Part I, Book 4, Chapter 1
One Mother Meets Another
Understanding this chapter ended up being a more involved process than usual—some sleuthing, extra reading, and speculation was involved—so this chapter’s post will be split into three parts:
- The Present (a quick and dirty summary of the part of this chapter that takes place in the present)
- Timeline Sleuthing (some calculating and speculation about the year(s) preceding the events of Book 3, particularly around where Cosette’s birth falls on the Fantine-Tholomyès relationship timeline)
- The Last 10 Months (a summary of the 10 month period leading up to the present events of this chapter)
I. The Present
Fantine arrives at an inn in Montfermeil, which has a giant abandoned rusty trailer out front, sunken in the mud. There’s a giant chain suspended from said trailer and two very sweet-looking little girls are swinging on said chain, with their mother—who musical-knowers immediately clock as Madame Thénardier—working the chain like a swing, because the chain on a rusty abandoned trailer is totally like a swing set on a playground.
If I had more time I could go into deep analytic raptures about the juxtaposition of this bleak-ass swinging scene with the fantasy-like rococo swinging scene from the previous book, with Fantine the link between the two, but this is already going to be such a long post, so alas.
Fantine is holding her own little child, who goes to play with the little girls, and when they all get along she asks Madame Thénardier, right then and there, if she’ll take care of her child for her. This is an insane thing to ask of a stranger you have not done a background check on, but Fantine got a good vibe, you see, and she trusted that feeling despite the fact that she is historically a terrible judge of people.
She introduces her daughter, whose name we all know, of course, because it’s…Euphrasie!
Yeah, the name reveal got me too. But Fantine calls her “Cosette” as an endearment and that’s what everyone’s going to end up calling her so we’re good. I have always thought “Cosette” was an utterly perfect cat name and so onto the list it goes.
She concocts a story about having a husband who’s dead, and needing to find work but people not willing to give a chance to a woman with a child, and says she can pay Madame 6 francs a month for childcare. Immediately a man’s voice from inside the inn yells “7 francs!”
Victor Hugo could have written comedy sketches. This moment is so, so funny even as I know what’s going down.
There’s a back-and-forth where the man demands that Fantine pay 6 months up front and tacks on 15 francs for expenses and she agrees to it all without once asking for some kind of breakdown of what those expenses would be or, idk, a contract.
The man asks if she has clothes for her child, and like the sweet little idiot she is Fantine volunteers that her child has a dozen very nice dresses of expensive materials and that she’ll hand them over right now, no problem. Oh, Fantine.
Fantine stays the night at the inn, then leaves in the morning, crying so hard that a neighbor comments on how heartbreaking it is, and as soon as she leaves, the man, who obviously is “Master of the House” Thenardiér, says, whew, that was close, I had a big debt due tomorrow and now I can pay it off. Fantine just got her ass scammed so, so hard. And that’s where the chapter ends.
II. Timeline Sleuthing
So now to the bit of information that sent me on a journey.
Hugo tells us, mid-chapter, that all of this takes place 10 months after the Four Bros walked out on the Gal Pals. Then Fantine says that Cosette is 2 years old, going on 3.
Hang on.
I spent a little while wondering if Victor Hugo is just really, really bad at baby math, but that doesn’t track for someone who 1) calculated the date of his own conception and 2) has offered really long explanations for everything so far in the story. It’s not in character for him to have messed up something as basic as this.
And in the last chapter of Book 3, Tholomyès refers to the fact that the relationship has gone on for almost 2 years.
If we assume that Hugo can do basic math, that means that Fantine had Cosette while she was with Tholomyès just under a year into their relationship, and Tholomyès, rather than accidentally leaving an unborn child he didn’t know existed, knowingly abandoned his child and his baby mama.
I wasn’t sure, though, if this was really the case, so I did some digging and found an outtake chapter that Hugo deleted from Les Misérables. Yes, I did EXTRA READING because this book isn’t long enough.
