Meta: the honeymoon suite

[genarti]

This is a crosspost from tumblr, edited slightly to be a coherent single post instead of a reblogging reply. (There's a thing called Brick!Club which is people reading through the book, one chapter per week, and blogging about their thoughts and meta and so forth; this comes from that.) The question that spurred it was about the fact that Valjean stays (reluctantly) in the honeymoon suite at the Thénardiers' inn when he comes to retrieve Cosette. The gist was (from vivelafizz and pilferingapples) along the lines of "Oh geez, does that mean what I think it means, if so that's UNNECESSARY AND SKEEVY, HUGO."

And then I waxed long-winded in reply, and thought it might be worth porting over here too:

( My long-winded rambling musings on the subject of nuptial symbolism here )