Cholera! As I read this chapter, this word lingered in my mind incessantly. How could one immerse oneself in the filth of the sewers during the peak of an epidemic and not get infected? It seems that Hugo chose to overlook the cholera epidemic during the June insurrection in favour of his obsession with the sewers! I just can’t shake this off. Sorry.

This realization brought back the fact that we're still on June 6, and it doesn’t seem like it's ending anytime soon. Hugo is a master at stretching time; clearly not the only one, but undeniably one of the most impressive.

Valjean's underground ordeal continues as he sinks into the ooze while pressing forward. As many have noted before, this act is profoundly symbolic of Valjean's own life, showcasing his ability to find a way out of the direst situations. Contrary to the previous chapter's emphasis on shedding heavy burdens to survive quicksand or its liquid equivalent, Valjean doesn’t get rid of Marius. Instead, he strives to keep Marius elevated above the liquid (I can’t even call it ‘water’): “He had only his head above the water now and his two arms holding up Marius. In the old paintings of the deluge there is a mother holding her child thus.” I imagined Valjean holding most of Marius’ body high, but the illustration below probably provides a more accurate depiction.

Reading about Valjean’s descent into the slime is so stressful after learning what it could mean!

I don’t really have any thoughts on this chapter in general besides it being a fun read. The image of Valjean carrying Marius like a mother carrying a child is sweet (even if it’s also stressful, giving the context). It’s also a nice call-back to how he blurs the line between father and mother for Cosette, occupying both roles simultaneously in his mind and in hers. With Marius, he’s been compared to a brother rather than a father, but it’s interesting to see how he continues to play with boundaries of family and of gender here.

The image of him praying is beautiful as well, and it lends his trials here an element of holiness.

Brickclub 5.3.6 “The Fontis”

.....huh.

We’ll have to see what comes of it, but I think @fremedon is right: Valjean just reprised all the asphyxiation deaths of the story at once, particularly his own two deaths by drowning and burial, and then he found a foothold and began to climb back out. He’s been in that grave from the convent heist for so long, but he now he’s actually maybe escaping??

On coming out of the water, he struck against a stone, and fell onto his knees. This seemed fitting, and he stayed there for some time, his soul lost in unspoken prayer to God.

This may be a silly question, but have we actually seen Valjean pray to God before? He’s knelt in prayer to the bishop, to Cosette, to the nuns doing their penance, but have we ever actually seen him feel worthy to kneel directly before God?

This is fascinating, I didn’t at all expect this to go as optimistic as it has, especially knowing how this book ends. But apparently the Jesus-carrying-his-cross metaphor was the good version of that metaphor (as opposed to my Valjean-is-crucifying-himself-on-Marius version) and there’s healing that comes from it.

And maybe the sewers as the place that turns up the truth of things instead of their earthly masks finally turned up the truth of Valjean. We see him as a mask here--his face is tipped up trying to breathe so that nothing is visible of him except what looks like a mask--and then he emerges, and maybe he's unmasked something about himself, and maybe it’s not what he always assumed and feared it was.

There’s something about Valjean that’s a tug-of-war between looks-foul-but-feels-fair and looks-fair-but-feels-foul, and I think maybe he has been uncomfortable with how much his current persona has asked the latter of him--as we’ll later learn it makes Marius uncomfortable. I’m still afraid he’s gong to take the wrong lesson from this grace, as, in fact, he maybe has taken from every single incidence of grace, but. He would rather look foul but feel fair, and that’s what he is here, and that’s the decision he’ll make at the end.

The problem is, 1) he’s made up a lot of that dichotomy in his own head and 2) he thinks, for reasons that are wrong, that making that choice means by definition losing Cosette.

Brickclub 5.3.5, “For Sand as for Woman There Is a Finesse That Is Perfidy,” and 5.3.6, “The Sink-Hole”

In the sewers, we’ve reached a sinkhole, though the text doesn’t actually confirm that until the first line of 5.3.6. As with Waterloo, the insurrection was preceded by rain, and the sewer floor has collapsed. 

In the story, we’re back at Man Overboard.

We keep coming back to that image--of drowning in the heart of civilization, within sight of shore (as Hugo’s daughter Léopoldine did--the metaphor is a personal one). This is the charge into the sunken road at Waterloo and the dungeons below the Châtelet.

And it is the bagne, and it is poverty, and it is social asphyxia: “that terrible, long, certain, relentless burial, impossible either to delay or to hasten, that lasts for hours, that goes on interminably, that takes you standing, free, in good health, that drags you down by your feet, that with every exertion you make, with every should you utter, draws you a little lower, that seems to punish you for your resistance by tightening its hold, that slowly sucks a man into the ground while leaving him time to watch the horizon, the trees, the verdant countryside, the smoke from the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds that fly and sing, the sun, the sky.”

And no one is immune, not completely--it’s possible for people and whole communities to slip into misérable status: “Sometimes the horseman is swallowed up with his horse, sometimes the carter is swallowed up with his cart. Everything founders on that strand.” 

And there is no dignity in this death: we are told it is abject, it is filthy, it is humiliating, and the grief of one’s survivors is overcome by their revulsion.

And that’s really what Valjean fears at this point--not that revealing his past would materially harm Cosette (though he SHOULD be worried, DID YOU EVEN LEAVE A NOTE), but that Cosette, having learned about it, would not love him anymore. And he’s going to keep fearing her reaction to the metaphorical quagmire even after coming home dripping with the literal one, in a scene we won’t get to see, though I have questions.

In the real quagmire, “The first law of salvation is to get rid of whatever you are carrying.” But Valjean is carrying Marius. “Dense enough to carry the weight of one man, this sludge could obviously not support two. Separately, Marius and Jean Valjean would probably have made it. Jean Valjean ploughed on, carrying a man who was dying or was perhaps a corpse.”

At the last minute, literally up to his face in sewage, he finds a foothold: “It felt to him like the first step on a staircase leading back to life.”

And that’s huge? And feels like it ties in with all the discussion of routes not taken in the previous chapters. He’s been buried since the convent.

Marius, starting here, will finally fight for his life; the barricade has taken away not just the shadow of murder around him but the suicidality that honestly I don’t think he’s ever been free of.

And it feels like this could have been that point for Valjean: after he gets out of the quagmire, he trips, falls on his knees, and remains there in prayer for a while, and when he stands up “his soul [is] filled with a strange brightness.”