Said chapter is worth the extra time because it really shows that Hugo is a messy bitch who loves drama, but, more importantly, it reveals that Cosette knew her father well enough to identify him on sight, Tholomyès was fully aware of her, and he actively denied any connection to her in public. In short, this man is even more trash than we thought before.
This does raise questions about how near-two years of carefree frolicking went down if there was a baby involved. How did Tholomyès, careless fuckboi, manage to stick by a girl he barely knew through a pregnancy? How was childcare handled when they went on outings? How did Tholomyès and Cosette have time to know each other?
I don’t know if any of this gets covered later on in the book, and it’s a weird amount of information to leave out for an author who wrote 14 chapters of backstory about a character who interacts with Valjean for half a day, tops. So I did some speculation, which brings me dangerously close to writing Les Mis fanfiction, but here we go.
If we go by the timeline established here, poor naive Fantine got knocked up very shortly after being with Tholomyès; it’s very likely that her pregnancy didn’t slow his roll too much because he was also banging Favourite, which is suggested when she’s the only girl he actively praises, and then openly kisses in front of everyone else.
Given that Tholomyès has a terminal case of both affluenza and being the world’s biggest manchild, it’s not hard to imagine that when Cosette was born, he didn’t feel the need to settle down or become more accountable. I imagine that Fantine, though, would have assumed that the baby tied them together, and that marriage would eventually be in the cards.
Childcare-wise, there is no way Tholomyès doesn’t have some kind of servant setup—he’s a rich man from a wealthy family with zero sense of responsibility—so he would have had a housekeeper and/or maid in his apartment in Paris. Fantine might not have officially moved in, but she likely spent enough time at Tholomyès place to be basically living there, and in those days well-off women didn’t care for their own children anyway, so it would not have been weird for Fantine, as the mistress of a rich man, to leave her baby with the help while they gallivanted around Paris.
Without having to worry about the drudgery of childrearing holding him down, Tholomyès probably enjoyed playing with his baby daughter the way even deadbeat dads do, because babies are super fun to play with when you don’t have to nurse them or change their diapers or get up in the middle of the night to tend to their needs. It would explain why Cosette knows and reaches for her Papa when she sees him, and it would also have explained why Fantine would have thought Tholomyès was in it for the long run even as he ranted against women and marriage.
All of that is to say that when you think it through, the timeline, as well as Fantine’s decisions, makes sense, and everyone has behaved in character. As for how Tholomyès could have walked out on a dependent partner and a young daughter, both who loved him, by the equivalent of dumping via group chat: this is standard behavior for a rich manchild who considers a fling with a poor girl to be utterly inconsequential.
Whew. I can’t believe Victor Hugo got me to do voluntary homework.
III. The Last 10 Months
Now that we have figured out how the relationship timeline makes sense, we can move onto what happened in the 10 months after the one-sided conscious uncoupling.
Fantine, a mere 10 months after the outing that turned into a ghosting, is nearly unrecognizable; no longer a ridiculously beautiful young girl in fashionable clothes, she’s in a calico dress with her hair hidden by an ugly covering, with a “coarse” cloak, “heavy shoes,” weathered hands, and a “dejected line” on her cheek. The before and after is so stark it’s like Hugo is writing some kind of PSA about the dangers of premarital sex.
After the Great Ghosting of 1817, Fantine immediately lost contact with the rest of the Gal Pals, which I thought was weird until I realized that when I graduated from college I immediately stopped talking to most of the girls in my sorority, so this actually totally tracks.
She also ended up unable to find work: “Led by her relationship with Tholomyès to disdain the modest trade she knew [sewing], she had neglected any openings. They were now closed to her. Nothing to fall back on. Fantine could hardly read and could not write.”
