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thjazi - 1.1.1- General Emotions- thjazi - Chapter 1, Woods of La Sandriae/La Saudriae: ALREADY THE TRANSLATION THING STARTS.
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1.1.1- General Emotions
Date: 2014-04-21 01:15 pm (UTC)My this is a...a Very Hugo Novel.
(also, wait, the Wood of La Saudrie? Because mine is very definitely Lan SaNdrie. Translation quarrels already?)
I haven't read it before, so I don't know if we get to see much more of the kickass women in this first chapter, but: KICKASS WOMEN! IN THE FIRST CHAPTER! And they're not dressing as men or being sneered at for their looks or anything, and they're TALKING TO EACH OTHER, I'm so pleased! No, really. SO PLEASED. I don't think I can get across what an awesome joy it is to see women interacting and being actually friends to each other right off the bat. Heck, there's a whole COMMUNITY straight off the bat! Not the most stable or survival-oriented, maybe, but still!
...and actually writing that, I'm just realizing some of what the adoption of the wandering family might have meant to the Bonnet Rouge, and why they're so very excited and on board with it, and why the vivandiere breaks down crying when it happens. This is a group that's likely actually decimated; they're down to a tenth of their starting numbers. And here's this little cluster of life, and one thing they can do that isn't about killing or dying. Crackers, I MAY CRY TOO.
Re: 1.1.1- General Emotions
Date: 2014-04-21 01:56 pm (UTC)AND YES, thanks so much Nelson and Sons for your attention to detail. Saudraie, Sandraie, whatever, it's all those Frenchies anyway.
Re: 1.1.1- General Emotions
Date: 2014-04-22 02:54 am (UTC)I also bet it's no coincidence the vivandière says she's never had the time for children. She's devoted her life to war and revolution instead, but she's also basically a kind and warm person who maybe could have had a family in a different world. When she sees this family, and she's in a position to help them, it gets to her. You don't have to accept Hugo's notions about all women being naturally maternal to see how she might feel strongly about this family. (Though those notions probably factored into his thoughts while writing this).
Re: 1.1.1- General Emotions
Date: 2014-04-22 06:33 am (UTC)And YES I AM VERY UPSET ABOUT THE SOLDIERS, I always get upset about soldiers, they definitely do Not Good Things but it's not as though they're working in a vacuum with that and it's not like it doesn't have all kinds of costs for them TOO, I can have sympathy for them as people without condoning the things they do or a particular cause. And these soldiers are being WAY humanized for us. Which...I actually like? one thing reading any real amount of battlefield stories shows is that people are REALLY VARIED on that score; maybe last week these guys burned a village, or massacred a DIFFERENT group of soldiers, but right now they've got this one thing they can do apart from all that and I AM VERY UPSET ABOUT EVERYTHING.
And oh geez oh geez I just want this whole crew to go home and raise these kids with lots of blankets and lovely meals and all.
Re: 1.1.1- General Emotions
Date: 2014-04-22 05:37 am (UTC)Chapter 1, Woods of La Sandriae/La Saudriae: ALREADY THE TRANSLATION THING STARTS.
Date: 2014-04-21 01:22 pm (UTC)I have never read this story, or even a synopsis! I have honestly ZERO idea what's going to happen! How exciting!
It's still kind of inevitable that I'm going to compare this to Les MIs, though. I compare EVERYTHING to Les Mis these days. So I'm wondering if we'll get another slow burn opening like the Bishop or
"--of the first regiment of Paris, which had numbered six hundred volunteers, there remained twenty-seven men; of the second, thirty-three; and of the third, fifty-seven."
WELL GOOD MORNING TO YOU TOO HUGO, I GUESS THAT'S A NO ON THE SLOW BURN THING.
"At the end of May, of the twelve thousand who left Paris eight thousand were dead."
SWEET FLAPPING WAFFLE HALOS it's like we're starting right in the middle of Waterloo
"The forest of La Sandrie was tragic."
...It's EXACTLY like we're starting in the middle of Waterloo. Wow, 2 pages in and already this is a Very Hugo Novel.
In former times La Sandrie was a favorite place for the hunting of birds by night; now they hunted men there.
EVERYTHING IS BIRD. A Very Victor Hugo Novel indeed.
