THROWS CONFETTI - Blog Posts

Liuuuu omg

@fantineweek 2018 - day three: family | friendship.

this is gonna be one part angsty canon meta, and one part angsty headcanon. because, uhhh, because i have a lot of feelings about this.

(extra long post too, whoops.)

friendship first.

okay. as much as i really, really do want fantine to have a whole bunch of friends who love and support her, and as much as i would love for favourite / dahlia / zéphine to belong to that category --

she really doesn’t have any friends at all. especially not the rest of the paris quartet.

believe me, i want favourite to be fantine’s best friend. i want dahlia to be the one who taught her which particular type of maroon made her blonde hair glow best. i want zéphine to have sat up with fantine during those restless nights when cosette was an infant and helped her with all the small important things involved with caring for a child of that age.

but while canon gives us not very much interaction between these ladies at all, it does give us just enough to say “uh-uh. the only reason these people spend any time together at all is because their boyfriends are best friends.”

from “tholomyes [sic] is so merry that he sings a spanish ditty” :

all received, to some extent, the kisses of all, with the exception of Fantine, who was hedged about with that vague resistance of hers composed of dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love. “You always have a queer look about you,” said Favourite to her.

okay, but just because hapgood has this translation, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what hugo originally wrote. (i parsed a little of this with the quartet last year here on my fantine blog.)

“tholomyès est si joyeux qu’il chante une chanson espagnole” :

toute recevaient un peu çà et là les baisers de tous, excepté Fantine, en fermée dans sa vague résistance rêveuse et farouche, et qui aimait. -- Toi, lui disait Favourite, tu as toujours l’air chose.

“avoir l’air chose” can be read as “you’re always daydreaming” or “there’s something peculiar about you” -- or any other number of ways to tell someone that they’re the odd one out.

fantine is the only one vouvoied by the entire party, except for tholomyès who of course tutoies her. we see why in this section -- because even though this is only one afternoon, and only one of the three ladies talking to her, we can reasonably extrapolate that this is how the dynamic has been between all of them for at least the past two years.

fantine is the only one who doesn’t want to play their game of exchanging kisses indiscriminately. the only one she’s in love with is tholomyès, so the only person she wants to be kissing her is tholomyès. meanwhile, the other ladies aren’t actually in love with their gentlemen: they see them as hobbies to drop when one or both parties get bored: of course they don’t care who kisses who.

the oldest, favourite, is twenty-three; the youngest, fantine, is twenty-one. that’s the same age gap between me and my sister. hugo treats this like an insurmountable distance. but it isn’t the age gap which isolates fantine from the other three ladies. it’s simply that she sees the world so differently than they do.

how could such different people be real friends?

in fact, the only person who extends a hand of friendship -- and i mean that in the sense of providing warmth and kindness in her life, out of no sense of obligation (*cough* valjean *cough*) -- is marguerite, her elderly neighbor.

from “madame victurnien’s success” :

She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison, and earned twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that she began to pay the Thenardiers [sic] irregularly.

However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned at night, taught her the art of living in misery. Back of living on little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the first is dark, the second is black.

Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to give up a bird which eats a half a farthing's worth of millet every two days; how to make a coverlet of one's petticoat, and a petticoat of one's coverlet; how to save one's candle, by taking one's meals by the light of the opposite window. No one knows all that certain feeble creatures, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can get out of a sou. It ends by being a talent.

[...]

The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.

this is where the angsty headcanon about family comes in.

hugo does nothing by accident. except for his math, which he does badly on purpose, because he hates math.

in one of the earlier drafts of les misérables, he gives fantine the name of marguerite louet. he scratched this out later, of course; he gave her a diminutive instead of a proper name, to show better how much of a street urchin she was.

but he kept the name marguerite, and he gave it to the elderly spinster neighbor who helped fantine.

marguerite is a type of daisy. it is also the french version of the name margaret, which ultimately derives from the greek word margaron, meaning pearl.

y’all know where i’m heading with this.

it would be too much of a stretch to headcanon that marguerite is fantine’s mother. marguerite is probably too old to be her mother -- and she takes a grandmotherly sort of role, anyway.

more likely that marguerite is the older aunt to a niece she did not even know existed.

maybe fantine is the spit and image of marguerite’s youngest sister. maybe fantine has the same nose that their dad had, the same high forehead as her brother, the same smile as the one she sees in the mirror (the same pearls).

or maybe it’s cosette who embodies those things, and if marguerite saw that little girl, she would be struck with a living image of the past.