About: Dak reads Les Misérables and recaps it here, so that she may better retain the information. Things not to expect: deep literary analysis. Things to expect: Spoilers. All the spoilers
Marius: Book 7; A Rhombus of Villainy (and a list of other bad dudes)
Time for a break from Marius and his crazy pants for an: Actual Bad Guys Alert! This is actually all this short chapter is about. First, a long explanation comparing mines to the strata of society. Here’s a list of people from the top going down to the bottom of this mine analogy: Jan Hus > Luther > Descartes > Voltaire > Condorcet > Robespierre > Marat > Babeuf
Way down at the bottom is a black hole of evil and crime, and that is where we find the next giant list of characters that are going to be introduced to us. A quartet of bandits were ruling the night around Paris in the early 1830’s, and we are going to learn about them now!
First up is Gueulemer. He’s the big dumb lazy brawn of the group. He’s described as having “a colossus’s body and bird’s skull.” So now I’m imaging he looks like a goomba from that live-action Super Mario Brothers movie. Good luck removing that image from your head. You’re welcome! He could have used his brute power for good by capturing bad guys, but chose to become a bad guy instead.
Babet is the opposite of Gueulemer. He’s a thin shrewd man who doesn’t give away any of his secrets. He sells plaster busts of “The head of the Government,” as well as being one of those street tooth-pulling guys.
Babet had been a family man and a traveled with them once upon a time. He read the papers, which is a rare thing in the circles he runs in and bemoaned the fact that his wife never gave birth to a child with a goat face. This didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t like he was yearning for a goat-faced child. He’d just read about such an event once, and that could have made them a lot of money. He left his family so he could take on Paris.
Claquesous is the most mysterious of the group. Nobody knows where he lives, nobody knows his name (Claquesous is a nickname.) Nobody knows what he looks like, he either wears a mask or lurks in the darkness. He only talks to people with his back turned.
Montparnasse is the youngest and I get the impression most deadly of the bunch. Not even twenty, he’s a fresh faced kid, bringing the pretty to the underworld party. By eighteen he had a stack of bodies in his wake already. Daaaamn, boyfriend. He is a gamin turned assassin, and his reason for being a murdering marauder is simply this: He wants to be the best dressed dude in Paris. (What? Is he disposing of the competish? Or is he stealing their finery? Or just stealing their money so he can buy new clothes? All of the above? What is your game, Montparnasse!?)
Even though his coat is a bit threadbare, Montparnasse is the fashion plate of the group. He wears his hat at a jaunty angle so he can show off a lock of hair as is the fashion. He keeps a flower in his buttonhole. He was “gentle, effeminate, graceful, robust, weak and ferocious.”
Does anybody else want to see some sort of dandy-off between Bamatabois, Bahorel, and Montparnasse? Fierce Mustache vs. Rash Waistcoat vs. Deadly Dandy. One of the events can be waistcoat layering! Bonus points for each extraneous fob watch chain!
This band of characters was known as Patron-Minette. They were basically a pimple on the butt of society, if I had to put it into different words. If anybody needed any shady business done, then these were the guys to see.
Now this quartet weren’t single..err..eight handedly? perpetrating all the crime in all of Paris associated with Patron-Minette. Here is a big long list of the gang’s lower echelons:
Panchaud, aka Printainier, aka Bigrenaille,
Brujon. (There is a whole dynasty of Brujons that I am being informed we will be learning about later),
Boulatruelle. (See! I knew we would hear about him again! If you don’t remember and you hate links, Boulatruelle is the friendly former convict who saw Jean Valjean go into the woods with his treasure chest of money outside of Montfermeil. You know, when there was talk of Valjean belonging to some mysterious roaming pack of thieves. What are we describing now? A roaming pack of thieves? See, how it all comes together!)
Laveuve,
Finistère,
Homer Hogu (a black man),
Mardisoir,
Dépâche,
Fauntleroy, aka Bouquetière,
Glorieux (former convict),
Barrecarrosse, aka M. Dupont,
Lesplande-du-Sud,
Poussagrive,
Carmagnolet
Kruideniers aka Bizarro (aka best alias yet!)
Mangedentelle,
Les-pieds-en-l’air,
Demi-liard aka Deux-milliards,
and etc…
Hey! Why stop there, Hugo? We should learn the name of each and every bandit ever associated with Patron-Minette and their little dogs too!
There’s a few more paragraphs about how these goblins among men rule the night and the only thing that can slay them is the daylight, and that is it for this chapter!
I hope you’ve enjoyed these last few relatively short installments, because the next one is nearly 100 pages long, so I’m predicting a lot of crazy stuff is going to go down and we’ll have about a thousand new characters to learn about. Either that, or it’s one hundred pages about something only tangentially related to the story, like the history of Parisian cobblestones or something. I will leave you in suspense!
Until the next time!
