Monsieur Bamatabois. A small town low budget version of Tholomyés (the fuccboi who ruined Fantine’s life) has entered the chat.
We get a good bit of description about who this guy was, floating somewhere between a fop and a vagabond, enough money that he doesn’t have to work, but nowhere near the budget of the Paris set we met previously.
As the chapter closes out we see him smoking, relentlessly messing with a woman that appears to be a prostitute. When his verbal assault doesn’t get him anywhere, he eventually grabs some snow and shoves it down the back of her dress. He does get a reaction, but not the one he expects. In a rage she turns on him, scratching his face and continuing to attack him in every way possible. The fight escalates, Bamatabois frantically trying to break free while this woman relentlessly unleashes her pent up rage on this man (he deserved it). As Javert arrives on the scene and pulls the woman off of the man, seemingly taking her to jail, we have the rev eal we all saw coming - this woman is Fantine.
it feels bad (but still accurate) to see Fantine suffering while the fuccbois of the world flourish. This society we have structured does make things easy for a certain type of person, and that person is not Fantine, or Valjean, or even Javert. It tends to be scoundrels like Tholomyés or his basic mini-me Bamatabois.
Will there be some kind of divine settling of accounts? Will we ever see a time where the Bamatabois of the world are held to account and the Fantines finally get the releif they so desperately desire? In the previous chapter Hugo told us “only God knows”. I don’t think that has to mean “everyone sits idly by and waits for a miracle.” I think it can look like individuals beginning to force an accounting wherever they have the agency to do so, even if that comes at a cost. “Only God knows” but in the meantime we can say “I won’t stand by and watch helplessly.”