Really though, the birds are part of the scene here, and wow, Hugo is on the BALL with his Interactive Scenery, as always; I don't know from France, but I an imagine exactly the setting here, and the quiet of the forest, and the way the inderbrush makes it hard to move and how it would be a perfectly lovely place for anyone not WORRIED ABOUT GETTING SHOT BY AMBUSH and all and hggg apparently I'm gonna have nightmares about more Hugo Scenery and this time it's going to be about a lovely little forest scene with birds singing all around and blood on the leaves and did I mention I live in the country and it's spring and there are birds singing all around WHILE I TYPE THIS and yeah,I'm kind of feelin' the scene here, GOOD MORNING INDEED.
But aside from the bloody shadow nightmare that constitutes a Hugo Woodlandscape, I really love this chapter? Or maybe because of the bloody Woodlandscape? Because, okay, this is some kinderundhausmarchen stuff, serious fairy tale time, and I fully realize that Grimm's collection wasn't put out until 1812 but the whole POINT of those stories is that they're around all OVER the place from way way back, and here's one of them: the mother and children fleeing the brutality of civilization, being taken in by the wild/dangerous denizens of the forest. And of COURSE it's another woman from outside the pale of the 'civilized' -- a Witch, basically, as these things go. who's comfortable in the wild places-- who reaches out to the mother first, and explains the rules of this new liminal place (because the Wild ALWAYS has rules) and yeah, I don't know how intentional any of this resonance is but I DID grow up on such fairy tales and I can't help feeling it. I MEAN. The children are ADOPTED BY THE REGIMENT, the wolves take in the twins, the fairies take in the lost princess, the children who've had their civil home taken are given one back by the wild.
Except that the Wild here IS the civil; the war IS what their society is doing right now. What the vivandiére knows and is teaching the mother is how to survive society, as it is. The war going on is a continuation of the violence that's left this mother family-less; she talks about the abuse and murder of the men in her life by their lords, and that's not the same as the war that killed her husband-- a bullet by some side, who knows which-- but it IS the same, too. The forest is an accidental retreat into the heart of the fighting that's been part of her whole life and agh, I don't know what I'm doing with all this, but this is just mashing my Fairy Tale time buttons WAY too hard to NOT talk about.
ANYWAY back in the actual plotlines! I know needsmoreresearch has eye-rolled a little over the Feminine Bonding, but darn it, I LIKE it, because yes, absolutely-- the two women in a group of men have some enormous commonalities that the men DON'T, in terms of social background and understanding, and that's being handled in a way that feels very natural. The vivandiére is more adept with the kids, but she's not the only one TRYING to connect, from the start the sergeant is trying to engage, too, but he doesn't know the same approaches as the vivandiére, and that's totally reasonable! I like the mother too. I'm sure she'd get flack if this were adapted for being too passive or seeming too ignorant or whatever, but she's been on the run for who knows how long, she's STARVING, she's terrified, she's in shock on a lot of levels-- she's responding just the way someone in her position WOULD, slowly and with prompting and not making any leaps of logic or social intent. Good job, there (less good job that I'm having to call them The Mother and The Vivandiére, when I've READ THE CHAPTER, and the BABY has a name, and the sergeant, but still. They're characters! Real characters! Even if they aren't named!).
.. Basically I'm wanting the whole story to be about this battalion and the vivandiére and the mom being super best friends and all of them raising their three kids together and going on adventures and there's a zeppelin, can there be a zeppelin? And hijinks?!? And I'm guessing I WILL GET NONE OF THIS but I'm 24 pages in and already I'm about to cry over everyone we've met. Hugo is a MENACE.
Re: Chapter 1, Woods of La Sandriae/La Saudriae: ALREADY THE TRANSLATION THING STARTS.
Date: 2014-04-22 03:01 am (UTC)I love your thoughts on the fairy tale element here because one thing about both Waterloo and the Wood of La Saudraie is that they're haunted. They're drenched with blood but the blood isn't something in the past that can be ignored--the history is still alive, still motivating people, and everyone knows it, and that's why it's so eerie, so dreadful. Except it's more than the literal facts of what happened at these places, it's what they represent on some mythic level, the Forest and the Grave and the Wild, like you said.
Re: Chapter 1, Woods of La Sandriae/La Saudriae: ALREADY THE TRANSLATION THING STARTS.
Date: 2014-04-22 05:41 am (UTC)...There's no way to do a cut in a comment, though. You can do a cut in a POST by doing [cut] and [/cut] except with < and > brackets. But you can't do it in a comment; everybody clicking on one of these discussion posts is just signing up to read some long comments, I think.
