Yes, I Have The Spleen, Complicated With Melancholy, With Homesickness, Plus Hypochondria, And I Am Vexed

Street rat… turned thief

“A lugubrious being was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a child; less than twenty years of age, with a handsome face, lips like cherries, charming black hair, the brilliant light of springtime in his eyes; he had all vices and aspired to all crimes.

The digestion of evil aroused in him an appetite for worse. It was the street boy turned pickpocket, and a pickpocket turned garroter. He was genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, sluggish, ferocious. The rim of his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make room for a tuft of hair, after the style of 1829. He lived by robbery with violence. His coat was of the best cut, but threadbare. 

Montparnasse was a fashion-plate in misery and given to the commission of murders. The cause of all this youth’s crimes was the desire to be well-dressed. The first grisette who had said to him: “You are handsome!” had cast the stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this Abel. Finding that he was handsome, he desired to be elegant: now, the height of elegance is idleness; idleness in a poor man means crime. Few prowlers were so dreaded as Montparnasse. At eighteen, he had already numerous corpses in his past. More than one passer-by lay with outstretched arms in the presence of this wretch, with his face in a pool of blood. Curled, pomaded, with laced waist, the hips of a woman, the bust of a Prussian officer, the murmur of admiration from the boulevard wenches surrounding him, his cravat knowingly tied, a bludgeon in his pocket, a flower in his buttonhole; such was this dandy of the sepulcher.”

Gavroche had taken to hanging around the Friends of the ABC during their meetings, getting underfoot and being helpful or a nuisance or both, arguing with Enjolras, admiring Bahorel, delivering messages and cockades, being a snarky brat.

And falling asleep on Joly.

It was something that had happened often enough that the others joked about Joly being an especially good pillow, to which Bossuet would reply that indeed he was, to which Joly would reply with a whack of the arm and a blush.

oh, and it's one thing to count the stars in the sky but it's another to count the bells in your laugh (all the music theory in the world cannot describe its resonance in my chest or the warmth it burns in my heart), for what can the stars give me that you have not already given, and given more freely? the stars shine bright but they cannot compare to the brightness of your eyes. I may see the stars inscribed lovingly on black velvet, a love song to the eternity of space and time, an inscription of the galaxies contained within the earth -- chasms filled to the brim with glittering multifaceted wonders -- but your eyes, your laugh, are worth more than any jewel. -- no. no, there can be nothing else but that laugh which contains within it all the joys the world can know. I would do a thousand foolish things to hear that laugh again.

to her: letters, i.

Friend Like Me

Grantaire was a puzzle.

He painted, he sketched, he made jokes that had them laughing until their sides hurt, he rambled about gods and men, he knew all the good cafés and restaurants, he could fence, he could box. He knew Paris almost as well as Bahorel did.

And yet, for all his talents, he kept himself to a bottle of absinthe or wine.

Joly and Bossuet would go drinking with Grantaire, often enough that it was not a surprise on the fifth of June that Grantaire joined them for breakfast. But Joly couldn't help noticing that a man of such talents, such potential, drowned himself in alcohol.

When Enjolras said that Grantaire was incapable of loving, of feeling, of believing, Joly saw, and saw the way the words stuttered forth like frightened children.

"Y-y-you'll see."

Like a genie trapped in a lamp.

me: alright i’m not so much concentrating on les mis anymore my new focus is the three musketeers! new interest! we’re broadening our scope! that’s diversification baby!

also me: If I See One More Alternate Universe Where Everyone Lives Except Fantine, Whose Death Apparently Is A Fixed Part Of The Timeline, I’m Gonna McFreakin’ Lose It

YOU GET IT BACK TOO HA! hello! Once you get this you have to say 5 things you like about yourself then send this to your 10 favorite followers (non negotiable) (positivity is cool) (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

I ALREADY ANSWERED IT HA! wait does that mean I have to answer it with five different things now you're making me procrastinate dammit michi

My hair is getting long and I can't wait for it to get longer.

My hair is also super soft ??

I'm getting better at doing my own eyeliner.

Do I got the booty? I diddly-iddly-do.

My singing voice isn't half bad.

it’s not fantine week anymore but that doesn’t mean i’m not eternally thinking about fantine so *fingerguns* here we go.

“i only understand love and liberty” is something that grantaire says but it might as well be fantine’s motto too because let’s be real here, these people come at it from different directions but they come to the same conclusion.

big old ramble under the cut.

grantaire is a student, or a former student by the time 1832 rolls around; he’s bossuet’s age, which i think comes to 4 years older than enjolras, which puts him at a solid age 30 at the barricade, 26 when marius meets the ensemble at the musain. in his debut, which is to say his introduction in a scene versus a description by hugo, he gives a grand declamation which takes up over five pages. i tried reading the whole thing in french and my eyes glazed over; in english it’s little better, if more decipherable since it’s my native language. friends, grantaire is verbose. but we can gather a few things from his long-ass rant:

that he apprenticed under gros, a painter of the time, and stole the apples he was supposed to have been drawing from still life (presumably ate them too). what we can take from this is that he is from a wealthy enough family to devote his time to learning how to paint, rather than a trade, e.g. feuilly.

that he believes virtue can easily turn into vice, saying almost the same thing in dialogue as a throwaway line that hugo said in description about javert when he got his terrible st michael on while arresting valjean in m-sur-m. (he also, in a single throwaway line -- the hapgood translation is “a bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous than the asp and the cobra” -- sums up fantine’s entire awful fate.)

that he is probably not an atheist, but definitely isn’t on board with the idea of an all-knowing all-powerful all-merciful god.

that a big part of why he believes this is because he sees how the world suffers. he has studied history and sees the way it repeats itself; he gives several classical examples and compares them to the contemporary history of his day. he also gives a statistic (how accurate it is i couldn’t tell you) about the number of deaths from hunger in a single neighborhood of london. he uses this as a reason to condemn all of england.

in short: grantaire is a skeptic, yes, but as the saying goes: a skeptic is only a bitterly disappointed optimist.

grantaire does not believe in the revolution because he does not think humankind has the ability to rise from its present miserable condition, and he does not think it has the will to rise from that condition either.

