Ten Little Chances to be Free

AKA "Okay, Victor, we got the point the first twenty-seven times you repeated it!" This is Hugo on a bender of classical allusions and repetition for rhetorical effect. Fortunately the Pléiade edition is well-annotated and there's a huge stack of footnotes, which is good because otherwise, even with Google and Wikipedia at my side, I wouldn't have been able to track down some of these people. (Apparently "Marie d'Ecosse" is not Mary Queen of Scots but her mother, Mary of Guise. Whaaat?) Also I feel compelled to note that I did not write the footnotes, Maurice Allem did, I'm just translating them.

( I don't even knoooow )

This will come as a head-exploding shock to everyone, but Hugo actually had an editor! Who actually made him cut digressions out of Les Mis! Or maybe Hugo himself decided to strike this one, but jesus God, why do you write a forty-page digression and then just decide to ditch it?

And that is exactly what he did. He wrote a forty-page digression on prostitution that never made it to the final cut. Like all the cut scenes, it involves characters meeting in odd ways and showing up in places where they shouldn't be, which makes it read like he's writing fanfiction of his own work--although who would write a digression fic except for lulz? In any case, if I ever make it to the final chapter, you'll see who the three flowers are. Or maybe you've already seen it, or will figure it out, or will cheat and look at the last chapter of the French version that's up on my website.

The digression would have originally been chapters four (or is it five?) through eleven of Volume III, book 7: Patron-Minette.

( Crack under the cut )

Another character trait of M. Gillenormand, according to a note found in Victor Hugo's papers:
"He had a very learned cousin, an entomologist, the Abbé Gillenormand, whom the emperor Alexander had wanted to see, and at whose home His Imperial Majesty had arrived too late--they were burying the Abbé, who had died of a fever he caught two days before the day when His Majesty had judged it best to come. He was furious with this cousin because of that. He had never forgiven him for having died before receiving the visit of the emperor of Russia."

Another of Hugo's notes:
"There was a series of Nicolettes. They would say in the house:
The new Nicolette.
The former Nicolette.
The Nicolette of the Directory.
The Nicolette from the time of Buonaparte."

His daughter was a child whom we will speak of shortly, the only person in his family who had survived; she was an old virtue, an incombustible prude, one of the most pointed noses and one of the most obtuse spirits one could ever see. ...A certain bigoted devotion. Bigotry is nothing else but the castration of the intelligence. The virtues that result from it resemble the chastity of a eunuch, and have just as much merit.

In an abandoned version, Victor Hugo, instead of revealing to Gillenormand the contents of Marius' little box, revealed to Marius the contents of the pockets of one of Gillenormand's frock coats.
One day he [Marius] saw in the house a servant looking for M. Gillenormand.
"What do you want with him?" asked Thomas. [Marius had at first been named Thomas.]
"Monsieur has given me one of his old coats," answered the servant. "He did not remember that there were some papers in the pockets, and I'm looking for him to give them back to him."
"Give them to me," said Thomas, "I'll return them."
The servant gave him the papers; Thomas threw them negligently into a drawer. At the moment when he was about to close the drawer, his gaze fell on these old papers and he recognized his father's handwriting.
They were his father's letters, the same ones that he had seen so many times M. Gillenormand put in his pocket without reading them. Curiosity overtook him, and another instinct perhaps drove him.
"Let's see what they are," he said, and he unfolded one and read it.

--

An omitted continuation of Valjean and Cosette's conversation from the chapter "The rose perceives that it is an engine of war."

[...he asked Cosette, "Aren't you going to put on your dress and your hat, you know the ones?"
This happened in Cosette's room. Cosette turned towards the wardrobe where her schoolgirl clothes were hanging.
"That disguise!" she said. "Father, what do you want me to do with that? Oh, the idea! No, I'll never put on those horrors again. With that machine on my head, I look like Madame Mad-Dog."]
"Well," said Jean Tréjean, "give them to me."
"Oh, gladly, Father," cried Cosette, "but what will you do with them?"
"That's my business."
"I understand, Father. They're for the poor."
"Yes," he replied, "they're for the poor."
Jean Tréjean retired early that night. He took "those horrors" into his room, and when he was alone, he took the poor merino dress and the poor plush hat, those horrors, spread them out on his pallet with a painful smile, and kissed them, then his white head fell on these cast-offs, and if there had been somebody in the room at that moment, he would have heard the good old man sobbing. His heart was bursting: he could not have said what it was... He felt as one would feel in front of the clothing of his dead child.
He locked this dress and hat in an armoire which he never opened, and when he had put away the key to this armoire, it seemed to him that it was a tomb he had just closed, and that he had put his happiness inside it.

