At the end of the last chapter I assumed that Fantine was pregnant, but it turns out that she ALREADY HAD A CHILD with Tholomyès! This makes what I already viewed as pretty despicable behavior on his part even more awful. He had a two year old daughter that he abandoned without thought. A fucc boi in deed.
We find Fantine in pretty dire straights. She’s sold all she has to pay off debts and other than keeping some nice clothes for Cosette she really has nothing left but eighty francs to get her home. Realizing that she is unlikely to find work as a single mom she makes the heartbreaking decision to pay someone to care for her daughter for the next six months with the hope she can later return and reclaim her. She chooses the wife of an innkeeper who seems to be a loving mother, but her interactions with the innkeeper himself is cause for concern. As she leaves we hear a brief exchange between the innkeeper and his wife - the money they got from Fantine would help them cover their rent. The situation seems very unstable.
Fantine’s grief and destitution are palpable. She has rapidly gone from an imagined life of upward mobility and luxury with this man who had fathered her child - a man she loved and who she believed loved her and would become her husband - and was now reduced to rags, leaving her child in the care of strangers on a desperate gambit to find employment and provide for herself and the child.
This deepens the disparity between the impact of this separation on Tholomyès and Fantine. For Tholomyès it seems like a flippant decision with no real cost, and he continues his life as an upwardly mobile man. Fantine writes but gets no response, and there seems to be no recourse available to her that would cause Tholomyès to take responsibility for his actions and the child he had fathered. For Fantine this marks an end to life as she had come to know it over the last two years and drops her further into poverty than she has ever been. Now she has another mouth to feed and the stigma of being a single mother. What was her crime? Loving and trusting a man who had wooed her and lavished her with gifts and affection.
Hugo really is doing a great job of showing the way that the actions of powerful people can have devastating effects on those who are oppressed in one way or another. It’s hard to reckon with the fact that the systems and structures that enable this lopsided existence are still just as potent today, and that for all of our supposed “progress” we still have plenty of people like Tholomyès ruining lives and failing to take responsibility. Patriarchy is alive and well and the engines of oppression are still running strong. Some days I just want to see it all burn to the ground.