
He raised his eyes, and recognized that wretched child who had come to him one morning, the elder of the Thenardier daughters, Éponine; he knew her name now. Strange to say, she had grown poorer and prettier, two steps which it had not seemed within her power to take. She had accomplished a double progress, towards the light and towards distress. She was barefooted and in rags, as on the day when she had so resolutely entered his chamber, only her rags were two months older now, the holes were larger, the tatters more sordid. It was the same harsh voice, the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan, the same free, wild, and vacillating glance. She had besides, more than formerly, in her face that indescribably terrified and lamentable something which sojourn in a prison adds to wretchedness.
She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia through having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in the loft of some stable.
And in spite of it all, she was beautiful. What a star art thou, O youth!
Gervais wrote:Juliet24601 wrote:Hello!
I'm not sure if this is a deeper meaning exactly, but I love the bit in 'In My Life' when Cosette sings 'there are times when I catch in the silence the sigh of a faraway song' because I think it's as if Fantine is singing to her from somewhere!
x J x
It's probably unintional, but either way, it would go along well with a passage of the brick that mentions the possibility of Fantine's ghost watching Cosette in the Rue Plumet garden. I'll look up the passage later.
ETA: Found it! It's not quite how I remembered it, though.In the garden, near the railing on the street, there was a stone bench, screened from the eyes of the curious by a plantation of yoke-elms, but which could, in case of necessity, be reached by an arm from the outside, past the trees and the gate.
One evening during that same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out; Cosette had seated herself on this bench after sundown. The breeze was blowing briskly in the trees, Cosette was meditating; an objectless sadness was taking possession of her little by little, that invincible sadness evoked by the evening, and which arises, perhaps, who knows, from the mystery of the tomb which is ajar at that hour.
Perhaps Fantine was within that shadow.
Rachel wrote:"In the rain, the pavement shines like silver", but I can't think of what it actually means!
Like, when she's singing OMO, she points out three things at the beginning that are beautiful to her, the trees full of starlight, the misty lights in the river, and the pavement that shines like silver, and the pavement is the only one she doesn't cast away as a fantasy. So, that suggests to me that there's something inherently beautiful and wonderful about the pavement shining like silver. And what's physically making it shine is the rain, the cold wet sensation that will probably make her sick and cold and take her ages to dry off. So, unless Éponine has completely lost it (which, to be fair, at this point is a definite possibility) it's not that. Maybe it's that something unpleasant like rain can still be beautiful, and that sounds an awful lot like how Hugo describes Éponine at one point.He raised his eyes, and recognized that wretched child who had come to him one morning, the elder of the Thenardier daughters, Éponine; he knew her name now. Strange to say, she had grown poorer and prettier, two steps which it had not seemed within her power to take. She had accomplished a double progress, towards the light and towards distress. She was barefooted and in rags, as on the day when she had so resolutely entered his chamber, only her rags were two months older now, the holes were larger, the tatters more sordid. It was the same harsh voice, the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan, the same free, wild, and vacillating glance. She had besides, more than formerly, in her face that indescribably terrified and lamentable something which sojourn in a prison adds to wretchedness.
She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia through having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in the loft of some stable.
And in spite of it all, she was beautiful. What a star art thou, O youth!
(on the other hand, I'm sort of distressed because I can't find my copy of Les Mis, and from this excerpt I prefer the Denny to the Hapgood, just based on how awkward that last sentence sounds)
freedomlover wrote:"Child without a friend."- Valjean talking about Fantine, but also Cosette.
"Somewhere beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?"- in the finale, I believe they may be talking about heavenI know on earth they were talking about how they can make France a better place, but "beyond the barricade" in the finale was their eternal resting place I think.
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