Previously in this series.
You are a child who has been kidnapped, abandoned, or killed in a horrifying and traumatic way, but you still retain the inherent goodness and innocence of the human soul, and are a symbol of hope to all those around you.
You are a horribly disfigured man with a vendetta against society and, for no easily discernible reason, a pet arctic carnivore with a Meaningful Name.
You are a woman and at the age of fifteen, the consciousness of your beauty bursts upon you in a sudden instant, like the advent of the sun, and you become the most fashionable woman in Paris.
You have a broad forehead, broad as the expanse of sky over the horizon, which is a sign of profound thoughtfulness in men, and which in no way reflects the physiognomy of the author.
You are a man, and complicated historical forces have forced you into a marginalized life, possibly one of inadvertent crime, for which you have been imprisoned for a million years.
You have literally run off with a goat.
You frequently make puns, but they are never funny. They are multilingual, serious, and full of multiple levels of meaning, and include at least two pieces of poignant social commentary.
You are a woman and a young man declares his interest in you by staring at you in a public place. You find this charming.
You are a mother and, in a moment of despair, exclaim that you would die for your child. Society takes you up on the offer.
You are in sympathy with but two things in the world. One of them is a building.
You come across a stranger in a darkened alley by a cathedral—but is it a stranger? No! For there are but twelve people in all of France, and you have long and complicated histories with all of them.
You are a woman, and your eventual degradation will result in a string of hauntingly poetic metaphors, and then death.
The world is literally dark with the weight of your existential crisis.
You are rich, and you are terrible.
You are poor, and you die.
You visit a courtroom and it is hilarious despite the melancholic gravity that suffuses the rest of your life.
You have a lot of profound and complicated thoughts about justice and civil unrest, and express them in the form of digressions on Breton peasant culture, the history of printing, and the Battle of Waterloo.
Love is, to you, a somber and starry transfiguration mingled with torture, an ecstasy in agony, the purification of the heart through the refiner’s fire. Though God himself has rendered transparent your love’s soul to your eyes, you don’t actually know her name.
You have made out with a handkerchief belonging to an old man.
You think nothing of contracting inheritable life debts with villains.
Your friends are fighting for liberty and likely to die. You join them not out of ideological impulses, but an excess of Romantic melancholy that drives you to seek your own destruction in the face of personal setbacks. Everyone is cool with this.
A chance meeting with a noble stranger has destabilized your conception of the world. As the sun sets or midnight chimes, definitely one or the other, a moment of frightful calm descends upon you and you see that you cannot go on as you have before. This hour demands of you the ultimate sacrifice.
The noblest of your antagonists has committed suicide. It was symbolic.
You die. It was also symbolic.
All that is left is the symbolism.
Tags: books, elyse martin, how to tell what novel you’re in
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“For there are but twelve people in all of France, and you have long and complicated histories with all of them.”
Ahahahah this is perfect.
You are a woman and at the age of fifteen, the consciousness of your beauty bursts upon you in a sudden instant, like the advent of the sun, and you become the most fashionable woman in Paris.
Did they not have acne back in Victor Hugo’s day? When I was 15 my face looked like a pepperoni pizza with extra pepperoni.
Romantic heroes don’t have acne. Acne is for other, less interesting people. After all, how would you find time to whangst about your inner turmoil if you had to worry about something as trivial as physical imperfections?
thank you for the word “whangst.”
*throws the TVTropes timewasting bomb*
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Wangst
Sorrynotsorry
You fiend.
Same here. Beauty may not have burst upon me, but zits sure did.
You are a Parisian cobblestone.
Love is, to you, a somber and starry transfiguration mingled with torture, an ecstasy in agony, the purification of the heart through the refiner’s fire. Though God himself has rendered transparent your love’s soul to your eyes, you don’t actually know her name.
…“Marius’s amours!” exclaimed Grantaire. “I see them now. Marius is a fog, and he must have found a vapor. Marius is of the poets’ race. He who says poet says fool. Tymbraeus Apollo. Marius and his Mary, or his Maria, or his Marietta, or his Marion, they must make odd lovers. I can imagine how it is. Ecstasies where they forget to kiss. Chaste on earth, but coupling in the infinite. They are souls that have senses. They sleep together in the stars.”
Remember when Marius cries on a tree for two hours because he can’t afford a passport?
Yes. Yes I do remember that.
I proper love you.
Last year I read my way through Les Miserables. I’m not sorry I did so, although I’ll probably never do that again. However…
I have a friend who learned early on never to admit to people at parties that he plays tabletop RPGs because he did so once, to someone who’d said he was currently playing in a Lord of the Rings campaign. This other guy pinned him to a wall, and explained in excruciating, minute detail, dice roll by dice roll, hit point by hit point, how his dwarf character ran into battle and was promptly trampled by an oliphaunt. It took twenty-five minutes.
