Child of the Law (ch1)

Let's see, so far I've ended up changing Javert's address (I'd managed to pick the name of one of the roads in Paris where the barricade was built, in a feat of spectacular subconscious association), Cosette's hair colour(!) and the degree of 'leniency' shown in Javert's later cases (I really don't see him letting criminals get off scot-free, however disproportionate their crime). This is what comes of breaking the habit of a lifetime and uploading a chapter to fanfiction.net before first putting it up here and letting it sit and stew for a while... I shall be very interested to see whether anyone on FFnet notices that the location of Javert's lodgings has changed between the original chapter 1 and the upload of chapter 2!

This was obviously a considerable stylistic experiment. Having done musical-verse Eponine, I thought I'd go for the full Hugo this time as a means of summarising and compressing the narrative if nothing else (ironic as the idea of Hugo's compressing anything is...) It was originally intended as a one-shot, but it got somewhat too long for that.

In any case it was a considerable challenge to un-learn all the conventions about 'limited third-person PoV' that I'd spent the last couple of decades in perfecting and to deliberately introduce authorial moralising, head-hopping and tendentious generalisations ("she was a child, and hence she loved...") I had to keep consciously pushing the story back when it tried to turn into my standard dialogue/monologue-driven narrative: I didn't quite manage to write it without any direct speech at all, but I came pretty close.

Hugo does of course give us direct dialogue — indeed, he gives us entire chapters of stream-of-consciousness transcription where some of his more bombastic characters are concerned — but he rather tends to keep things at a distance and tell us about the characters talking rather than show the conversation through the eyes of one of the participants as a modern author would. I was aiming hard for that 'detached' feel.

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Chapter 1: l'inspecteur Javert

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