Invictus

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Invictus
by William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)

100 Pictures Challenge #20: Fortitude.


wants this here... Seriously, don't you think there's *already* enough Les Mis stuff in my gallery without my adding more to it?

So yeah. Jean Prouvaire on the wrong side of the barricade, making good use of his one shot before he gets dragged off to the other end of Rue de la Chanvrerie and killed.

Obviously, if you've read the book, there's no such scene. Between the time Marius enters the barricade (during the penetration of the barricade) and the time he threatens to blow everything and everyone up with gunpowder, Jehan simply... vanishes. It's only when they call the roll and can't find him among the able, injured or dead that they realise he's been taken prisoner. Not long after, they hear his voice crying out, from the other end of the street, "Long live France! Long live the future!", before the rifle squad executes him... and that's that.

Now, I know that fanon!Jehan has always been portrayed as... well, floofy (and I myself am certainly guilty of drawing him cuddling lobsters, oi) - and gosh, Victor Hugo gives that impression in his initial description of Jean Prouvaire as a dreamy, timid poet who blushed at nothing, was addicted to love and liked long walks through fields of wild oats and bluebells (not to mention dressing badly, which, in fanon, has come to be a hideous preference for idiosyncratic, anachronistic costumes). But then Hugo says at the end of the descrip, "Still, intrepid." This is repeated in the barricade sequence when the Amis realise who's gone missing: "And who? One of the dearest. One of the most valiant, Jean Prouvaire." (This valiance having already been emphasized in the storming of the barricade scene where Jehan is the only of the Amis who's not a barricade chief named who openly fights the ranks of soldiers and guards crowning the barricade - at point blank range).

I therefore choose to believe that it was the valiant side of Jehan that showed itself on the barricade, and not the floofy poet; that he'd charged up the crest at some point and had somehow wound up on the wrong side (or toppled or shot: seriously, how stable can a barricade constructed of loose paving stones, furniture, barrels, an omnibus, iron gratings, glass doors and the odd bit of shoring timber be, anyway?), and that his execution was at least every bit as epic as Enjolras'. As MmeBahorel of Abaissé so aptly put it: "Prouvaire was taken, but like hell he went without a fight if his dying words were the shout "Vive la France, vive l'avenir"."

Meh, just my take on it.


Les Misérables written by Victor Hugo, translated by Charles Wilbour and mangled by Farlander.