Autre trait du caractère de M. Gillenormand d'après une note retrouvée dans les papiers de Victor Hugo :
« Il avait eu un cousin très savant entomologiste, l'abbé Gillenormand, que l'empereur Alexandre avait désiré voir, et chez lequel S.M.I. était arrivée trop tard, vu qu'on enterrait l'abbé, mort d'une fièvre attrapée la surveille du jour où S.M. avait jugé à propos de venir. Il était furieux contre ce cousin à cause de cela. Il ne lui avait jamais pardonné d'être mort avant d'avoir reçu la visite de l'empereur de Russie. »

Une note de Victor Hugo porte :
« Il y avait une série de Nicolette. On disait dans la maison : La nouvelle Nicolette.
L'ancienne Nicolette.
La Nicolette du Directoire.
La Nicolette du temps de Buonaparte. »

Sa fille était un enfant dont nous parlerons tout à l'heure, la seule personne de sa famille qui eût survécu ; c'était une vieille vertu, une prude incombustible, un des nez les plus pointus et un des esprits les plus obtus qu'on pût voir. ...Une certaine dévotion bigote. - Le bigotisme n'est autre chose que la castration de l'intelligence. Les vertus qui en résultent ressemblent à la chasteté d'un eunuque, et ont juste autant de mérite.

Dans une version abandonnée, Victor Hugo, au lieu de faire révéler à Gillenormand le contenu des poches de la petite boîte de Marius fait révéler à Marius le contenu des poches d'une redingote de Gillenormand.
Un jour il [Marius] vit dans la maison une servante qui cherchait M. Gillenormand.
- Que lui voulez-vous ? demanda Thomas. [Marius avait été d'abord appelé Thomas.]
- Monsieur m'a donné un de ses vieux habits, répondit la servante. Il ne s'est pas souvenu qu'il y avait des papiers dans les poches, je le cherche pour les lui rendre.
- Donnez-les moi, dit Thomas, je les lui remettrai.
La servante lui donna les papiers ; Thomas les jeta négligemment dans un tiroir. Au moment où il allait refermer ce tiroir, son regard tomba sur ces paperasses et il reconnut l'écriture de son père.
C'étaient les lettres de son père, les mêmes qu'il avait vu tant de fois M. Gillenormand mettre dans sa poche sans les lire. La curiosité le prit, un autre instinct peut-être le poussa.
- Voyons ce que c'est, dit-il, et il en déplia une qu'il lut.

--

And, an omitted continuation of Valjean and Cosette's conversation from the chapter "The rose perceives that it is an engine of war."

[...il demanda à Cosette :
- Est-ce que tu ne remettras plus ta robe et ton chapeau, tu sais ?
Ceci se passait dans la chambre de Cosette. Cosette se tourna versle porte-manteau de la garde-robe où sa défroque de pensionnaire était accrochée.
- Ce déguisement ! dit-elle. Père, que voulez-vous que j’en fasse ? Oh ! par exemple, non, je ne remettrai jamais ces horreurs. Avec ce machin-là sur la tête, j’ai l’air de madame Chien-fou.]
- Eh bien, reprit Jean Tréjean, donne-les-moi.
- Oh ! je veux bien, père ! s'écria Cosette, mais qu'est-ce que vous en ferez.
- C'est mon affaire.
- Je comprends, père. C'est pour un pauvre.
- Oui, répondit-il, c'est pour un pauvre.
Jean Tréjean se retira ce soir-là de bonne heure. Il emporta « ces horreurs » dans sa chambre, et quand il y fut seul, il prit la pauvre robe de mérinos et le pauvre chapeau de peluche, ces horreurs, les étala sur son grabat avec un douloureux sourire, et les baisa, puis sa tête blanche tomba sur cette défroque, et s'il y eût quelqu'un dans la chambre en ce moment-là, on eût entendu le bon vieux homme pleurer à sanglots. Son coeur crevait : il n'eût pu dire ce qu'il avait... Il éprouvait ce qu'on éprouve devant les vêtements de son enfant mort.
Il serra cette robe et ce chapeau dans une armoire qu'on n'ouvrait jamais, et quand il eut retiré la clef de cette armoire, il lui sembla que c'était une tombe qu'on venait de fermer, et qu'il avait mis là son bonheur.

