I don’t know any other way to put it other than I feel almost traumatized from the plight of Fantine. I didn’t sleep after I read the description of her having sold her front teeth. Selling her hair, her teeth, her body- and after selling her teeth, we the reader are treated to nothing more than a sentence that says Cosette wasn’t ill at all… it was a ruse for the Thenardiers to extort money from Fantine.
I feel it was unintentional, but I found that Hugo’s next line after the description of how Fantine got her money, “After all it was a ruse of the Thenardiers to obtain money. Cosette was not ill.” was so… devoid of humanity, devoid of sympathy. Devoid of any empathy at all, that in the very moment I read it, Hugo himself was nothing more than a Thenardier to me.
It’s something that a lot of french writers did, and I love it. Such a dissonance between the miserable life of the characters and how it’s described. Since i’m french, we talked a lot about french litterature, and it’s good to note that Victor Hugo was very critical of all the french society, and how the upper-class treated everyone under them. If the book tell it this way, it’s because the upper-class didn’t give a fuck about the poorer, and it would be how a rich guy of this time would have describe the story. A lot of messages still work today with our modern society