#i am not saying marius has not made bad choices or done horrible things

[desertfangs]

Since there's been a lot of discussion of Marius lately, I wanted to highlight one of my absolute favorite scenes with him. It's at the end of the Queen of the Damned, and Marius wants Lestat to actually obey the new rules the Coven has come up but also he knows Lestat probably won't:

"You will obey the rules, won't you?" he asked suddenly. Mixture of menace and sarcasm. And maybe a little affection, too.

"Of course!" Again I shrugged. "What are they, by the way? I've forgotten. Oh, we don't make any new vampires; we do not wander off without a trace; we cover up the kill."

"You are an imp, Lestat, you know it? A brat."

"Let me ask you a question," I said. I made my hand into a fist and touched him lightly on the arm. "That painting of yours, The Temptation of Amadeo, the one in the Talamasca crypt . . ."

"Yes?"

"Wouldn't you like to have it back?"

"Ye gods, no. It's a dreary thing, really. My black period, you might say. But I do wish they'd take it out of the damned cellar. You know, hang it in the front hall? Some decent place."

I laughed. Suddenly he became serious. Suspicious. "Lestat!" he said sharply.

"Yes, Marius."

"You leave the Talamasca alone!"

What I really love about this is it shows Marius' sense of humor. His reaction to the painting especially cracks me up. He's like "It's not really my best work... but I do wish they'd display it somewhere it would be seen!" I don't know, I find that super relatable.

But also it's funny because Marius often gets perceived as this humorless paternal figure but he's not really that stuffy and uptight. He's exasperated by Lestat, but honestly, who isn't?

[pilferingapples]

Beeble Mis 6: quickest reaction post I am capable of

Okay this is Incomplete because I really did miss a lot but the Good the Bad and the ?? Things About This Episode, Spoilers obviously

..y’all the barricades were SO GOOD

Honestly the barricade was amazing?? like obviously they’ve cut a lot but the cuts in this part of it made Sense and they kept so much? -the Five Less One More Scene? Done and Done Well  -Gavroche getting the bullets? Beautiful , I sobbed - Courfeyrac’s death scene?? Don’t need my heart! Take it! I hate everything!!! But in a good way! - all the combat badassery! All the trying to look after everyone! Inspiration and heartbreak! THIS BARRICADE IS MADE OF LOVE?!? I kept yelling THERE HE IS ,THERE’S ENJOLRAS and I am still WAY messed up about him in the best way! This! Was! Good!  - Grantaire and Enjolras and their whole thing? Good! Really good! I think this is probably the arc that paid off the best after the cuts and edits (and really I DO understand Some Things Have to Go For Time). Changed but still Really Good and aww the Smile ?!?  Yeah even The Line that I know everyone’s gonna make fun of, it Works In Context IMO, I’m ready to defend it. I was Emotions.  - I swear I’m not going soft on this because it’s the barricade ; I was ready to be Judgey As Hell about the barricade! But it?? It was good. One of the best Barricade Sequences I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot! Let me give credit where due, this was Damn Good.  Yeah, there were changes, and having seen how good the barricade sequence was now I really wish the other scenes and characters could have been there (I miss Le Cabuc and the Artillery Gunner and the Death of Prouvaire the most; I’d love to have seen Quinn’s version of those).  But there’s always some condensing by nature of the media shift/time, and for the time and scenes they had, it was Really Good. I’m getting emotional again just typing this up!  Well Played, BBC. 

Also, Javert’s reaction to Valjean showing up was just about Everything I Wanted. Like, not quite --I feel like there could have been a little more time there , and why was it all in the Corinth?? --but Good. Good. 

-NICOLETTE IS THE MVP OF THE GILLENORMAND HOUSEHOLD

-Oyelowovert at the bridge? Beautiful. Amazing acting. 

- Thenardier and Gillenormand continued being their Perfect Awful Selves. Props especially to this Gillenormand for IMO really selling his change of heart while still keeping the Horrible Old Man mannerisms like he has to. 