So, the scene where Javert attempts to get M. Madeleine to fire him. There are actually three versions: the published one, the one from Les Misères (call it the prototype version of Les Misérables), and the one from Hugo's notes. Since it would be a pain in the butt to indicate the exact points of digression, and since the latter two versions are mostly the same, I'm just going to give you the whole chapter as it would have appeared in Les Misères. Plz to ignore any typos.

( Forgive me, sir, I would not dare... )

Holy shit guys, Camden lock is burning down.

I had forgotten how minuscule the print is in my annotated LM. The text of the novel itself looks to be about 10pt, the notes more like 8pt and half of them are in italics. When I had it from the library a couple years ago, I actually bought a pair of reading glasses even though my vision is perfectly fine, but I have since managed to scratch them horribly and then misplace them and forget about them. I kind of wish I'd remembered, because I tried going through it tonight looking for parts to type up and now I have a pretty awful headache. I did find some good stuff, though: a very extended version of Javert denouncing himself to M. Madeleine, the original idea for how Marius found out the truth about his father, M. Gillenormand's cousin the entomologist, a short and sad little scene after Cosette throws away her convent clothes... I'll transcribe it after I've either found my reading glasses or bought a new pair.

And so help me God, I need some impulse control. I went to the mall (yeah, I know) today for a very specific item: Lush sells a shampoo bar with henna in it, I don't want my red hair to fade, and for some reason they don't sell it on the website. I walked out with the shampoo bar in question, plus $30 worth of stuff from L'Occitane en Provence, a 2008 calendar of Waterhouse paintings (which I'd secretly been wanting, but not entertaining any real hope of finding), and an arm-breaking load of books that I used up all my Borders gift cards on. And it's all brain candy, too--I have a secret weakness for Da Vinci Code ripoffs, which are a definite case of the imitations being way better than the original, but still kinda trashy even if the writing isn't as horrible as Dan Brown's. You know the type. Unassuming modern scholar starts unravelling a historical mystery and ends up discovering some utterly fanciful Dangerous Secret buried in the annals of history... it's a guilty pleasure, what can I say. (And dude, The Historian is about Vlad Ţepeş. How could I resist?)

...the headache hasn't gone away yet. Fucking tiny text.

Had my 20th birthday on Friday. (One more year, one more year... the US has the most back-asswards drinking laws.) Does this mean I'm not allowed to see Spring Awakening and enjoy it anymore? *g*

I got a giant pile of books for Christmas, but birthday was quality over quantity. So I got a really nice oversize ceramic mug with a built-in strainer and a lid, which means I can make looseleaf tea by the cup without having to break out the teapot. And--I love my mother forever for this--my very own shiny copy of Maurice Allem's annotated Les Misérables. Or in other words, the one with all the footnotes, commentary, and deleted scenes. All the rough-draft fragments I put up on the website were from a copy that is currently languishing in the Simon's Rock library 400 miles away; my last act before I left that godforsaken school for good was to photocopy about fifty pages' worth of footnotes and then return it to the library, but even a casual page-through reveals tons of things I missed. (Joly's "I swore to go through fire, not water," for example, was originally "So we have a choice to make between water and wine.")

Strange to think that the semester from hell was two years ago. There are things from that time that I'm still bitter about, things I haven't talked or posted about--at the time I couldn't see anything but the individual problems piling up, so I had no idea what a nasty situation I was in, and by the time I realized how badly I'd been fucked over it was too long ago to comment. And one of the only things keeping me sane at that point was spending hours in an ill-lit dorm room poring over the tiny print of that book with a pair of drugstore reading glasses, typing it up onto the computer and trying to translate it with my rusty high-school French.

One of the things I found on a random page-through:

Victor Hugo avait d'abord songé à faire connaître au père de Cosette, qu'il avait appelé Lebotelier avant de l'appeler Tholomyès, le mariage de son enfant. On a trouvé, dans le dossier des Misérables:

« Nous croyons devoir informer M. Gustave Lebotelier, avoué à Évreux, que sa fille, l'enfant de Fantine, s'appelle maintenant Mme la baronne Telbon, possède vingt-cinq bonnes mille livres de rente, et demeure rue du Hanovre, No. 17, au premier. Un citoyen honorable peut avouer et remplir les devoirs de la paternité vis-à-vis d'une personne ainsi placée. »

I'm imagining the look on his face, and it's priceless.

Feh, you thought there were no more fragments left, didn't you? Surprise. I still need to type up the outtakes of Javert's attempted resignation, an early version of "Cemeteries Take...", and assorted other things that you barricade boy fangirls will probably have no interest in.

But now, some rantings of M. Gillenormand! Who doesn't love M. Gillenormand?

( Voyez un peu où mène le jacobisme! )