Cimourdain rides through Brittany with a big old tricolor cockade. This is not recklessness or stupidity. Cimourdain knows and appreciates the danger. No, this is a conscious risk taken because Cimourdain highly values pride, or honor, or honesty, or some combination of those things; he disdains the idea of hiding his colors out of prudence. He has his sword and pistols, and that helps, but he can still be outnumbered and surrounded. Yet, for all his revolutionary flag-waving, he’s obviously a priest, and the innkeeper can identify him as one.
The exchanges between Gauvain and Lantenac are oddly hilarious, as is the innkeeper’s description of the exchanges as “pleasantries.” They both promise to kill each other, but what a difference! Lantenac is formal, polite, wordy, makes a point to emphasize both rank and familial relationship, uses incongruous courtesies like talking about how he “has the honor to inform” Gauvain that he’ll kill him if he has the “good fortune” to seize his person, and is almost poetic in his description of how he’ll kill Gauvain: he says he’ll have him “beautifully” shot with an arquebus (a type of gun).
Gauvain is terse and doesn’t waste words: if he takes Lantenac, he’ll have him shot. That’s it. Rank and family don’t matter, they’re just Gauvain and Lantenac. There is no honor in informing Lantenac of this, nor is there any point in pretending there’s an honor to it. He’s just informing him.
The warnings are posted facing each other, as if glaring at each other.
It’s all very funny, and then Cimourdain bows in the direction of Gauvain’s poster, and it is no longer funny, it is suddenly poignant. We’re told that the peasants call this a battle between Michael and Beelzebub (shades of Les Mis and Enjolras), but while the peasants think Gauvain is Beelzebub and Lantenac is Michael, the innkeeper thinks it’s the other way around. I’m starting to see what @edwarddespard meant when she crack-theorized that Enjolras was a reincarnation of both Gauvain and Cimourdain, as Enjolras also gets the Michael comparison. But we know what happens to Enjolras, and we know the heartbreak of being Michael.
The innkeeper’s theory of the war is interesting: rural peasants vs. urban bourgeois. Accurate, or not? I will need to read more French Revolution history to find out, though it seems to erase the urban working class completely, and perhaps also the peasants who did things like raid granaries.
Cimourdain goes straight to Dol, despite the innkeeper’s warnings, because he wants to save something as precious as his son. Is that almost-son Gauvain, or is it the Republic to which he wants to be father and husband? Both, obviously, but it’s equally obvious that Cimourdain will have to choose between them at some point.
Here’s my THOROUGHLY UNSPOILED prediction for the end of the book: Lantenac, Cimourdain and Gauvain all die on the same guillotine, after Cimourdain reports Gauvain to the Committee of Public Safety but then chooses to die with him in a fit of Romantic remorse.
3.2.1: Plus Quam Civilia Bella
Cimourdain rides through Brittany with a big old tricolor cockade. This is not recklessness or stupidity. Cimourdain knows and appreciates the danger. No, this is a conscious risk taken because Cimourdain highly values pride, or honor, or honesty, or some combination of those things; he disdains the idea of hiding his colors out of prudence. He has his sword and pistols, and that helps, but he can still be outnumbered and surrounded. Yet, for all his revolutionary flag-waving, he’s obviously a priest, and the innkeeper can identify him as one.
The exchanges between Gauvain and Lantenac are oddly hilarious, as is the innkeeper’s description of the exchanges as “pleasantries.” They both promise to kill each other, but what a difference! Lantenac is formal, polite, wordy, makes a point to emphasize both rank and familial relationship, uses incongruous courtesies like talking about how he “has the honor to inform” Gauvain that he’ll kill him if he has the “good fortune” to seize his person, and is almost poetic in his description of how he’ll kill Gauvain: he says he’ll have him “beautifully” shot with an arquebus (a type of gun).
Gauvain is terse and doesn’t waste words: if he takes Lantenac, he’ll have him shot. That’s it. Rank and family don’t matter, they’re just Gauvain and Lantenac. There is no honor in informing Lantenac of this, nor is there any point in pretending there’s an honor to it. He’s just informing him.
The warnings are posted facing each other, as if glaring at each other.
It’s all very funny, and then Cimourdain bows in the direction of Gauvain’s poster, and it is no longer funny, it is suddenly poignant. We’re told that the peasants call this a battle between Michael and Beelzebub (shades of Les Mis and Enjolras), but while the peasants think Gauvain is Beelzebub and Lantenac is Michael, the innkeeper thinks it’s the other way around. I’m starting to see what @edwarddespard meant when she crack-theorized that Enjolras was a reincarnation of both Gauvain and Cimourdain, as Enjolras also gets the Michael comparison. But we know what happens to Enjolras, and we know the heartbreak of being Michael.
The innkeeper’s theory of the war is interesting: rural peasants vs. urban bourgeois. Accurate, or not? I will need to read more French Revolution history to find out, though it seems to erase the urban working class completely, and perhaps also the peasants who did things like raid granaries.
Cimourdain goes straight to Dol, despite the innkeeper’s warnings, because he wants to save something as precious as his son. Is that almost-son Gauvain, or is it the Republic to which he wants to be father and husband? Both, obviously, but it’s equally obvious that Cimourdain will have to choose between them at some point.
Here’s my THOROUGHLY UNSPOILED prediction for the end of the book: Lantenac, Cimourdain and Gauvain all die on the same guillotine, after Cimourdain reports Gauvain to the Committee of Public Safety but then chooses to die with him in a fit of Romantic remorse.