Les Misérables
My favorite part (major spoilers)
I must get this off my chest. This part concerns an elderly gardener named Monsieur Mabeuf. He slowly sank into poverty and had to sell everything he owned; he had absolutely nothing left, and nothing to lose. Gloomy and insane, he ultimately sacrifices his life in a revolutionary riot. Here he meets Enjolras, a revolutionary, in the rioters’ barricade.
“He [Mabeuf] walked straight to Enjolras, the insurgents fell back before him with a religious awe, he snatched the flag from Enjolras, who drew back petrified, and then, nobody daring to stop him, or to aid him, this old man of eighty, with shaking head but firm foot, began to climb slowly up the stairway of paving stones built into the barricade. It was so gloomy and so grand that all about him cried: “Hats off!” At each step it was frightful; his white hair, his decrepit face, his large forehead bald and wrinkled, his hollow eyes, his quivering and open mouth, his old arm raising the red banner, surged up out of the shadow and grew grand in the bloody light of the torch, and they seemed to see the ghost of ‘93 rising out of the earth, the flag of terror in its hand.
When he was on the top of the last step, when this trembling and terrible phantom, standing upon that mound of rubbish before twelve hundred invisible muskets, rose up, in the face of death and as if he were stronger than it, the whole barricade had in the darkness a supernatural and colossal appearance.
There was one of those silences which occur only in the presence of prodigies.
In the midst of this silence the old man waved the red flag and cried:
“Vive la révolution ! vive la république ! fraternity! equality! and death!”
The way he said “and death” instead of “liberty” (as the phrase is supposed to go) can symbolize two things, I think: “death” to antiquated values, prejudices, and monarchies, and the revolutionaries’ willingness to accept their own deaths in the name of France’s future. The author himself makes no argument against doing the latter.
They heard from the barricade a low and rapid muttering like the murmur of a hurried priest dispatching a prayer. It was probably the commissary of police who was making the legal summons at the other end of the street.
Then the same ringing voice which had cried: “Who is there?” cried: “Disperse!”
M. Mabeuf, pallid, haggard, his eyes illumined by the mournful fires of insanity, raised the flag above his head and repeated:
“Vive la république !”
…
Enjolras stooped down, raised the old man’s head, and timidly kissed him on the forehead, then separating his arms, and handling the dead with a tender care, as if he feared to hurt him, he took off his coat, showed the bleeding holes to all.
and said:
“There now is our flag.”
The use of Mabeuf’s coat as a flag symbolizes how the revolutionaries were standing up against the oppression of the people.
Page created June 9, 2024. Last updated June 9, 2024