Here we leave the telling of Jean Valjean’s story and the world of bishop Myriel in Digne and find ourselves in Paris in 1817 (the same year and location the previous chapter showed us through a series of historical vignettes). We meet four students in Paris who have become friends, and the four young “grisettes” they are currently dating. This term grisette is an interesting one. It primarily refers to a working class woman in Paris, but it carries a coqutteish / flirtatious element with it. We get the idea that these young women who are somewhat impoverished and living a working class life are hoping these relationships can pull them out of that place and change their experience and station.
It’s a tough thing to be confronted with - yet another indication of the state of things in the society that Hugo was writing about that to some degree still has parallels to our world. Thankfully these young women are not disposable characters, they are all given names and backgrounds. There is one young woman becomes the focal point, and her name is Fantine. It would be hard to miss the fact that this entire section of the novel (the first of 5 sections) is titled Fantine, and it is safe to assume we are finally meeting her here. We get the idea that she is 20 or 21 years old and she is in a relationship with the oldest of these 4 students - Tholomyès, a 30 year old prematurely balding “ill-preserved rake”. He is the ringleader of this crew and from the drop, he gives the worst vibe of the bunch. He is seemingly smitten with Fantine though it is framed as a passing affair. For Fantine he is her first love, and Hug describes her as viewing Tholomyès as “the love of her life”.
Even here at the outset we get the idea that she is being setup for heartbreak, and all of the cards are stacked in this young man’s favor. He is wealthy and well off, of elevated class and seemingly has the whole world open to him. Fantine on the other hand is a former orphan who has been in Paris since she was 15, and she has no safety net, no one looking out for her. The horizons of the possible futures available to her likely seem incredibly narrow and mostly bleak, and this young man she has fallen in love with seems to provide a ticket to a brighter future. This patriarchal structuring is well known and documented, and it’s a thing that still exists in large part today. I wish we could say that Fantine’s woes were a thing of the past but sadly they are not.
Even on a first read this story will feel familiar and most of us will likely feel the anxiety rise as we worry about what will become of young Fantine.