Yip1982
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Marius surviving the fall of the barricadesI know I've only seen Les Mis twice, but I can re-live the musical in the cast recordings.
It's really amazing that Marius is able to survive the fall of the barricade, whereas Gavroche, Enjolras and his fellow students didn't. I'm sure that Valjean's prayer (Bring Him Home) must have brought this about, but could it be that during the final battle he positions himself far away from the soldiers and so only suffers wounds? Perhaps his love for Cosette was able to distract him from the onslaught, as we can see from the Red and Black sequence, and after Do You Hear The People Sing, when he did not join the throng of students.
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Eponine93
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Hm... maybe Jean Valjean had something to do with that...
I always thought it was just too ironic that only character that survived the barricade was the lover of the main character's surrogate-daughter, even before I knew squat about the show.
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Orestes Fasting
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*twitch* That's coincidence, not irony. It's ironic that the only person who survived the fall of the barricade was the only one who deliberately went there to die.
</linguistic pet peeve>
As far as the musical is concerned, I think Marius was just lucky to get seriously injured fairly early on in the battle, so that he was already down when the last onslaught came. Nobody's going to waste their ammunition shooting at what looks like a dead body, and once he's down for the count he can't go and get himself killed in a fit of suicidal heroics.
In the book, it was blind luck--one of Hugo's coincidences. By all accounts he should have been the one killed first, since he was out in the thick of things completely exposed to the attackers.
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eponine5
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I always assumed that perhaps Marius wasn't the only one left alive by the end of the fighting. Other people at the barricade may have been injured or unconscious in the same way as him, but Marius simply had Valjean to take him away and keep him alive.
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Fantine
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That seems like a plausible theory, eponine5.
I also agree with you, OF. He got lucky.
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Eponine93
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Eponine5, I completely agree with you. Yip1982, you have to understand it wasn't like he just walked away from the battle unharmed. In the musical, they don't really show the recovery period in detail (for obvious reasons) but Marius hovered in between life and death for I believe four months, even though he was under the care of a doctor and his grandfather. When he was taken away from the barricade, he was so bloody and injured that Thenardier, as well as the cab driver Valjean hired, thought he was a dead corpse.
Marius was kept alive by Valjean's blessing for the sake of the plot. Valjean's prayer has nothing to do with the fact he survived. In fact, at that point in the book (the night before) Valjean didn't even really like Marius.
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lesmisboy
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Slightly O/T in this thread, but can anyone answer a question for me? I read the book ages ago, and just wanted to ask what happened to Azelma Thenardier? Does she die? Also, (PLEASE forgive my ignorance), is Cosette's real name Euphrasie or did I read that wrong?
If it is, how does she get the name Cosette? I remember Victor Hugo does explain this, but still didn't quite understand...x
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Glissando
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Yes, her name was Euphrasie, how that became Cosette I forget.
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Orestes Fasting
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Even Hugo explains it as simply some ineffable instinct of mothers to somehow come up with nicknames that have nothing to do with the kid's real name.
Azelma survives and moves to the United States with Th�nardier to become a slave trader.
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lesmisboy
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Thanks very much, both of you. One more question (sorry!), what is Fantine's surname?
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Orestes Fasting
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She doesn't have one. She was a child of the streets; she didn't even have a name at all until someone called her Fantine in passing when she was little and the name stuck.
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lesmisboy
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Thanks OF. When you say 'a child of the steets', do you mean like an urchin? Who brought her up/educated her??
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Orestes Fasting
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Yeah, pretty much. Nobody knew who her parents were, and she didn't have any education. I suppose since she grew up in Montreuil-sur-Mer instead of Paris or another big city, her childhood wasn't too awful.
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lesmisboy
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Thanks very much x
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Gargamel
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As usual with Hugo (in almost every novel he wrote) Co�ncidence and plain luck is everywhere!
(try to count every extraordinary co�ncidence in the plot... )
So as usual, it is extraordinary that Marius lives after the barricade. But it is also true that he was not the only one between live and death at that moment on the barricades!
Valjean and his grandfather saved him!
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Aimee
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Re: Marius surviving the fall of the barricades | Yip1982 wrote: | I know I've only seen Les Mis twice, but I can re-live the musical in the cast recordings.
It's really amazing that Marius is able to survive the fall of the barricade, whereas Gavroche, Enjolras and his fellow students didn't. I'm sure that Valjean's prayer (Bring Him Home) must have brought this about, but could it be that during the final battle he positions himself far away from the soldiers and so only suffers wounds? Perhaps his love for Cosette was able to distract him from the onslaught, as we can see from the Red and Black sequence, and after Do You Hear The People Sing, when he did not join the throng of students. |
I think in a dramatic way, yes Valjean's prayer had something to do with Marius's suvival ie for plot and narrative purposes. Whether you believe in the direct power of prayer is up to you but for the purposes of the show/story God's presence is everywhere.
As to him being distracted by his love for Cosette, I'd echo what has been said already, that he was devastated that Cosette had left Paris and gone to England [he thinks] and so wanted to die [in the book] didn't care if he lived or died in [the show]. He was reckless and the first injured in the final battle.
Having only seen the show twice you might not noticed the story develop. Here in the UK, after Marius is injured, Enjolras goes to him and tries to revive him but fails. Thinking he is dead, Enjolras then throws himself right to the top of the barricade and over the top in a moment of vengence. This is why he is out front when he dies.
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wtwt5237
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Re: Marius surviving the fall of the barricades | Aimee wrote: | | Yip1982 wrote: | I know I've only seen Les Mis twice, but I can re-live the musical in the cast recordings.
It's really amazing that Marius is able to survive the fall of the barricade, whereas Gavroche, Enjolras and his fellow students didn't. I'm sure that Valjean's prayer (Bring Him Home) must have brought this about, but could it be that during the final battle he positions himself far away from the soldiers and so only suffers wounds? Perhaps his love for Cosette was able to distract him from the onslaught, as we can see from the Red and Black sequence, and after Do You Hear The People Sing, when he did not join the throng of students. |
I think in a dramatic way, yes Valjean's prayer had something to do with Marius's suvival ie for plot and narrative purposes. Whether you believe in the direct power of prayer is up to you but for the purposes of the show/story God's presence is everywhere.
As to him being distracted by his love for Cosette, I'd echo what has been said already, that he was devastated that Cosette had left Paris and gone to England [he thinks] and so wanted to die [in the book] didn't care if he lived or died in [the show]. He was reckless and the first injured in the final battle.
Having only seen the show twice you might not noticed the story develop. Here in the UK, after Marius is injured, Enjolras goes to him and tries to revive him but fails. Thinking he is dead, Enjolras then throws himself right to the top of the barricade and over the top in a moment of vengence. This is why he is out front when he dies. |
Are you trying to tell us that Hugo believed in the power of God and he used it to push his plot forward?
And it is a little weird that you think Marius was distracted because his Red and Black and Do you hear the people sing sequences. They were meant to describe the character's mentality and had nothing to do with where they really were or what they were really doing.
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eponine5
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The point is that Marius didn't care what he was doing, and he was so distracted by Cosette that he wasn't at the barricades for any reason like the other students'. (Well, Grantaire also had a different reason, but that's another issue.) They went there to win something, he kind of went there to be defeated.
Anyway, that's just my interpretation.
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Orestes Fasting
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Re: Marius surviving the fall of the barricades | wtwt5237 wrote: | | Are you trying to tell us that Hugo believed in the power of God and he used it to push his plot forward? |
Are you trying to tell us he didn't?! Trying to discuss LM in the absence of religion is like trying to discuss fanfiction in the absence of slash.
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