a blind flaneur

Gavroche’s sleep inside the Elephant is interrupted by a whistle from the thug Montparnasse. He needs the gaman to help rescue one of his gang who has escaped from prison and is stranded precariously on the edge of a high wall not far from Place de la Bastille. Chapter IV.6.3 describes the prison break in […]

In Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo’s characters do not exchange  dialog. They declaim at one another, often histrionically.  The novel was written immediately after the tempestuous debut in 1829 of Hugo’s play, Hernani. Dramaturgy in one guise or another was paying the bills, and it sustained the young novelist as he scrambled to satisfy a […]

I continue to marvel at the rogue Gavroche and see in him the prototype for Huck Finn. After explaining how he “borrowed” his bedroom furnishings from the beasts at the Jardin des Plantes, Gavroche adds insouciantly, “You crawl over the walls and you don’t care a straw for the government.” Victor Hugo pauses in telling […]

Gavroche climbed nimbly up the leg of the Elephant in Place de la Bastille, entering its cavernous belly through a breach so narrow “only cats and homeless children” could pass through it. He dropped a rope so the little boys could join him. Then Gavroche lit a bit of wax-coated string called a […]

Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
The first time I came up from underground at the Bastille Metro stop, I imagined hearing the prisoners’ chorus from Fidelio as they sang “Luft und Leit.” On some rational level I knew what awaited me above ground, but on a deeper, more archetypal plane, I […]

Two 19th-century illustrations depict Place de la Bastille in the years before and after Victor Hugo ’s description of the Elephant in Les Misérables IV.6. 2: [above left] Elephant caparaconne d’or by Alvoine, from the time of Napoleon; [below left] La Colonne de Julliet, from the time of Louis-Phillippe.
The source for these illustrations is […]

After Gavroche and the “brats” devour their sou’s worth of bread, they continue down Rue Saint-Antoine to Place de la Bastille,where Gavroche has taken up residence, surreptitiously, in the belly of the Elephant. Yes, the Elephant. One is tempted to say that only Victor Hugo could have imagined the ensuing scene, but in fact the […]

[Photo by Ms. Modigliani]
If Gavroche and his charges found themselves famished on Rue Saint-Antoine today, they might duck down a side street to Rue des Rosiers (a.k.a Falafel Alley), heart of the old Jewish neighborhood in the Marais. They could knosh at the world-famous L’As du Fallafel and never leave the street. There you pay […]

Les Misérables is one of those roman á fleuvre (a phrase cribbed from Walter Benjamin, who knew all about the genre after translating Proust) that descend through treacherous eddies and backwaters before finally reaching the sea. It takes a stalwart, even obsessed, reader to cover its vast distance in one passage. I […]