1.1.1-Primeideal

Club NinetyThree 1.1.1: The Woods of La Saudraie
Greetings, revolutionaries!

I first read “Ninety-Three” last summer, this will be my second time reading it through. I’ve skipped to some of the more interesting parts in between (like when the club was announced), but there are a lot of long digressions that I…didn’t get into last time and don’t expect much to get into this time, either. Ah well. Maybe I’ll be ficcing/lyricing/stuff along the way, maybe not, we’ll see.

No specific spoilers below, but things to watch for that might make more sense with hindsight, idk?

The forest of La Saudraie was tragic. It was in these woods that the civil war began its crimes in the month of November, 1792. The ferocious cripple, Mousqueton, had come out of these gloomy depths; the number of murders committed there made one’s hair stand on end. There was no place more frightful. The soldiers penetrated there cautiously. Everywhere was abundance of flowers; one was surrounded with a trembling wall of branches, from which hung the charming freshness of the foliage; sunbeams here and there made their way through the green shade; on the ground the gladiolus, the yellow swamp flag, the meadow narcissus, the gênotte, the herald of fine weather, and the spring crocus formed the embroidery and decoration of a thick carpet of vegetation, luxuriant in every kind of moss, from that resembling velvet, to that like stars. The soldiers advanced step by step in silence, noiselessly pushing aside the underbrush. The birds warbled above their bayonets.

This is a paragraph. Like, we’re not even going to break in between “scariest place ever” and “pretty flowers yay”—the beauty of the natural world is independent of the atrocities being committed there.

"Curiosity is one form of feminine bravery." This is describing Houzarde, the water-carrier, who scouts ahead to find Michelle Fléchard. We don’t see Michelle being specifically praised in this chapter, but we do see her give all the bread to the kids (oh, hey, stop me if you’ve heard this one). Watch to see how Michelle’s specific feminine virtues show up down the line. Is she specifically brave? Is she specifically curious? Does Hugo have some issues writing about female characters? Uh, this might be harder than expected to not spoil.

The sergeant, who was clever with his tongue, continued to question her. "People have parents, you devil, or have had them! Who are you? Speak!"

Radoub is not necessarily the most pleasant guy. But by the end of the chapter, we already see him making the call to adopt the children and their mother. Is he going to evolve throughout the course of the book, or do we already see all sides of him here?

"What, you don’t know who killed your husband?" "No." "Was it a Blue? Was it a White?" "It was a bullet."

Boom. That last line is what caught my eye the first time—Hugo’s not messing around. There will be time (and pages and pages and chapters of chapters) to go into detail about the motivations and justifications of both sides here, but from Michelle’s perspective (and her kids’), what matters is that a particular individual has been shot and killed. Even this perspective, says Hugo, matters a great deal.

Commentary
Primeideal Reblogging to expand on that last point, now that I’ve seen some more discussion.

A follow-up on 1.1.1: people are talking about the importance of names, and all these characters getting names at least in the dialogue if not the narration. One character who doesn’t get a name, however, is Michelle Fléchard’s husband, who doesn’t really need one at this point. He’s already dead—if he hadn’t been, this scene wouldn’t have happened.

Some parts of the book would still work if he’d survived. There are long walls of texts that aren’t even narratives at all, those could go on just the same whether he’d lived or died. And the next few chapters aren’t at all dependent on his role in the story. But everything that hinges on Michelle and her children joining this battalion couldn’t have happened if one anonymous peasant hadn’t first been killed.

Once the scope of that comes to light, maybe some of the characters would rather things hadn’t panned out quite the way they did. Would the whites or blues choose to let the man live, if they could do it all over again?

And if so, would he have deserved to live merely because of his ripple effect on the rest of the plotline? Or because of something more fundamental, independent of how his life and his family’s interact with the lives of others?

Pilferingapples (reply to Primeideal) OOOOH. That IS something to know to watch out for. I mean, you’re not being spoilery exactly, but one of the almost frustrating things about Hugo is that no, there isn’t any throwaway character, EVERYONE REALLY DOES MATTER, and I CAN’T pay equal attention to everyone in a single read (hence my ALREADY planning another Les Mis reread. HUGOOO!) so I’m REALLY OKAY with having potentially key points flagged for future reference!

Lifeisyetfair (reply to Pilferingapples' reply) Expanding on primeideal’s point, everything that really matters in this novel flows from the act of mercy depicted in this chapter. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his spoiler-filled essay Victor Hugo’s Romances, suggests the main character of the novel is effectively a moral dilemma: “It is a novel built upon “a sort of enigma,” which was at that date laid before revolutionary France….That enigma was this: “Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill the sheep?” This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the end.”

Some of the main themes are the power and limits of utilitarianism as a moral philosophy, and the consequences of mercy. If evil flows from a good act, does that condemn the act itself? Is the act morally necessary whatever the consequences?

The question of 1793 and the Terror is whether or not a bad act may be necessary to produce good, and whether such acts can ever be justified. The question of Ninety-Three is the complement to that, the reverse.

The first chapter sets up this debate. Remember as we read through the book, that much of it would not have happened if the troops had not adopted Michelle and her kids. If they’d passed her by, or if they’d shot her.