(Okay, if we get enough comments to a post then Dreamwidth will start collapsing them down, and then people will have to click on "Expand" to read the whole comment. I don't know exactly the number of comments it takes to do that, but we're a ways off. You'll see it if we ever hit that.)
no subject
Date: 2014-04-21 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-22 02:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-22 06:30 pm (UTC)One of the weird things about this read for me is that I have very little idea of who's important yet -- okay, a little bit, in that there were names I kept catching when I did my skim for chapter titles, but I have no idea who's going to be a complex major character and who's going to stay pretty true to their initial impression, or die quickly and only show up as a memory for other characters, or what. And it's a Hugo novel, so I expect there'll be a large cast and some epic scope, and my genre trope-detecting sensors are nowhere near as usefully calibrated as they would be for a modern novel.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-21 08:46 pm (UTC)This may be old old news (I am going into this absolutely blind as far as what the plot of the book is going to be), but I found it interesting how Hugo minimizes the importance of the different sides in the fighting, when compared to the human misery that fighting produces.
The chapter starts out with soldier from one side of a conflict creeping through the woods, looking for their enemies, along with a flurry of historical names that had no significance for me—so I was a little worried (hang on, I have no idea who any of these people are. Which side are the guys in the woods? Are they the good guys or the bad guys? Are there good guys and bad guys? Am I in way over my head?). Have I mentioned that in addition to not knowing the plot of the book, I don’t know anything about the historical background? When people mentioned what side they were on, I paid close attention, hoping that I could catch up with what the sides were and what they were about.
But then we get this woman who knows nothing about the conflict except that it has ripped her life apart. She doesn’t understand when the soldiers ask her what side she’s on or where her loyalties lie. She doesn’t know why her home was burned down. The sergeant asks who killed her husband and she either doesn’t understand the question or simply doesn’t see its relevance:
—Est-ce un bleu? Est-ce un blanc?
—C’est un coup de fusil.
For this victim of the war, the sides don’t mean anything; all she knows is that her home is gone, her husband is dead, and her children are hungry. Ironically, the blues are fighting for people just like her, people who have been oppressed by the aristocracy for generations—but the fighting hasn’t done her any good. And she doesn’t even realize that’s what the fighting is about.
And the vivandière echoes this idea in her speech about giving water to the wounded: “Wounded men are all thirsty. They die without any difference of opinions.” Such great lines in this chapter!
no subject
Date: 2014-04-21 11:44 pm (UTC)This is my first time reading Ninety-Three, and I'm going into it with only the vaguest background on the actual history involved and know nothing of the plot beyond "takes place in France in 1793...probably." Also, my translation dates from 1903 (Helen B. Dole), and has such gems as a grenadier exclaiming "By Jove!" (and apparently spells the location correctly in the chapter title?)
The vivandière is such an opinionated spitfire. I love her.
I also love how the kids, when they wake up, "were more curious than frightened. They admired the plumes." That's actually pretty reassuring, as it means that despite the war, despite all the tragedy and the doubtless terrifying situations they've been through, they're still kids, and here, with their mom, they feel safe. Also, that is such a perfect reaction for them to have, a sort of, "Oooh, shiny!" moment.
And I want to give Hugo major kudos for setting the scene in the woods the way he did, where "it was impossible to see a man ten feet away," and "the moss and thick grass deadened the sound of the marching men." If you get separated from the group in a situation like that, especially if you're from the urban environs of Paris, that's got to be terrifying, and so much more so if you know there's enemy soldiers out there somewhere nearby.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-22 03:08 am (UTC)I'm starting from the same level of ignorance as you and I'm really curious as to what we'll find.
I also love the scene-setting here. It works on so many levels. It explains why they're scared, it helps the reader get into that isolated and paranoid headspace, and it creates a creepy contrast between the peace and beauty of the forest itself and the slaughter that has happened there before and could break out again at any moment. We sense that these flowers in this forest really do hide the sword, and it's chilling.
also copying from tumblr
Date: 2014-04-22 01:22 am (UTC)Context:
-This is my second time through Ninety-Three. I read it before reading or being interested at all in LM and it has a special place in my heart. Ironically, I was led to it by Ayn Rand (whose politics I don’t share, but whom I was reading for her portrayal of the early Soviet Union in We The Living, which draws on Ninety-Three in places).
-Victor Hugo owed his existence to the Vendee War. His mother was from the Vendee and his father was a republican soldier who met her during the war.