- A Pretty Good Javert Jump, I will give it a solid 6.5 out of 10, did not make me laugh so that’s Good

The Bad 

-Javert’s every move being given a Greek Policeman Chorus is..weird.  Oyelowo is entirely capable of portraying Javert’s internal conflict without having to spell it out to a sounding board. 

Javert’s character in general kinda suffers in this episode from the built-up weight of all the weird things it’s done over the course of the series IMO--he gets his Resignation moment and his Noose Stock moment and all Now,  and it’s sort of effective but also like...this is not the Javert who has those moments. 

--that’s pretty much a summary for all my real issues with this episode; there are a lot of moments , particularly for Valjean and Javert’s character arcs, that just don’t land how they should because the previous episodes subvert them. And yet for just this episode they are good! They just don’t connect. 

The ????? I Just Have a Lot of Feelings!  A Lot of Very Mixed Feelings! and a really really bad internet connection! 

- Okay I missed a lot of the sewer section specifically (curs’d Technical Difficulties!)  but it really seems like Valjean had all his real epiphanies and character growth there? Which is...okay, since it didn’t show up anywhere earlier really, that’s the right place to put it; it IS a major change point for him (Marius, of course, did a splendid job of being Not Conscious, well done, Marius. Sleep it off, you don’t wanna remember this).

-Javert like..going to the police station and telling everyone about everything in between every character beat? and meeting Valjean at the sewer grate with what looked like half the police force along with him? Weird , and I’m not a fan, but it DID give me the chance to see Javert tearfully tell his poor Long Suffering Sidekick that VALJEAN WAS WITH ANOTHER MAN ahahahah oh man I shouldn’t be laughing at this bit but I was

-I am genuinely undecided about the changes to Valjean’s confession and self-exile and everything around it? Having him tell Marius before the wedding at least eliminates the unease of wondering if Marius is having second thoughts post-wedding morning, and I guess I appreciate the Six Weeks of honeymoon for making it very clear that Valjean’s not going into his spiral because of anything Cosette does , but also like...it kind of makes it seem like he’s so codependent he can’t handle Cosette even going away on a trip, instead of him sinking as he’s being pushed further away? 

Also why is he gardening. In Digne. How. Why. Why does he get WORSE when Cosette shows up. 

-Thenardier showing up and Cosette being there and being part of that conversation is... huh. I’m processing? It’s a Lot, it’s a very big moment; I think I might like it , but I really have to watch it again. 

- The ending--I get what they’re trying to do with the momes there, and I approve the intent! I’m just not sure it works..? But...I think it’s genuinely daring of the series.  It’s an obvious effort to honor the challenging, unresolved notes that haunt the ending of the novel.  I respect the Choice. 

Gonna be rewatching this one a couple times; I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say after I’ve seen it again! 

[centrifuge-politics]

Brick Club 5.5.2

Welcome to another Hugonian tangent on my part. I am the Victor Hugo of Brick Club. I’m going to hop into the chapter halfway because the cut is just an offensively long look into literally a single line à la my research in the eight pound cannon last volume. So if you have any interest in medical(?) care(??) in pre-germ theory Europe, specifically the use of the mentioned “chloruretted lotions,” by all means read my essay.

First of all, it took me ages to figure out what this illustration reminded me of but I got it:

Gillenormand continues to rankle me in a powerful way, the shriveled bastard. “M. Gillenormand did not permit anybody to explain to him—” yeah, because heaven forbid anyone with actual expertise explain anything to a rich royalist old man. I’m so glad he gets to be happy and unburdened considering he’s the fount from which literally all of Marius’s woes sprang from to begin with. Poor bourgeosie has been sad and grumpy in his manor home while Marius was nearly driven to suicide but all’s well now, I suppose! You heard it here first, folks, everything is Gillenormand’s fault. No, I will not be taking constructive criticism.

