Dead Dove Do Not Eat
LEGERDEMAIN, n. This word is a fancy French import that means “sleight of hand,” which is funny because it’s literally light of hand in French, just all run together: lightofhand. (This looks like a tumblr username and now I’m kind of mad that it was never mine.) Legerdemain, like sleight of hand, can mean tricks like maneuvering a coin or a card between your fingers and then making it vanish, or any kind of display of skill or trickery.
Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, 1594
Legerdemain is an uncommon word in English and its French counterpart is even rarer. The Trésor de la langue française has marked the phrase léger de (la) main as “vieilli et littér.,” dated and literary, which, like, same.
In case you were wondering (I was), light of hand and sleight of hand have only the hands in common. Sleight is English all the way through, as you can tell from its spelling. It used to be the noun form of “sly,” which is thrilling. Modern speakers would probably produce “slyness” instead. I have only ever seen the word sleight in the phrase sleight of hand, so it’s pulling its own kind of disappearing act.
This week in Capital-R Romance, I still haven’t finished Les Mis (I’m at VIII, 1, xxi, or 83%). You know why?
That monster Victor Hugo killed Gavroche. I don’t want to talk about it.
Just kidding. When have I ever not wanted to talk about something?
#LesMisSpoilers
As I said a few weeks ago, I knew Gavroche, charming Parisian child revolutionary, was doomed.
It’s a nineteenth-century novel. People gonna die.
This particular nineteenth-century novel is literally called Les Misérables. Sometimes people translate that as “The Wretched.” More often, they don’t translate it at all. (In British English, I think people say “does what it says on the tin,” but here in the U.S., we say “Dead Dove Do Not Eat”:
I don’t know what I expected.)
Cute kids in a story with a sad ending? Always at risk.
A cute kid in a story with a sad ending that also has many pages of essays about how cute, resourceful kids are the spirit of Paris? Basically wearing a bull’s eye target.
On top of all that, Victor Hugo toys with readers using a trick I’ve seen deployed by many other authors and scriptwriters and TV showrunners: Gavroche cheerfully survives enough near-fatal experiences—literally dodges multiple bullets while singing a song—that you start to think, oh, maybe I was wrong and Gavroche is gonna make it. Every bullet dodged gives you hope.
And of course, the moment you let go of your suspicions, the moment you take a cautious step into believing that maybe Victor Hugo isn’t a villain who’s going to kill the best character right in front of your eyes, that’s when he does it.
I wrote “every bullet dodged gives you hope” up there because that is what happened to me, but for savvy readers, it’s paradoxically also true that every bullet dodged makes you worry more. You know what Victor Hugo is doing. While reading this chapter, I thought to myself, he’s doing that thing. Deceiving me into believing Gavroche will live. Catching even those readers who expect Gavroche’s death off guard.
I saw all of it. While reading, I made myself a mental catalog of the ways the text was manipulating my feelings, as though I could ward off its effects. This isn’t quite the same as that Saul Bellow essay I discussed a couple weeks ago, about how we take refuge in literary symbolism in order to avoid confronting passion and death, but it’s similar. If you know you are being manipulated, then it follows that the manipulation shouldn’t work on you, right?
And if you expect a sad thing to happen, then you feel less sad when it does. (Ha.)
Nope. Sadness is sadness, expected or unexpected. Understanding the forms of fiction doesn’t lessen their effects. Maybe that makes sense, as a microcosm of the bargain we make when we pick up a novel: I know this isn’t real and I’m going to engage with it anyway. But I don’t usually resist that bargain in any way. Certainly not in the way that I felt myself resisting Gavroche’s death scene, desperately itemizing Hugo’s methods while simultaneously falling for all of it, full of hope and fear. I don’t know how these two things are possible.
Maybe for some readers or some fiction, peeking behind the curtain destroys the illusion, but not for me and Les Mis. I pulled Victor Hugo’s curtain all the way back and he still got me good. When Gavroche died—when I read Gavroche’s death scene, I should say—tears sprang to my eyes. I knew what he was planning, I saw how he accomplished it, and none of that stopped it from working. Fiction is powerful and strange.
I didn’t finish reading any small-r romance novels this week because I finished writing one. I don’t want to talk about it.