(at this point in time, he’s wrong about the first part, but tragically right about the second. and it’s the second one that’s the kicker.)

fantine was a gamine and a grisette. she was as musichetta is; the difference is that joly probably would actually marry musichetta, and we all know how tholomyès worked out for fantine. (poorly.) fantine was a gutter kid, who worked for her living. given an alt canon where she survives 1823 and makes it to paris with valjean and cosette (age 36 at the barricade), we can assume the following:

that while she has a comfortable place in the fauchelevent household, she will probably still be doing much of the sewing and upkeep; louison would likely take a much smaller role. she can teach cosette about coquetry and fashion, she can show cosette a little about upper society, but she cannot be part of that society any longer. she is masquerading as the shy retiring wife to a shy retiring man. theater, the arts, et cetera, these are all faded memories carefully preserved in her mind. any indulgences the fauchelevents take are pretty much relegated to walks in the luxembourg gardens.

that she has been through hell and back, and knows intrinsically both the good and the evil that every man is capable of. jean valjean in particular encapsulates this: when she knew him as mayor madeleine, he was both an angel and the very devil. so the inherent goodness of man is a complicated thing for her. perhaps some people are simply born wicked, but certainly some have wickedness thrust upon them. (yes, i know that’s from wicked, yes, i know the original shakespeare quote is a dick joke, yes, i got it, yes, grantaire would laugh his ass off at this, yes. however. still kinda true.)

that even after going through the worst hell a human can imagine, she still believes not only that there is a god but that he is good. we know this in particular because there is a bit of dialogue when she is in the hospital where she is planning what sort of confirmation dress little cosette is going to wear.

that seeing students on the street talking of barricades and rebellion would make her hackles rise like those of a cornered wolf. fantine was born in 1796, just two years after the reign of terror ended. she grew up watching napoleon’s rise to power, she grew up watching the wars, she was a young woman for the bourbon restoration. she knows what revolutions do: she is a product of one. we can reasonably extrapolate from hugo’s introduction of her character that the revolution is why she has no family and why she grew up as a gutter kid, but again: she grew up watching everything.

so fantine knows, has known from birth, how unfair the world is.

does she want the world to be better? well, sure. but while she knows that individuals can change for the better, she also knows from experience that The People generally don’t.

grantaire and fantine having a conversation about belief and revolution would be an interesting one, i think.

... and now i want to write a fic about it. damn it.

noot noot! book of nile please <3

“Lover’s Wreck” - Gaelic Storm

In my sleeping mind she sings a sad and lonely lullaby

And when I wake, there’s just the ache that’ll haunt me ‘til I die

It’s been two days now since he woke from the first death that wasn’t his and wasn’t drowning. Two days, and he’ll never wake from it again, but he can remember it now, in Val d'Argent, as clearly as he did on the train in Sudan: the heat of blood spilling out, the sharp pain, and most of all the shock.

He remembers her looking up at her friend’s face and thinking Oh, this is it. I didn’t think it would be like this.

He remembers her thinking, I don’t want to go.

It reminds him of how his own first death went. Of how he had been so sure he would survive, and then the stomach-dropping realization that he wouldn’t.

And then, of course, he did. And now she has, too.

He doesn’t want to go to sleep again. It was easier in Goussainville, knowing that Merrick’s men were coming but not knowing Nile, not really. But now Merrick’s men have come and gone and taken Nicky and Joe with them, and Andy is being weird and quieter than normal, and Nile …

Nile.

She shines, is the thing. Booker has tried, but he can’t take his eyes off her.

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also people should keep in mind that sometimes when an artist says “doodle" what they mean is "stress-free art”. that doesn’t necessarily mean that the “doodle” they made is something that they didn’t work hard at or didn’t spend a long time on. some people get really out of control when they see impressive works and the artist write “just a doodle” and they think, this is it, this is the end, im no longer going to be an artist, how can i possibly compare myself.

sometimes “just a doodle” means “not working on commissions or something work-based”, so don’t fret yourselves. plus not everyone who posts art plans on a bunch of people seeing it. you don’t really expect your stupid poorly written artist caption to be seen by a lot of people via reblogs,

Femslash Revolution's Prompt Exchange

Femslash February is approaching, and we have found ourselves faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, we live every month like it’s Femslash February - but on the other hand, we want to do something special to celebrate our favourite event on the Tumblr calendar. What’s a femslasher to do?

Why not make someone else’s femslash dream come true? We all have great ideas that we’ve never felt able to create for ourselves. This January, we’ll be collecting prompts from anyone who wants to participate - no need to follow us! - to post at the start of February, creating a shared femslash wishlist. Pick a prompt, and grant someone’s wish with a fic, art, edit or any other kind of creation!

If you want to participate, please signal boost this post, and check under the cut for more details on how to take part!

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