Gillenormand’s unearned joy is sharply contrasted with Marius’s grave reservation. He’s very much in a state of shell shock—“the whole affair of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; shadows, almost indistinct, were floating in his mind…he understood nothing in regard to his own life”—and instead of dwelling on his inability to process what just happened, Marius is clinging to the idea of Cosette, of life, of the future. “Let us emphasise one point here: he was not won over, and was little softened by all the solicitude and all the tenderness of his grandfather.” Good! Fucking excellent, because Gillenormand has proven himself to solely operate in his own interest and he will discard anyone who isn’t immediately useful to him with little thought. It’s immeasurably satisfying to see Marius turn and leverage himself against Gillenormand in service of his own interests for once.

I have done my due diligence, now onto what I really want to talk about: when we thought bleach was medicine and used it on Marius.

Marius’s wound gets horribly infected (natch) and “it was not without difficulty that the chloruretted lotions and the nitrate of silver brought the gangrene to an end.” Silver nitrate I recognize, its caustic properties mean it can be used as a topical antiseptic, although it’s no one’s first choice today. Despite being a clear liquid solution, it will also permanently stain the top layer of your skin brown if you come into contact. This fades fairly quickly as your skin naturally exfoliates away, in about a week or so from personal experience.

I was much more intrigued by, first of all the word ‘chloruretted,’ and second of all what kind of chlorine compounds would be used as treatments for infection in 1832. I went googling and found an illuminating article from 1827 titled, “The Chlorurets of Oxide of Sodium and of Lime, As Disinfectants” by Thomas Alcock (as well as a subsequent review of this article from The Lancet the same year which is amusingly awful). I’m going to start with some definitions and then I very much wanted to talk about this article that is only barely tangentially related to the situation. Sorry.

Chloruret is an archaic translation of clorure which is just the French word for chloride. Chloruret seems to have been used to refer to not only chlorides but chlorates and hypochlorites as well, which is, uh, not a great system because sodium hypochlorite, sodium chloride, and sodium chlorate are bleach, table salt, and herbicide respectively and, it goes without saying, very different! So I’m doing some guessing in context as to what compound these authors are referring to. Chloruret of lime is the compound calcium hypochlorite (CaClO)—which you might find today in swimming pools—and I believe chloruret of soda is just sodium hypochlorite (NaClO) which is slightly confusing because this is the exact same compound as chloruret of oxide of sodium. I have a 0.5% solution of NaClO in my bathroom right now to clean my shower with, this is what we colloquially call bleach.

All of these chloruret compounds were known to prevent decay, but it’s unclear if anybody really knew why, which leads to a couple of highly questionable recommendations from Alcock and his contemporaries. Alcock begins his article relating how chloruret of lime or soda was used to slow the decay of corpses for identification and investigation as well as to disinfect hospital equipment, sick-rooms, sewer systems, anything. Alcock and his reviewers didn’t have a concept of bleaching agents, but Alcock observes “both the chloruret of lime and of the oxide of sodium have the disadvantage of discolouring the muscles when applied to them.” Additionally, this article was written before germ theory supplanted the miasma theory of disease and Alcock continually recommends the use of chlorurets “in destroying putrescent and infectious effluvia” with the belief that clearing out a bad smell would also purify the ‘bad’ air spreading disease and infection. He actually has an entire section relating cases from French doctors where chloruret of lime cured “asphyxia” caused by breathing the Parisian sewer fumes.

The reason chlorine bleach works as a disinfectant is because it pretty indiscriminately kills organic material by destroying proteins on a molecular level. This is great when you’re just wiping down operating tables and hospital rooms, but very bad when you start applying bleach to living, organic patients. Alcock quotes a French medical report recommending “Applications of the chlorureted water to be made to the buboes, the carbuncles, and the gangrenes of persons labouring under the plague” which isn’t the worst idea considering antibiotics are over a century away but also “Water containing half a dram or one dram of the concentrated chloruret of oxide of sodium to each pint, to be given to the patients afflicted with plague as their common drink.” It probably goes without saying, but this will not cure infection or plague or anything except the condition of having intact stomach lining. There is no good reason to ingest hypochlorite in any form, despite the section titled “On the Internal Use of the Chloruret of Soda.” Do not drink bleach.

