lyrics set to a traditional melody. The peddlers, or canardiers would market their canards through street performance -
“Peddlers did not merely sell canards - they were public performers, recounting crime stories and filling Parisian streets with murder ballads”
“Peddlers transformed the canard from a silent, but visually stimulating text, to the very audible centrepiece of a street show. Not merely crying headlines the portepaniers and contre-porteux of Paris would play violins or guitars, or sometimes beat drums to attract an audience. Having drawn a crowd, the peddler typically mounted a pedestal and explained the news report in brief (…) the peddler then burst into song, singing the ballads (…) Pointing to the relevant images on poster-sized canards, the peddler sang the entire complainte.”
The complaintes were written in rhyming couplets/verses, made extensive use of puns and could often be quite bawdy and humourous. Cragin again;
“In 1835, Parisians bought canards and sang their ballads detailing, among many other subjects, the fire that burned the Theatre de la Gaite, the fighting in North Africa, Gros’ suicide (…) and the most notable of all in terms of its coverage, the assassination attempt on the life of King Louis Philippe and the arrest, trial and punishment of his would-be assassin, FIeschi. It is certainly hard for us to take seriously as journalists these popular newsmongers searching for just the right word or phrase that would convey a humorous or dramatic double meaning and still rhyme with Fieschi.” (n.b. I’d argue that Cragin ignores the existing pun culture in the modern British tabloid press here, but that’s a sidetrack!)
Similarly, the narrative itself was intended to be informative, but also to entertain and thrill. The writing style was incredibly melodramatic - criminals were ‘monsters’, ‘demons’, ‘beasts’, ‘savages’, ‘wolves’, ‘wallowing in the blood’ of their victims (who were ‘pious’, ‘frail’, ‘angelic’, ‘innocent’ etc - when they weren’t being fallen women, of course!). Canards thrived on gory details - very elaborate (and dubiously sourced!) descriptions of the anguish, agony and terror of the victim; the bludgeoning and bloodspattering and innard spilling, the pain (always quantified; ‘horrible’, ‘unspeakable’, ‘immeasurable’, ‘profound’, ‘extraordinary), the writhing, the ‘eyes trembling in death’ and so on (and then equally evocative descriptions of criminal executions,. The structural composition, too, mirrored that of narrative fiction more than fact-based journalistic reporting - suspenseful holding back of key facts and details for dramatic effect. Basically, as Cragin surmises -
“The canards’ representation of crime created a form of popular theatre.”
- which means that it makes absolute sense for Combeferre to refer to them in his smack-down of Bahorel’s expression of contempt for actual popular theatre :D
Before I go into what I think Hugo/Combeferre were actually getting at with this metaphor, here’s the couple of paragraphs preceding this exchange;
“The next day (Courfeyrac) took Marius to the Café Musain. Murmuring with a smile, ‘I must introduce you to the revolution,’ he led him into the back room used by the ABC Society and presented him to his friends with the single word, ‘A novice’.
Marius had fallen into a hornet’s nest of lively minds (…) being a solitary both by force of circumstances and inclination, and given to self-communion, he was at first somewhat dismayed by the tumult with which these young men assailed him, the hubbub of outspoken, unbridled thoughts, some so remote from his own thinking that he could not grasp them. He heard philosophy, literature, art, history and religion discussed in terms that were quite new to him. New vistas were opened up, and since he could not get them in any perspective he was not sure that they were not visions of chaos. When he discarded his grandfather’s views in favour of those of his father he had thought that his mind was made up; but now, in some peturbation and without wholly admitting it to himself, he began to suspect that this was not the case. His whole outlook began again to change; all his previous notions were called into question in a process of internal upheaval that he found almost painful. It seemed that his new friends held nothing sacred. No matter what the subject, it gave rise to forthright language that was disconcerting to his still-timid mind.”
So, Hugo is presenting the Bahorel/Combeferre theatre/duck (canard) exchange as something that is intimidating to Marius. It’s an example of outspoken, political young minds working quickly; of wit, rhetoric and reason being used to challenge social, political and ideological assertions and hold them directly to account. The chapter is also framed around references to Napoleon - in the second paragraph of the chapter (so, prior to the canard exchange), there’s
“But one morning Courfeyrac did put a question to Marius. He asked abruptly:
‘By the way, have you any political views?’
‘Of course,’ said Marius, slightly ruffled.
‘Well, what are you?’
‘I’m a Bonapartist democrat.’
‘A wary compromise*,’ commented Courfeyrac.”
.. and then the final paragraph of the chapter;
“None of the young men ever used the word ‘Emperor’. Jean Prouvaire occasionally referred to Napoleon; the others all called him Bonaparte. Enjolras pronounced it: Buonoparte.”