That is exactly how it feels to read Victor Hugo’s account of the battle of Waterloo.
That is a terrifyingly accurate analogy.
Huh, I tried reading that about 2 years ago, and got stranded halfway through (which, in my defense, is about 500 pages in), but the Waterloo part was actually one of the segments that I thought was interesting. The endless discussions about the use of monasteries and religion as a whole on the other hand? *snore*
I liked the Waterloo section too!
that 823-word-long sentence on Louis-Philippe, though…
I also liked the Waterloo section! The section on The History Of Parisian Street Slang, Including Why It Will Be Outdated The Moment I Publish This Book But Fuck It, I’m Putting It In Anyway Because I Get Paid By The Word nearly killed me.
But his theories on etymology! The way you can tell where characters come from by what slang words they use! That bit where he talks about how criminal slang is just one kind of jargon, and goes on to list like twelve words for “boy who works as a [profession]’s assistant”, culminating in “cherub”!
No, I hated the bit about 1817 popular culture the most.
Oh good god the Waterloo section! The level of minutiae he goes to made me feel like there was no way he wasn’t just making crap up. Like, no one actually knows what some Prussian lieutenant was doing at exactly 7:23 while the wind blew lightly from the South-East. And in the end actual characters spend all of two pages on the battle field after the damn battle is over! Arg!
I feel like the Waterloo section honestly gave me some sort of Victor Hugo-related Stockholm Syndrome, because after that, I was cool with everything he wanted to tell me. The entire history of some random convent? Sure! Pages and pages on Paris street slang that I can’t properly understand because I don’t speak French and am reading in translation? Bring it on! Chapters on the history of the Paris sewers? Please, M Hugo, tell me more!
I have actually voluntarily read other nonfiction about the history of waste management in major cities, and I blame this interest entirely on Victor Hugo.
I loved the Waterloo part. But the sewers of Paris… I had to skip in the end. I’ve been telling myself for years I’d try again one day, and I just can’t.
Is it weird that i never wanted to read teh book before hearing that it contains a history of Waterloo and convents? I may skip the “story” part.
To be fair, part of my interest in the sewer section continuing for as long as Victor Hugo wanted was that I knew that Javert was going to die right after it and I would be stuck with no one but Valjean in full Martyr mode, Cosette the nonentity, and Marius Pontmercy, King of Goobers.
I just laughed part of a noodle through my nose at “Marius Pontmercy, King of Goobers.”
Quoting from my copy of an English translation by Charles E. Wilbour: “We do not, of course, profess to give here a history of Waterloo…’ This is followed by 32 pages describing Waterloo. I love it.
It takes, at minimum, 3 paragraphs to reach the conclusion that you are, indeed, miserable and full of existential regret.
*looks around* yep, only twelve.
(I think I’m actually in a Victor Hugo novel . . . )
I’m not, but I’m pretty sure I dated a guy who was.
Something weird going on here. The following three paragraphs appear in the preview on the front page, but not on this page:
“You are a man, and complicated historical forces have forced you into a marginalized life, possibly one of inadvertent crime, for which you have been imprisoned for a million years.
You have literally run off with a goat.
You are a woman, and your eventual degradation will result in a string of hauntingly poetic metaphors, and then death.”
My fault! I’d received a new draft, went in to make changes, and neglected to update the teaser. WTG NICOLE
I think it’s fixed now.
“You are rich, and you are terrible.
You are poor, and you die”.
Be right back, starting a wall sampler.
You have literally run off with a goat.
Have I stolen the goat in a moment of desperation, to feed my illegitimate child? Or are the goat and I involved in a romantic relationship?
It can be two things.
And also symbolic, probably.
See also: How To Tell If You Are Aberforth.
Though God himself has rendered transparent your love’s soul to your eyes, you don’t actually know her name.
I think one of my guy friends is in a Victor Hugo novel.
is his name marius
If so, may I stab him.
You have sold everything you ever owned to buy bread. Including your teeth.
Oh god. As someone who has spent an embarrassing portion of the last week reading Les Mis fanfiction, I am so delighted.
oh, we had the same week then.
You are prone to extremely long and verbose bouts of historical and societal digressions. Even you’ve forgotten your own fucking plot line.
Sewers. SEWERS.
The cloaca of the world, where excrement mixes with the sublime.
You disdain religion, and yet believe in an inherent goodness and nobility which, if it can be revealed within men, elevates the soul.
You are a landlord or priest, whose spiritual corruption is reflected in his dentition.
You are a meticulously-describe street in the old part of Paris which has now been replaced by one of Hausmann’s boulevards.
You are putting up, standing on, or pulling down a barricade.