-I’ve seen this book criticized for mixing up the Vendee War, which had more actual armies, with the Breton chouanerrie, a guerrilla war which stretched on for years. The first chapter seems to indicate that the soldiers are dealing with guerrilla warfare and abushes.
-This book was written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune and its suppression. Hugo didn’t support the Commune, but couldn’t condone its repression (unlike in 1848) and was very active in the movement for clemency for the Communards. So pay attention to Paris vs the rest of France, city vs country, rebellion vs central authority, revolution vs counterrevolution, mercy vs harshness, and what exactly a Republic should be and do in that situation (the Commune having been suppressed by the nascent Third Republic). I don’t think there’s a single overriding way to interpret the Commune’s shadow across the book, but it gives rise to the questions that the book addresses.
Reactions
- Before we even get to the action or to the description of nature, we get a description of a particular innovation of the revolution, which politicians gave what orders, how its influence continues today (Hugo’s today, that is). And then “At the end of May, of the twelve thousand Parisian troops, two-thirds were dead.” We might not be predisposed to sympathize with the fears of soldiers, and soldiers who’ve come there to fight rather than being people defending their homes, in a war so filled with atrocities toward civilians. But this makes the horror they too have been through vivid.
-I think of this battalion as standing in relation to history the way the barricade in LM stands in relation to the real barricades- the real history exists in this universe, but a niche of fiction exists alongside it. And of course this niche has been “cleaned up,” sanitized, made to express the author’s ideals. And these fictional soldiers are tremendously appealing (Radoub! I love Radoub!).
- Michelle has a convent education and, before her home was burned, she had a servant. She was not destitute before the war made her so. Right now she’s the only Vendeen amidst the Parisians, but keep an eye and see who’s from where as the story goes on.
-Adding to the vivandiere love. She’s wonderful! And she’s treated by the text as a real, brave soldier. Like Radoub, she’s a Parisian, and we know how Hugo loves Paris. She had a meaningful role in the 10th of August- we saw in Ukraine recently how important supplies are in an urban insurrection and how people volunteered to bring food and drink.
-More vivandiere: “I am a good woman and a brave man.”
Re: also copying from tumblr
Date: 2014-04-22 03:09 am (UTC)Re: also copying from tumblr
Date: 2014-04-22 06:36 pm (UTC)Re: also copying from tumblr
Date: 2014-04-22 07:39 pm (UTC)Re: also copying from tumblr
Date: 2014-04-22 08:42 pm (UTC)Ch. X-posted from Tumblr: 1.1.1 (or, I want an action movie starring Houzarde and Michelle)
Date: 2014-04-22 02:49 am (UTC)In some ways this chapter smacks of the Waterloo digression in Les Mis. There’s the description of beautiful nature haunted by death and war, the sheer spookiness of the surroundings, the admiration for the combatants, and the civilian peasant with no political opinions getting swept up by people with concerns she can’t even comprehend. Hugo’s admiration for the soldiers is even stronger here than in Waterloo, I think, what with the honorable and solicitous behavior of the soldiers, and the bit about how the soldiers sent from Paris to the Vendée were a model for future generations. Which makes sense, since these are republicans and not Bonapartists. Michelle Fléchard is in the same situation as Guillaume Van Kylsom the gardener who was caught up by the English troops at Waterloo, except she gets sympathized with and rescued (if also interrogated, patronized and gawked at), while Van Kylsom was abused and exploited.
Mostly, it’s the atmosphere of overwhelming dread that’s the same.
Many authors have spent many words on the divide that can exist between the people who fight wars and the people who live in the areas where wars are fought. Here the divide seems to be mainly urban vs. rural: there are the Parisians, who think France is one nation and are amazed at anyone fighting for the lord and king and curé who abused their family, and then there’s Michelle, who identifies herself by her region rather than by her “nation,” who has no nation, and who thinks abject submission to church and state is the natural and inevitable order of things. Or else she seems to. Because we don’t actually know how sincere she is when she says her husband fought for the king, let alone how sincere she is when she says that it’s a “mercy” her father was beaten for hunting a rabbit rather than killed. One thing about being a peasant in feudal France is that you’re probably not going to blurt out your frank opinions to passing strangers with guns. You’re going to dissemble and play stupid and docile (easy enough to do if you’re scared anyway). Of course there probably were peasants who thought like this, but there were also certainly peasants who didn’t.