(*N.b. that’s from the Denny translation; the Hapgood translation has “The gray hue of a reassured rat,” instead, which I’m assuming is more faithful to Hugo’s original French. Lol Denny, water u doin, etc :c)
So. Hugo has framed the exchange as being pretty significant, both to us (it’s a showcase of sorts; he’s spent 11 pages telling us how remarkable these young men are and here’s our first glimpse of them in action) and to Marius (establishing how out of water~ the poor duck~ feels when confronted with the attitude and ideologies of the ABC). The canard put-down is - IMO - supposed to strike us as astonishingly quick-witted, sophisticated, multi-faceted and impressive - and it is, like I don’t think I’m ~reaching when I say Combeferre is making a number of quite subtle points in this relatively short pronouncement - but instead literally all of its nuances have been lost in translation and it just comes across as this astonishingly weird dude talking about ducks outta nowhere and it’s a shame because there is seriously so much going on there :c. Like, at very least I think Combeferre is, in his use of the canard metaphor
i. chiding Bahorel for his snobbery
ii. chiding Bahorel for tacitly advocating theatre restriction and censorship {and, in doing so, accidentally expressing Bonapartist sentiments},
iii. drawing parallels between the melodrama of the theatre and the melodrama of canards in their social tradition (and here’s a fuller quote on that from Cragin;
“While a close reading of these texts reveals the canards’ popularisation of social mores, one is more overwhelmed by the genre’s self-conscious attempt to entertain its readers. Above all, the news genre created a melodramatic rendering of victimisation, enhancing the emotional reading of crime news. The canards made such a reading explicit, calling their reports drames de vie - literally, dramas of life (and death). (..) The reports treatment of victims, like their monstrafication of criminals, contained all the elements of popular melodrama. At times the canards made explicit connections between news and theatrical performance. After Edmond Couty tricked his victim into poisoning herself, and as she died her agnoising death, the 1864 complainte stated. “The curtain falls.. on this part of the play. One need only consider the myriad of fictitious details invented by canardiers to glimpse the connection between their products and popular melodrama (…) news reporting was itself a creative dramatic art, though its contemporaries may not have recoginsed its fictitious content. Whereas one might at first suspect that canardiers copied popular dramatic structures or techniques, theater critics of the nineteenth century suggested the inverse relationship. They proposed that French dramatists probably imitated the dramatic structures they found in news reporting. The canards’ representation of crime created a form of popular theatre.”
iv. drawing parallels between theatre and press censorship, and the historical use of each as a political tool of oppression
v. (implicitly) suggesting that freedom of expression and freedom of will are fundamental to ‘liberty’, and that bourgeois plays and popular crime news sheets have their “place in the scheme of things”, whether or not men like e.g. Bahorel find them base/boring/low-brow (‘domestic poultry’) or venerable/high-brow (‘real birds’) and that trying to impose arbitrary judgements like that on the ~populace at large~ is, like, actual literal tyranny dude.
vi. making a couple of broader philosophical points maybe which I need to think through and get the wording right on :X BUT WILL COME BACK TO
v. making an amazing duck pun trololol :3
So! I’ll come back to this because gosh it’s interesting - like, I can’t emphasise enough how much theatre censorship was used as a political tool, of both suppression and propaganda, during the various revolutions/restorations and regime changes from the Ancien Régime onwards, and there are direct parallels with the press censorships taking place throughout the same period - and the amis would be absolutely fluent and conversant on those issues, which is why Combeferre would be able to use that kind of irreverent shorthand to express; ‘Lol Bahorel I know you’re just being flippant but would you pls listen to what you’re actually saying u sound like a Bonapartist rn, what r u going to start sanctioning the free press now too huh just because u find canards in bad taste, Bahorel pls, PS DUCKS LOL’. Or, uh, something.
(And quickly on bourgeois snobbery; so there is an etymological thread that links ducks, false rumours/lies and nineteenth-century Parisian crime news sheets and it’s this; ‘Canard’ came to mean ‘lie’ because of the trick some mother ducks will do to distract predators from their offspring - luring the predator away from the nest by pretending to have a broken wing. Then, as Cragin explains, the term was adopted to describe these news-sheets because;
“The term canard identified the genre’s reader in a pejorative stereotype (…) the genre’s lies were only fit for those too foolish to believe them - the uneducated lower classes with lowbrow tastes and little money”
Canard is an explicitly snobby, elitist term, and it’s the same kind of ‘highbrow vs lowbrow’ snobbery Bahorel is exhibiting, so again Combeferre’s just kind of hammering home that Bahorel is being a gross snob about this and could he please stop.
(btw lol I don’t mean to be a downer on Bahorel because this is obviously just a throwaway remark that Combeferre is pouncing on deliberately and running as an excuse to make a political argument {and fwiw I think Combeferre is being kind of gross and snobby too} - but I think that’s the point of the passage in the context of that chapter; like, that being around kind of quick-fire political banter that manages to be both combative and tongue-in-cheek is exactly what is making Marius such a sadface rn.)
So yeah, I’ll stop here but maybe come back to this?? Because omg canards/Combeferre/Hugo/DUCKS :D