This is super sad and, again, totally tracks; Tholomyès wouldn’t have wanted his mistress to be a working woman because 1) ew and 2) she’d have less time and energy to devote to being his plaything, so he would have actively discouraged her from working. She also would have aspired to behave as if she were of his class, especially if she thought they’d end up married, so it makes sense that over the course of their relationship she would have eschewed working, learning new skills, or saving up.
This is all, unfortunately, very reminiscent of how stay-at-home girlfriends, wives, and moms often end up in a place where they don’t have savings or retirement accounts of their own and a big black hole for a resume, so when they’re dumped/divorced, they’re completely and utterly screwed. If you take any of the unsolicited advice I dole out in the course of this project, let it be this one: ladies, protect your options! If you’re a woman of the stay-at-home variety, your spouse/partner should be, at the very least, funding retirement accounts in your name that you manage—if you are unable to have a conversation about this with said partner, then this is not a relationship you should stay in.
Fantine did attempt to contact Tholomyès—she hired a public letter-writer to send him three letters, none of which he responded to, because that man is THE WORST. With no help forthcoming from him, Fantine decides to leave Paris and go back to her hometown, where perhaps her old connections can help her find a job. The problem is that, with a child in tow and no husband in sight, she wouldn’t be able to get a job, so she realizes the only option for her is to separate herself from Cosette “to conceal her wrong-doing.” Absolutely brutal choice.
I did see, when I was trying to figure out the birth timeline, people online going, “Why did Fantine have to leave her child, when she could have just told people in her hometown that she had a husband who died, which is what she told Madame Thénardier?”
The obvious answer, which it seems a lot of people go to, is “Fantine is just not very smart,” which…yeah. But I think the real answer is this: Fantine is still holding out for Tholomyès to come to his senses and return to her. If she tells people in her hometown that her husband is dead, and then he shows up very much alive, then she’s in a huge pickle.
It’s fine for her to lie to the Thénardiers, because 1) assuming they are upstanding people (which they’re not, but she doesn’t know that) they might be less inclined to take in an illegitimate child, and 2) if Tholomyès does show up to save the day (which he won’t, but she doesn’t know that), she can just yoink back her kid with a thank you and be on her way.
So in fact, this is fairly strategic thinking by a young woman with no money and no options.
In a lovely and poignant detail, even as Fantine herself is in cheap ugly clothing, Cosette is dressed like a little princess in silks and lace and ribbons—”[Fantine’s] sole remaining vanity.” I saw people assuming that Fantine was buying Cosette fancy clothes, but it was historical practice to sew children’s clothes—and Fantine was a seamstress—out of old discarded adult clothes. Presumably Fantine cut up her precious rich-man’s-mistress gowns so her baby wouldn’t have to be dressed as a poor child, and repurposed the lace and trimmings from said gowns, which was also common practice. It’s a beautiful detail that demonstrates how much Fantine loves and prioritizes Cosette.
(I also did some back-of-the-napkin math; Cosette’s dresses would have been primarily made from the skirts of Fantine’s gowns, and depending on style you could probably get 3 baby dresses out of each skirt, with scraps from the skirts and bodices used to make caps. Fantine tells the Thénardiers that Cosette has a dozen dresses, so Fantine probably had about 3-4 gowns to work from, which I think is a normal quantity of clothes for the poor-mistress-to-a-rich-man lifestyle she was living. Math checks out.)
Fantine sold everything else she owned for 200 francs and had 80 francs left to her name after paying off her debts. This is extra depressing given that in a previous chapter, Thomolyès was strutting around with a 200-franc walking stick.
Given the state that Fantine is left in, and the great desperate act she has to take of leaving her beloved daughter with strangers so that she can work, you would hope that Tholomyès experiences some karma for ruining Fantine and Cosette’s lives so thoroughly when he could very easily have just…not.
Alas, Hugo tells us that, 20 years later, Tholomyès is “a well established provincial lawyer, wealthy and influential […] still a man of pleasure.”
BOOOO. I hate how realistic this is. Damn you, Hugo.
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