One thing I do like about this entire section is that it would be so easy to portray the soldiers as out of touch and therefore wrong and destructive, or alternatively to portray Michelle as stupid, but Hugo avoids both. The soldiers are pretty great here, actually, especially the vivandière (a martial and politically active woman!) and the sergeant. They believed that they were going to be ambushed. Once they discover Michelle, the threat of ambush is still there. Just because Michelle’s in their corner of the woods doesn’t mean they can assume that no one else is. And as the sergeant notes, she could be a spy. Yet not only do they not mistreat her in the slightest, they take the time to be actively concerned about her wellbeing and her kids’, and to adopt the whole family and bring them into the regiment. This has to be a huge risk—a crying baby could easily give them away. But they do it anyway. Michelle herself is heroic, though in the usual Hugo sacrificial-mother way.
The vivandière Houzarde is a fascinating character already, and I hope we’ll see more of her. She has seen numerous battles; she gawked at the execution of Louis XVI; she took a soubriquet rather than use her family name; and, most tellingly, she commands the men not to shoot right as their sergeant orders them to shoot. And they listen to her! At the same time, she’s scrupulously attentive to the scared and apolitical woman she finds (while Houzarde herself and her men are still in danger, I have to point out again), and she gives drinks to all the thirsty wounded she sees, no matter what side they’re on.
Sadly, I suspect this book isn’t going to be about Houzarde and Michelle teaming up and fomenting revolution. *sigh*
General reaction
Date: 2014-04-22 05:34 am (UTC)It's interesting to come into this with almost no idea of what it's about. I know there's a guy named Cimourdain and it's set in 1793 so Some Stuff Is Gonna Go Down, and I happened across a few scattered and context-less spoilers while I was scanning for chapter titles, but that's really it.
One thing this book (and club) are certainly going to get me to do is actually learn my French Revolution history a bit better. I actually paused in the first paragraph and went to look up the Vendée, because I didn't really know what went down there in '93 except that a lot of fairly bloody stuff did. So now I know the Wikipedia summary version, because if I let myself fall into research vortexes already I will never read this chapter. But I am very sure that the club's going to give me a lot more detail as we go.
Some thoughts:
- The chapter opens with some scene-setting about where this regiment came from, who were ministers of what at the time, who's been killed in this forest. Most of it means very little to me, reading in America in the 21st century. I wonder how the ministers' names and such would have read to Hugo's audience in the 1870s? That's about 80 years later, so barely within living memory; I don't have a good sense of whether he'd be expecting the audience to immediately know who Gohier and Mousqueton were, or if he was showing off his historical research here.
- Speaking of scene-setting: one of the things I'm curious about with this book is Hugo's pastoral description. In Les Mis, Hugo does a lot of nature imagery, but mostly in a very urban kind of way -- it's all dogs and swans and symbolic animals, and occasional digressions about nettles or how to farm this or that, but it's not tied to the land and the seasons much. He doesn't tell you that it's spring and therefore this is in bloom or that's being planted; he doesn't tell you that it's early September so this fruit is in the markets and farmers are harvesting that. I don't know how much of that is because Hugo sees the world with a city boy's eyes, and how much of that is a specific choice for Les Mis which takes place primarily in cities (and especially in Paris.) So I'm trying to pay attention to the descriptions here!
And there are some really evocative descriptions of forest here. I can absolutely picture it! Lots of specific kinds of plants: these aren't just trees, they're birches and beeches and oaks, and the flowers are crocus and daisy. I think it's interesting, too, how all his descriptions of the forest make it sound lovely -- all flowers and moss, no looming dark shadows of pathetic fallacy here -- but all the same, it's ominous simply because it's unknown territory where hiding is easy. What lurks behind those trees and wild underbrush? Maybe nothing, maybe enemies. You don't know until either you're ambushed or you aren't.
"In former peaceable times La Saudraie was a favorite place for the Houiche-ba, the hunting of birds by night; now they hunted men there." Hugo does have a way with starkness when he wants to.
- Speaking of seasons and pastoral details, the flowers include gladiola and crocus. My edition has a translator's footnote saying "The gladiola is with us an autumnal, the crocus a spring flower." Regional differences, terminology differences, or Hugo being really bad at botany? I looked up gladiola (which I know as gladiolus, and which is apparently also called sword lily). I found... mostly a lot of stuff about cultivated varieties, of which there are lots, but a couple of sites saying that wild gladiolus blooms in summer in Europe. Maybe Hugo and Lee Benedict are both bad at botany?
