Part I, Book 5, Chapter 8
Madame Victurnien Spends Thirty-five Francs for the Sake of Morality
We all get to experience happiness—well, everyone but Javert—for the tiny sliver of empty space on the page between the end of the last chapter and the start of this one. Because this is where [Fantine voice] it all went wrong.
Before we go on, though, I just want to appreciate the amazing trio of chapter titles Hugo comes up with for this and the following two chapters (yes, I read ahead, how can you not?)—the man is the master of ironic titles.
So Fantine is happy with life in her new job—after nearly two years of being a kept woman/manchild’s plaything, it feels good to work for a living. She’s got a steady paycheck, a room of her own, and furniture for said room that she’s borrowed on credit (uh oh)—everything’s coming up Fantine!
So of course it all has to slip away.
Because Fantine, being mostly illiterate, has to use a public letter-writer to correspond with the Thénardiers and send them money, all her coworkers notice all the letters she’s sending and getting, and they decide that the pretty new girl who keeps writing letters is a stuck-up bitch. Which, ??? Sending letters makes you stuck-up now???
Hugo goes on a pretty great long rant about how nosy busybodies are the worst, and the world would be better if small-minded gossips just minded their own business, which is absolutely true but also incredibly funny coming from a guy who you can just tell loves gossip.
Because these workers apparently have nothing better to do (maybe Mayor Madeleine should institute town movie nights or something), they get the letter-writer to spill the tea and, from there, find out that Fantine has a child. They all make the very logical conclusion that Fantine must have been a prostitute, which is an absolutely bonkers conclusion to jump to. People can have secret children for normal reasons, you nosy weirdos!
One of the coworkers is so invested in Fantine’s secret that she spends 35 francs of her own money and takes the time to make a 262-mile round trip to visit the Thénardiers and see Cosette. This is an insane level of effort to put into finding out your coworker’s business!!! Madame Victurnien, you need to get a damn hobby! When people do unnecessarily stupid things I like to say, “Doing nothing is free,” and in this case doing nothing would literally have been free. I just cannot with this woman.
Because Hugo’s gotta Hugo, we get a little ranty backstory in which we learn that Madame V, the “doorkeeper of everyone’s virtue,” is a real hypocrite because she had her own wild past in which she married a rogue monk, which sounds like its own thing. In any case, Victurnien runs to Fantine’s boss and gets her to fire Fantine.
In addition to being mean-spirited as all heck, this is also a particularly evil move given that Cosette is horrifically mistreated by the Thénardiers and any decent person, upon seeing the state of Fantine’s daughter, would have done…literally anything better than getting Cosette’s mom fired. You could have alerted Fantine, or told the other factory women that there was a child in distress, or at the very least did nothing, and instead you went out of your way to make things so much worse!
So the workshop supervisor one morning gives Fantine 50 francs and tells her that the mayor doesn’t want her working there anymore, and the mayor thinks she should leave town. If you know anything about Mayor Madeleine (and this is confirmed by me reading ahead), you’ll know this is total bull and this lady is speaking out of her ass. Someone should talk to Madeleine about the fact that this supervisor is making all sorts of statements on his behalf.
Fantine, now out of a job, can’t leave town; she still owes on rent and the furniture she got on credit. Someone tells her to go talk to the mayor—you know, the one who gives out money so easily he’s reverse-burglarizing people—and she doesn’t because, as far as she knows, he’s the one who fired her.
I kind of hate this rom-com level of misunderstanding—we’re well aware of what’s about to become of Fantine and it could all be avoided so easily if she just talked to Madeleine and cleared things up!
Thus ends this savagely titled chapter. The beginning of Fantine’s ruination is here, all because some bitter old lady needed better hobbies to spend her time and 35 francs on.
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