Femslash Revolution's Prompt Exchange

Yes, I have the spleen, complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!

nickcartell: Papa did say if Cosette was good he would get her puppy!! Happy Holidays from all of us at 55 Rue Plumet. We hope you have a safe and blessed holiday season!

Nick Cartell’s Instagram 12/15/18

@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.

my first attempt on Sketchbook Express - female Sauron in battle. original design by reforgedmairon.

france: ten

france: twenty

france: thirty

france: forty

france: fifty

france: sixty

france:

france:

france: sixty ten

world: france what are you do—

france: four twenties

world: france stop it

france: four twenties ten

world: france that doesn't even make any sense

france:

france:

france:

world:

france:

world:

france: hundred.

“is joly holding the bouquet?” yes

I just used the line “that’s not an asshole move, it’s a whole asshole ballet” and I’m kinda proud of it so it’s going here where it will get the recognition it deserves.

the only true adaptation of les mis is this one

me, sobbing over all these goshdarned adaptions: why isnt bossuet bald? why is he never bald?? hes supposed to be bald???

this morning for the first time I got up from my bed and I shucked off my nightclothes and I looked at my body in the pale morning light, and I saw that the body I was in was good. I saw the softness of the dimples in my elbows and my knees, and I saw the fall of hair neither really brown nor really blonde, and I saw the muscles beneath the padded softness of my waist and hips and I saw that the softness was also good. in the pale morning light my body was not something to be ashamed of. the next time I stumble bleary-eyed from bed I hope I will take that short time to look in the pale morning light, and remember that moment as clear as water when I knew that I loved the house I had made for myself.

to me: letters, ii.

LES MIS RULE 63 Gina Torres as Inspector Javert

Some police officers have a peculiar expression, combining an air of meanness with an air of authority. Javert had this, without the meanness. 

The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear that on growing up it would devour the other little ones.

Give a human face to this wolf’s whelp, and you have Javert.

Javert was born in a prison. Her mother was a fortune-teller whose husband was in the galleys. She grew up thinking herself outside of society, and despaired of ever entering it. She noticed that society irrevocably closes its doors on two classes of people, those who attack it and those who guard it; she could choose between these two classes only; at the same time she felt that she had a powerful foundation of rectitude, order, and honesty based on an irrepressible hatred for that race to which she belonged. She entered the police. She succeeded. At forty she was an inspector.

Her face consisted of a regal nose, broad cheekbones, and deep brown eyes. One felt ill at ease on first seeing her thick eyebrows and strongly defined nose and lips. When she laughed, which was rarely and terribly, her voluptuous lips parted, showing her teeth. When she laughed, Javert was a tiger; strange, majestic, terrifying. Beyond that, she had an oval face, a square jaw, thick black hair that fell over her shoulders, between the eyes a permanent central crease like an angry star, a gloomy look, and an air of fierce command.