#and realistically i know i did a lot of comms like 11 or so since july last year

[lyriumsings]

turns out going out and doing things is good for you vs staying inside for weeks at a time lol but sadly leaving the house cuts into drawing im trying to make up for it by watching studies and collecting comm refs

[pilferingapples]

Hi!! I'm so sorry if this question comes off as stupid or uninformed, but I've always had it since I've read Les Mis... how does Bahorel manage his expenses? He comes from a peasant background and I'm guessing his parents weren't able to endow him with much wealth. Yet, he's been enrolling (though not attending) in law classes for eight years, so he must be paying for each year's tuition. I don't have the book on me, but I think I remember it saying that he had a fair bit of money to spend (or maybe I'm remembering that wrong.) But where does he get all this money from? Does he have a job? Or maybe I'm just stupid and farmers do get paid well? I don't know.

..Ok, you know what, Nonny? Not only are you not at all stupid, attempting to answer this question has rocked the very foundations of my understanding of what's going on here! Herein is a Mystery!! Indeed I cannot give you an answer, but I hope you'll journey with me as I explore some New (to me!) Questions!

So , first off, the Known Facts:

Bahorel's parents are peasants! The narration in 3.4.1 says so:

Il avait des parents paysans (he had peasant parents)

and Bahorel, in 3.4.1 , says so :

Il disait d'eux: Ce sont des paysans, et non des bourgeois; c'est pour cela qu'ils ont de l'intelligence (he said of them: They are peasants, and not bourgeois; that is why they're intelligent)

And peasants are of course kind of famously Not Very Wealthy ,but...

Il mangeait à rien faire une assez grosse pension, quelque chose comme trois mille francs.

and here the plot thickens and i enter the land of Linguistic Mystery!

Hapgood translates that line as :

He wasted a tolerably large allowance, something like three thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.

Donougher says

He consumed quite a considerable allowance, something like three thousand francs a year, doing nothing.

Rose:

He ate up a fairly large allowance, something like three thousand francs, doing nothing.

FMA:

Doing nothing he ate up a rather large allowance, something like three thousand francs.

Now I don't have my Wilbour with me, and I don't care what Denny says, but either way, the trend is clear, right? Every translator says "allowance" . Every translator says "allowance" ! And in modern English (and Rose and Donougher at the least are very definitely trying to be modern English friendly!) "allowance", in this context, would mean money from the family-- the allowance for a young adult in college. Right?

This is what I assumed! This is what everyone I know assumed !

BUT IT MIGHT BE WRONG?!?

look again at the French:

Il mangeait à rien faire une assez grosse pension, quelque chose comme trois mille francs.

The part being translated as "a large allowance" is "une assez gross pension". And that is not the French word for allowance! At least, not in the "money from home" sense.

What IS the word for "allowance" (in the money-from-parents sense)? Well, there are a lot of options. Allocation, indemnité, (those two are the words specifically used in examples about students getting money from home!) argent de poche. But pension doesn't seem to be it!

What does "pension" mean? Well, it can mean the money paid to a school or hotel for upkeep--but that would be money that was paid to the school , not something Bahorel was free to use on "nothing" (and also Paris law school was not a boarding school!); it really really doesn't work in context here, and seems to have been an unusual usage anyway.

Aside from that, and a far more common use, a pension was almost always used to mean...well, a pension ! an amount of money paid regularly by the government or a former employer, or paid out regularly from an individual's personal savings/investments.

So if I'm right about this reading of it (and I might not be!) , I think the question hidden in Bahorel's intro isn't "how can his parents afford to support him" but "how the heck is Bahorel, who is , realistically, all of 29 at most, and has been a student for 11 years, already getting a pension ??"

Most of the options seem iffy-- a job he did well enough at that they felt obligated to give him a pension at 2- years old, but didn't want to stay at?? a careful savings accumulated when he was what, 10?? --but there's certainly room for ideas there! (and yes I have indeed been having a lot of fun batting ridiculous theories around with friends today, but--)

I suspect the easiest answer on this is the one Hugo was probably thinking of-- a pension from the government for some sort of Art. That was the first source of financial stability for Hugo when he was in his 20s, after all-- a small but reliable pension for his first volume of poetry-- and he does frame Bahorel as being a very active Romantic, which sort of implies some sort of artistic output.

(...if that's right, it means Bahorel is fighting passionately to overthrow the government that's paying him a regular stipend. He can't be bought out!XD)

Anyway! I was going to get into theories on how Bahorel's parents could be supporting him, but now I think..honestly...they may not be?? Thank you for this question , you've caused me to reassess a very well-known passage! (sources used: Linguee, Wordreference, the 19C word enteries from this collection of dictionary entries over the decades!)