#anyway feeling sad about valjean hours 2nite

[secretmellowblog]

I love how the parallel between Valjean’s crisis after the Bishop and Javert’s crisis after the barricades is so strong that their thought processes are often described with nearly the exact same metaphors.

The musical conveying this by having them sing the same melody is such a perfect translation of the way their dialogue/descriptions echo each other in the novel...Like:

Valjean: 

“Is it true that I am to be released?” he said, in an almost inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.

Vs Javert: 

As though in a dream, (Javert) murmured rather than uttered this question: “What are you doing here?”

—

Valjean:

Like an owl, who should suddenly see the sun rise, the convict had been dazzled and blinded, as it were, by virtue.

Vs Javert: 

He perceived amid the shadows the terrible rising of an unknown moral sun; it horrified and dazzled him. An owl forced to the gaze of an eagle.

—

Valjean:

He no longer knew where he really was. 

Vs Javert:

Where did he stand? He sought to comprehend his position, and could no longer find his bearings.(…) He no longer understood himself. 

Valjean: 

At times he would have actually preferred to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things should not have happened in this way; it would have agitated him less.

Vs Javert:

But then, why had he permitted that man to leave him alive? He had the right to be killed in that barricade. He should have asserted that right. It would have been better to summon the other insurgents to his succor against Jean Valjean, to get himself shot by force.

—

Valjean:

He actually saw that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He had almost reached the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horrified by him. 

Vs Javert:

He conceived a horror of himself. 

—

Valjean:

He could not yield to the evidence of what was going on within him. He hardened himself against the angelic action and the gentle words of the old man.

Vs Javert:

He had not yielded without resistance to that monster, to that infamous angel, to that hideous hero, who enraged almost as much as he amazed him. 

Valjean:

 By one of those singular effects, which are peculiar to this sort of ecstasies, in proportion as his reverie continued, as the Bishop grew great and resplendent in his eyes, so did Jean Valjean grow less and vanish. After a certain time he was no longer anything more than a shade. All at once he disappeared. The Bishop alone remained; he filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a magnificent radiance.

Vs Javert:

Then his reflections reverted to himself and beside Jean Valjean glorified he beheld himself, Javert, degraded. (…)

Javert, the spy of order, incorruptibility in the service of the police, the bull-dog providence of society, vanquished and hurled to earth; and, erect, at the summit of all that ruin, a man with a green cap on his head and a halo round his brow; this was the astounding confusion to which he had come; this was the fearful vision which he bore within his soul.

—

Valjean:

That which was certain, that which he did not doubt, was that he was no longer the same man, that everything about him was changed, that it was no longer in his power to make it as though the Bishop had not spoken to him and had not touched him.

Vs Javert:

All that he had believed in melted away. Truths which he did not wish to recognize were besieging him, inexorably. Henceforth, he must be a different man.

Valjean:

He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his soul, and it seemed frightful to him.

Vs Javert: 

He felt himself emptied, useless, put out of joint with his past life, turned out, dissolved. Authority was dead within him. He had no longer any reason for existing.

Valjean:

Did he have a distinct perception of what might result to him from his adventure at Digne? Did he understand all those mysterious murmurs which warn or importune the spirit at certain moments of life? Did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just passed the solemn hour of his destiny; that there no longer remained a middle course for him; that if he were not henceforth the best of men, he would be the worst; that it behooved him now, so to speak, to mount higher than the Bishop, or fall lower than the convict; that if he wished to become good he must become an angel; that if he wished to remain evil, he must become a monster? (….) did he catch some shadow of all this in his thought, in a confused way?

Misfortune certainly, as we have said, does form the education of the intelligence; nevertheless, it is doubtful whether Jean Valjean was in a condition to disentangle all that we have here indicated. If these ideas occurred to him, he but caught glimpses of, rather than saw them, and they only succeeded in throwing him into an unutterable and almost painful state of emotion.

Vs Javert:

God, always within man, and refractory, He, the true conscience, to the false; a prohibition to the spark to die out; an order to the ray to remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the veritable absolute when confronted with the fictitious absolute, humanity which cannot be lost; the human heart indestructible; that splendid phenomenon, the finest, perhaps, of all our interior marvels, did Javert understand this? Did Javert penetrate it? Did Javert account for it to himself? Evidently he did not. But beneath the pressure of that incontestable incomprehensibility he felt his brain bursting.

..And these are only the lines I've caught tonight. I don't know, as much as Les Mis adaptations love to focus on Valjean and Javert (often without understanding them cough bbc les mis cough) I feel like there are very few that Get how much both of them were broken by the same prison system, and how the trauma of that makes them view themselves and their own feelings through similar lenses.

#les mis #les mis letters #lm 1.2.13 #1.2.13 #but yee!!!! #valjean/javert parallels #javert #valjean #anyway feeling sad about valjean hours 2nite