As far as sight could reach there was nothing to be seen but slaughter-houses, the wall, and an occasional factory looking like a barracks or a monastery; shanties and heaps of rubble, strips of old wall black as shrouds and of new wall white as winding-sheets; trees in parallel rows, featureless edifices in long, cold lines, with the monotony of right angles. No accident of terrain, not an architectural flourish, not a bend or a curve: a glacial setting, rectilinear and hideous. Nothing chills the heart like symmetry, for symmetry is ennui and ennui is at the heart of grief. Despair is a yawn. It is possible to conceive of something even more terrible than a hell of suffering, and that is a hell of boredom. If such a hell exists, that stretch of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital might have been the road leading to it. But at nightfall, particularly in winter, at the time when the last light faded and the wind whipped the last leaves off the elms, when the darkness was at it’s deepest, unrelieved by stars, or when wind and moonlight pierced gaps in the clouds, the boulevard became suddenly frightening. Its straight lines seemed to merge and dissolve in shadow like stretches of infinity. The pedestrian was minded of the gallows-tradition of that place, and its solitude, which had been the scene of so many crimes, was nightmarish. There seemed to be pitfalls hidden in the dark, every patch of deeper shadow was suspect, the spaces between the trees resembled graves. By day the place was ugly; in the evening it was melancholy; at night it was sinister.
This is the abysmal introduction that Hugo gives us to the environs of the Gorbeau Tenement, also known as No. 50-52 to the post workers. The boredom combined with the lurking dread it took on at night make for an incredibly uninviting and unappealing combination.
Somewhat inexplicably, reading it reminded me of a recurring night terror I had as a child, where after dying I was ushered in to an eternity that at first seemed varied and good, but as time went on it began to repeat, and then upon zooming out I saw that I was stuck on a great looping conveyor belt of time, and that there would be no escaping the repeated monotony if this eternal fate. In that sense, the promise of eternal bliss became a fearful hell for me. For some reason the idea of a hell of boredom combined with Hugo’s description of “straight lines [that] seemed to merge and dissolve in shadow like stretches of infinity.” brought that particular nightmare roaring back.
So with that unsettling setting of scenes, we transition toward what the reader can only anticipate as the next place we find Valjean and Cosette. Why here? Why this particular place? How will this impact our duo who has already suffered so much separately and now find themselves together? We’ll have to read on to find out!