Also I think this may finally (FINALLY) be the correct platform for me to say how VERY MUCH I hate Marius. Musical-Marius is fine, if a bit whingy, so nothing prepared me for the BLINDING RAGE that was reading book Marius. Ugh! And the worst of it is the narrative thinks he’s positively fantastic! I think that might have been what pushed me over the edge honestly — if the narrative has suggested that he was a basically decent person who had some learning to do and was making some (FAIRLY EGREGIOUS) mistakes along the way… Well, he would still have been annoying really. I love when he shows up to undertake Suicide By Revolution (For A Cause I Don’t Believe In, With People I Don’t Like) and he does some… thing, by accident, and they’re all like, you are the best at revolting, you are our leader now! And also the bit where he kills Jean Valjean by being a UNREASONABLY JUDGEMENTAL TWAT DO YOU HEAR ME MARIUS YOU WERE DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT ONE but will the narrative ever mention it, oh no.
I like book Eponine though. She’s awesome.
In the musical, Marius is vastly improved by the presence of the People’s Revolutionary Front and Men’s Chorus.
The July Revolution happens and he doesn’t. notice.
Also, Marius is an idiot for going for the tedious Cosette instead of the obviously superior Eponine (this applies to the book, the musical, and the film. Especially the film. Film Eponine is just the best). Although I regard Javert as the hero of the story so feel free to disregard.
Théophile Gautier: “Just at that time Victor Hugo’s Misérables was in great vogue, and the names of the characters of the novels were on everyone’s lips. I called the two male kittens Enjolras and Gavroche, while the little female received the name of Eponine.
“Eponine attached herself particularly to me, like the Eponine of the novel to Marius, but I, being less taken up with Cosette than that handsome young man, could accept the affection of this gentle and devoted cat, who still shares the pleasures of my suburban retreat and is the inseparable companion of my hours of work.”
Awwww.
My first cat was named Cosette! In my defense, I was 10 and had not yet read the book.
You dramatically commit suicide after the unexpected mercy of your lifelong enemy triggers within you an existential crisis. But first you stop by your workplace to tidy up your paperwork and write a helpful memo of constructive criticism to your boss. (The memo is, of course, included in the narrative in its entirety.)
And your boss is able to tell that the memo is a suicide note, despite its total lack of relevant details.
OKAY BUT CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW QUEER ALL OF LES AMIS ARE, BECAUSE I HAVE SEVERAL IMPORTANT OPINIONS ABOUT THIS
YES PLEASE SHARE WITH THE CLASS
OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OKAY
first of all: agender aroace jehan who SLAMS haters in the trashcan
transboy demibiro demibi enjolras who ALSO SLAMS haters in the trashcan but in a much less artistic way
aropan eponine (i know shes not one of les amis but i dont CARE)
genderqueer demipanro bi bahorel shoving nerds into lockers (and then letting them out and buying them lunch and like three stuffed animals) (bahorel REALLY REALLY likes stuffed animals)
Hey! Enjolras isn’t attracted to women who aren’t The Shining Ideal Of France!
Wait, which book does the hankerchief making out happen in?
Les Miserables. It’s the bit where Marius (king of goobers) finds a handkerchief embroidered with UF on the bench where Cosette and Valjean habitually sit, decides “her name must be Ursula!”, and conspicuously kisses it whenever he sees her.
Valjean is, of course, by this time going by Ultime Fauchelevent.
How did I ever forget this!?
Marius does *so many* ridiculous things, it’s easy to let one slip the mind.
Wait, which book does the hankerchief making out happen in?
How did I ever forget this!?
“You have literally run off with a goat.” THIS IS ME.
“You have a lot of profound and complicated thoughts about justice and civil unrest, and express them in the form of digressions on Breton peasant culture, the history of printing, and the Battle of Waterloo.”
I think this is actually a sign that you are Victor Hugo.
The world is literally dark with the weight of your existential crisis.
Absolutely, yes, yes, this is my life.
YES PLEASE SHARE WITH THE CLASS
It’s a lot about dying, isn’t it?
You are a drunken boor who worship a marble statue come to life as a mud puddle worships the sun.
I took a break from most of the internet for a week and missed this completely! It is wonderful. ELYSE THIS ROCKS
There are plenty or barricades in Paris. Somehow, all characters who matter to the plot end up at the same one.
Everyone lived in the Gorbeau House at some point.
You are assigned spy duty. You aren’t even trying to blend in. You’re also the most known policeman in all of France.
To change your alignment, or to die? Depends on your starting alignment. In a staged version, you even get to sing the same song with diffferent lyrics. Much symblism.
You are in love but senpai won’t notice you. You crossdress and run off into battle intending to die. You are successful because you are not a shieldmaiden and there is no ancient evil thing for you to kill.