The next section is a series of gruesome anecdotes of hospitalized patients who were cured of gangrene in every imaginable body part using chloruret of soda. Alcock, despite constantly mentioning how disgusting this all is, takes a certain amount of satisfaction in vividly describing just how horrific each infection presented before bleach swooped in to save the day. To skim, gangrene is when body tissue dies, in this case due to some sort of bacterial infection. Avoiding anything too graphic, dead tissue rots and this is bad and will send you into septic shock.

This brings us, unfortunately, back to poor Marius. Who has been dragged through an effluvious sewer with open wounds and now has gangrene. Alcock relates an account that might be comparable, that of a boy with an infected wound on his cheek, closest to Marius’s grazing head wound. The treatment was “a solution of the chloruret, in the proportion of one part to six of water” applied directly to the wound and dressings. This apparently worked very well, the infection cleared out “and the surfaces granulating kindly.” So Marius, despite needing sections of dead skin cut away, might not even have too much of a scar from his head wound, although it would be kind of badass, wouldn’t it? Can I see Marius with a gnarly face scar from a) being shot and b) being slathered in bleach?

Second, he was shot in the shoulder through and through. This might present more of a problem because the wound goes pretty deep near some pretty vital areas and sepsis is a major concern because we don’t have antibiotics and, lord, how did Marius actually survive this? Alcock provides an example of “a case of punctured wound received in dissection…the patient experienced immediate relief from the diluted chloruret of oxide of sodium [NaClO], used as a lotion, combined with free use of leeches.” A winning combination and “the patient recovered without any untoward circumstance.” This has got to at least leave a significant patch of discolored skin from the repeated application of bleach, if not an impressive scar to boot. Hugo specifically says nothing of this, but sodium hypochlorite solutions were apparently also frequently injected at infection sites for deeper wounds or more internal infections, specifically in the bladder, the uterus, and, oddly enough, the nose for atrophic rhinitis). I get that everyone was working with what they had but…bleach injections is a challenging concept.

A final, indulgence; the subsequent review of Alcock’s article in The Lancet is absolutely laughable as a modern reader. It’s three and a half pages long and its criticism basically amounts to: yeah, chlorurets are great and all, but salt does the exact same thing so this is useless. It’s so smugly dismissive of Alcock’s terminology, his case presentation, and the usefulness of even exploring the applications of chlorurets that it borders on anti-intellectual. And, in the process, is so blatantly wrong about chemistry and medicine that it reads like parody today. “Chloruret of soda, to use for once Mr. Alcock’s nomenclature, is a ‘disinfecting agent,’ and preserves animal substances;—common salt preserves animal substances, but has it been proved that it is not a disinfecting agent?” The Lancet says, with an air of ‘gotcha!’ then continues, “Let the test of experience decide.” Earlier, they said, “It is certain that culinary salt will answer many of the intentions to be effected by the chloride of soda, and it is a disinfecting agent in a very great degree. We do not pretend to ascribe to it all the properties of the chloride of soda, but we are certain that it possesses a great many of them.” That’s a lot of unfounded speculation for a noted medical journal. Also, since The Lancet is petty, I can be petty; chloride of soda is a bad name for sodium hypochlorite because chloride is Cl and a soda (Na) of that is NaCl which is sodium chloride which is just salt, Lancet. Not saying chloruret is a better term, but I haven’t based my entire snarky critique on that basis! Beyond the petty, the test of experience is in and salt and bleach are, shockingly, not interchangeable as disinfectants, something that is easily tested, even in 1827. Salt is a desiccant, it kills some bacteria by sucking the water out of it. Bleach is an oxidizer, it kills bacteria by literally breaking apart the proteins in organic material. This is why, despite The Lancet’s flippant dismissal of the substances’ differences, we use salt to preserve foodstuffs and not bleach. There are so many legitimate critiques of Alcock’s article, he overly relies on anecdotal evidence, his measurement recommendations are unclear and unstandardized, he injects bleach in patients, but this review is just lazy.