1.2.1-Fizzygingr

Club 93 1.2.1: England and France
Because it’s just about tomorrow, and I wanted to see if I could knock out two chapters in one day. (I would very much like to go to bed but this is good practice for me. What with Real Life Classes starting in a few weeks.)

Anyway, we have a whole new setting now, and whole new characters, and because this is Hugo, the former is every bit as important as the latter, if not more so. The Claymore is a character. She’s both English and French, and that combined with the chapter title is almost certainly of some political importance. But I’ll leave that to someone who knows about politics. I’ll tell you what I do know, though: that she is built for deception. Not just deceptive, but designed that way. It’s in her nature, and it pervades and reflects the whole atmosphere, and the lives of everyone on board.

Like this man. The one with the peasant’s dress and the aristocrat’s hands. The one who has the appearance of one starting out on an adventure, and seems both vigorous and commanding, but his truthfulness is “a studied and exact” truthfulness, and we can’t trust a thing about him.

(Though I’m not sure how authority can be one of the traits he only seems to have? Because that’s an external trait more than an internal one; people either respect your authority or they don’t. Unless it’s more like…he seems like he knows what he’s doing, but he’s going to screw up big time.)

I like the person this guy presents as, at any rate, even if I don’t trust him one bit. I wonder if Hugo’s going to keep on exploring the real self vs. perceived self thing though him. The appearance vs. reality theme will definitely play a part, at any rate, and I’m interested to see how.

And here we are wondering about This Mysterious Man, when we suddenly learn that the ship plans on setting fire to the coast. I don’t know about the rest of you, but that line kind of took me by surprise. I was so wrapped up in wondering about this individual that I forgot war was happening around and to him. It felt wrong and surprising and out of place, the way violence is supposed to feel.

Commentary
Pilferingapples I want you to know I read your post before I made mine, and then I could hardly come up with a post, because this is 99.9 percent of everything I could think of to say.

And yeah, bit of shock with the whole BURN IT BURN IT ALL thing! I was reading along expecting Intrigue and Hat Business, but not, you know. KILL IT WITH FIRE where IT is the crew’s own country. It made the whole “GUILLOTINE THIS MAN” letter at the end seem KINDA REASONABLE, really. :/

Needsmoreresearch (reply to Pilferingapples) Regarding the BURN IT ALL, KILL IT WITH FIRE…yep, this is a for-reals war going on. Which you know, we all know, we all just saw it in the woods, but somehow it gets easy to forget when we’re not right there.

RANT INCOMING, I’M SORRY, IT IS NOT AIMED AT ANYONE IN PARTICULAR, YOU PROBABLY ALL KNOW THIS, BUT I DO RANTS FIRST THING IN THE MORNING: I’m saying this in terms of historiography, really—like, I’ve seen people talking about revolutionary history say that “the war” wasn’t really a part of the Revolution and…and what? Everything that’s happening in Paris relates to the whole, you know…WAR SURROUNDING AND FILLING THE NATION. “Guillotine this man” isn’t just a weirdo revolutionary obsession, it’s a response to a war in which you’ve had the king and queen conspire against the French army, you’ve had the then-president (it was a short-term position) of the Convention, the Girondin Isnard, use rhetoric about obliterating Paris so that years later people would have to search the Seine for traces of its existence. That rhetoric was echoing a similar threat made by one of the foreign armies. (This thing with Isnard was part of the “pathetic sight” of the fall of the Girondins Hugo drops in at the beginning of the chapter.)

But uh yeah we’ll see more war ahead so yeah.

sorry about the rant augh

Pilferingapples (reply to Needsmoreresearch's reply) Hey, not taking it personally! It bugs me too. How can you explain ANYthing about the way the Revolution went without acknowledging the war from outside? Answer: you really CAN’T, it doesn’t make any sense, and then we get two and a half centuries of analysis amounting to OH THOSE WACKY HEAD-LOPPIN’ REVOLUTIONARIES, THIS IS WHY YOU CAN’T TRUST REFORMERS.

I’m really interested to see how Hugo deals with all this, since of course he’s got his own conflicted views about the entire process of the Revolution while still pretty clearly not being against the ideal (the shiny, golden ideal). Which should at least keep things nuanced here (and perhaps since he’s not personal buds with any of THESE royals, there will be a little less of the teeth-grinding assertions of royal niceness).