pilferingapples:

Or, as dear dull Wraxall has it, “Two Lines of Dubious Origin”.

Oh yeah while I was away I GOT A WRAXALL YAY GO ME I don’t know if I should tag my thoughts on it as Brick!club or not? VITAL CONSIDERATIONS as I stall on making a current post.

Except not really stalling, because I have not much…

Snark, snark everywhere, and everyone gets a bit of it: the unusually superstitious townspeople (a “plante rare” around Paris indeed), the old Catholic women crossing themselves even though meeting Satan anywhere on earth isn’t an especially orthodox belief, and even the "voltairiens,“ which I didn’t know until today was a word in French or in English, with their skeptical sarcasm.  And of course poor Boulatrouelle, whose only redeeming feature is his drunkenness.  Hey, it’s a drunk in the Brick that isn’t ridiculously talkative.  Yay for him.

I’d also like to remark again that displacing the narrative into accounts of authorities, journalists, and superstitious locals is a very proto-modernist way of obscuring the reality of what’s going on in the story.  Of course one can reasonably assume that Boulatrouelle met Valjean in the woods and that Valjean’s hidden stash is buried there, but there’s still a mild ambiguity surrounding the whole thing.

Is it bad that I was too lazy to look up the Latin verses?  Medieval monks dabbling in the dark arts aren’t exactly my thing, you know.

Pilfering Apples: Brick!club 2.2.2 In Which Several Lines Will Be Read That May Have Come From The Devil Himself