Part I, Book 5, Chapter 10
The Consequences of Her Success
We continue with the bitterly ironic chapter titles and, in Chapter 10, witness Fantine’s famously tragic arc. I wrote “f you, Madame V” in my notebook and I stand by it.
Fantine, who has been sacked and is now underpaid and overworked in the meager job she’s managed to get, is getting deeper in debt. The Thénardiers are pissed because Fantine is behind on her payments, so they start sending letters to get her to send them money. They write that Cosette doesn’t have clothes for the winter and will freeze to death if she doesn’t have a woolen skirt, send 10 francs now, so Fantine does the only thing she can do to raise the money and sells her beautiful golden hair to a barber for 10 francs.
This is such a poignant act of self-sacrifice with big Gift of the Magi energy; in previous chapters, we are told not only how beautiful Fantine’s hair is, but also what pride she takes in it, even when she’s fallen on hard times. I also want to tell her, Fantine, girl, negotiate a bit! I bet you could have gotten more than 10 francs for that gorgeous Rapunzel hair!
With the money, Fantine buys a skirt herself and sends it to the Thénardiers, who are even more pissed because the skirt was a ploy and they wanted money. Just because they’re dicks, they give the skirt to Éponine.
Having no idea about any of the actual situation (once again, Madame V is a massive [bleep] for seeing Cosette and not alerting her mother or anyone else to the rank abuse she was suffering), Fantine comforts herself: “My child’s not cold now. I’ve clothed her with my hair.” UGH.
Because the first shakedown letter worked, though not the way they wanted, the Thénardiers try again, and tell Fantine that Cosette has caught miliary fever and will die if she doesn’t get expensive medicine that they themselves cannot afford, to the tune of 40 francs.
At this point I wanted to smack Fantine a bit. I know stress and poverty affect your ability to problem-solve, but GIRL. You live in a town with a free pharmacy!!! If you get a letter saying “your kid will die if you don’t give us 40 francs for medicine,” go get the medicine for free and send it to your kid! This is like when old people fall for scams and believe that the IRS really does take payment in the form of Target gift cards or whatever.
Fantine, evaluating her hopeless situation, asks her buddy Marguerite some questions. She asks what miliary fever is, and confirms that it requires a lot of drugs and that it especially hits children and they can die from it. It’s terrible that Marguerite is unknowingly corroborating the Thénardiers’ story, but the exchange has big “Jake and Caleb in prison on Brooklyn 99” energy. I heard all of Marguerite’s answers in Tim Meadows’ voice.
So, with no other way to raise 40 francs on short notice, Fantine goes to a dentist who was previously weird about her nice teeth and sells him her front teeth for 40 francs exactly. My god, Fantine, not to go all #girlboss on you, but you have got to learn to negotiate for more!!!!!!
“My child won’t die of that awful sickness for want of help,” she tells Marguerite. “I’m pleased.”
I’M not, because as we all could have guessed, Cosette was never ill! Honestly it’s a miracle she’s not actually sick, as she’s out sweeping the street in the dead of winter wearing rags.
At this point, Fantine has moved into a garret, has given up her bed and is sleeping on the floor, is in constant pain, and is coughing a lot. I fear this poor girl is not long for this world. At this point I was filled with so much incandescent rage toward Tholomyès—the sums ruining Fantine are tiny by his standards, idle expenses if anything! This was a man who bought a 200-franc walking stick to accessorize! He could have solved all of Fantine’s financial problems without feeling the pinch, and instead he left her to fend for herself like this, probably without even realizing what fate he was consigning her to. God, I hate this fictional man so much.
Because the previous letter worked like gangbusters, the Thénardiers up their demands and say they’ll throw Cosette—allegedly still weak from her illness—onto the street to die if they don’t get 100 francs immediately.
Once again, I know this is not the point, but there is another option here! We’ve learned that a round trip costs 35 francs, so instead of trying to drum up 100 francs, why doesn’t Fantine spend 17 francs to go to the Thénardiers herself, pick up Cosette to save her from being tossed out, and go from there? Fantine, you are killing me. (And yourself!)
Fantine is too broken. Having given up her hair and her beautiful teeth for Cosette, she is resigned, like the Giving Tree, to giving all of her body to help someone she loves.
“Well, let’s get on with it and sell the rest,” she says, and becomes a prostitute.
(I really hate to litigate Fantine’s decisions here, but it seems that becoming a prostitute after you’ve rid yourself of the features that made you most beautiful means you’ll be getting the smallest fees possible. I realize this is a disturbing way to #girlboss but I have to point it out.)
There is something so gutting—even as you know it’s coming—how Fantine keeps making these tremendous acts of self-sacrifice for her child, all for nothing. She’s martyring herself for a lie, and it’s sad beyond belief.
This string of chapters is so, so sad and enraging. I’m sorry to say that for literary reasons, I absolutely loved them. I could not stop nerding out over how Hugo wrote these chapters, charting Fantine’s fall, to parallel Valjean’s downward arc as told in Book 2.
Through Fantine’s descent deeper into poverty, finally landing at prostitution, she ruminates on what has brought her here, and even though the obvious answer is “Tholomyès, the worst man in the world,” she lands on Mayor Madeleine as being the source from which all her ills have sprung, and she comes to hate him deeply—which beautifully mirrors how Valjean himself came to hate the world over the course of his imprisonment.
Hugo goes on to say that Fantine “felt hunted, and something of the wild beast developed in her,” which echoes his description of how prison transformed Valjean “into a wild beast.”
I’m in awe of the double-mirroring going on in Book 5; in both theme and structure, Hugo has, over the course of these chapters, the figure of Valjean/Madeleine serving as a mirror both to the bishop and to Fantine. I’ve noted how the chapters about Mayor Madeleine’s rise parallel the Book 1 chapters about Bishop Myriel, and Fantine’s downward arc has so many callbacks to Valjean’s. The effect this creates, of one figure simultaneously reflecting behind and ahead, standing for both rise and fall, is astonishing.
One of my piano teachers emphasized the importance of understanding and appreciating the “architecture” of structure in Brahms’ music, and I feel like this is the literary equivalent—all these little phrasings and references, making you aware of the larger arcs forming around you. It’s sublime, the way this is structured, and I cannot get over how genius it is.
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