- I'm interested by the vivandière! I'd never heard of this term, but it was apparently a common one, and certainly "camp follower selling wine to the soldiers" is a very common and logical sort of job. ("Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery," says Hugo, which is... very Hugo. I can't decide if I like that he recognizes that being a curious lady can totally be a brave thing to be, of if I'm just facepalming at the 19th century in general and Hugo in specific about woman issues.) I like the woman's personality, too. I'm interested in her and her story; I hope we see more of her.
- The entire conversation with the poor widow is just heartbreaking. And it illustrates something very key, with Hugo's usual (lack of) subtlety but also Hugo's usual keen eye for humanity. What do countries and political causes and military sides mean to her? She knows the town and region she came from. She knows that her children are hungry, her feet are sore, her town was burned. What side killed her husband? A bullet. What kind of people were her family? Her father did this, her grandfather did that, they're dead. That's the people they were. She's not necessarily dumb, and she's not stonewalling anybody on purpose. She just has no breathing space to think about these things, and never has.
Sergeant Radoub doesn't seem to be browbeating her on purpose, either, so much as just unable to understand that repeating his questions isn't eventually going to garner a better answer. He's a funny mix of empathetic and self-absorbed here.
- My translation has the grenadier referring to the woman as "a Chinese Iroquois." OH GOD WHY, and also what does that even MEAN. Is that what it is in the French?
- The children are adopted by the regiment. "Hurrah for the Republic!" they cry, having voted upon this. The vivandière is overjoyed at the prospect of children underfoot, and the widow to join her -- because she wants a friend? Because she wants a helper? Because she clearly feels sorry for her? Some combination, maybe. Anyway, the children don't understand anything of this, and neither does Michelle. Nobody's asked her opinion. She doesn't care about the Republic -- she doesn't even consider herself French. She hasn't agreed to come along, even, though I assume she will; she's said she doesn't have a destination in mind. I'm side-eyeing everybody involves in this decision, although it does currently seem as if hanging around with a ragtag army band is going to provide better for the Fléchards than wandering the forest. At least this way Michelle has shoes.
Re: General reaction
Date: 2014-04-22 01:29 pm (UTC)I don't even think Radoub is self-absorbed so much as operating from a totally different frame of reference, and even when he grasps that hers is different, he still has to operate from within his. He still has to be concerned with her political loyalties and if maybe she would give info to their enemies, until it becomes 100% obvious that she simply does not care. She has literally no idea about the issues that are a matter of life and death to him--and to her, as well, though she doesn't have the information to grasp it. That's as hard for him to comprehend as it is for her to comprehend the idea of being a loyal citizen of the French nation.
I boggled at the Chinese Iroquois too. In the French it's the same: iroquois de Chine. Which, uh. I think they're using "iroquois" as a generic term for "savage," so they're saying that Bretagne peasants like Michelle are like the "savages" of China. Thank you, 19th century.
Speaking of: yeah, the "feminine bravery" thing was um. I do think it's genuinely respectful of the vivandière and of curiosity, but it's also very much patting the little ladies on the head and putting them in their proper pigeonhole.
The moments of starkness in Hugo's writing here are great, especially because of how they stand out from all the eerie evocative description.
Re: General reaction
Date: 2014-04-22 08:40 pm (UTC)As for the "feminine bravery" thing, I expect to have a lot more moments of mixed feelings like that about ladies in this book, because, well, Hugo and the 19th century. A lot of moments with both Michelle and Houzarde ("the mother" and "the vivandière," but I like giving them their names even if it's noteworthy that Hugo doesn't) struck me that way, of course, as they presumably struck us all -- the way that Houzarde instantly gravitates to the children, for example, mitigated by other things she does and by the way the soldiers are drawn to them too.
Re: General reaction
Date: 2014-04-24 11:54 pm (UTC)I don't see how any other decision is really possible for the army AS an army without them being just vicious about it? In taking her in, either they recognize her as one of their countrypeople-- a citizen of France-- or they take her in as a foreign national, and then it gets into taking someone a prisoner. If they leave her, well, she and the kids are starving and utterly unprotected. They might leave food and some water with her, but that still leaves her walking a war zone unarmed and untrained. They may be forcing a group membership on her, but it's the only way they can offer everything they CAN offer.
As far as Michelle's general dullness of response, I really don't think enough credit's going to her physical straits here. I mean, she's been in a state of adrenaline rush, foodless and without water; if I miss one meal my responses go monosyllabic. She's doing REALLY well with her judgement overall, considering; but I don't think she'd be prepared to make this kind of abstract choice for several meals and a nap yet, and it kinda has to be made NOW-ishly.