“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (post 7): Only at very end of hour-long, extremely intimate conversation, do Marius and Cosette exchange names

“Gradually they began to talk. Overflow succeeded to silence, which is fulness. The night was serene and splendid above their heads. These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other all their dreams, their frenzies, their ecstasies, their chimeras, their despondencies, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they ceased to see each other. They confided to each other in an intimacy of the ideal, which even now nothing could have increased, all that was most hidden and mysterious of themselves. They related to each other, with a candid faith in their illusions, all that love, youth and that remnant of childhood was theirs, suggested to their thought. These two hearts poured themselves out into each other, so that at the end of an hour, it was the young man who had the young girl’s soul and the young girl who had the soul of the young man. They inter-penetrated, they enchanted, they dazzled each other.

“When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she laid her head upon his shoulder, and asked him:

“ ‘What is your name?’

“ ‘My name is Marius,’ said he. ‘And yours?’

“ ‘My name is Cosette’ ” (1, p. 814).

1. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables [1862]. New York, Modern Library, 1992.

Comment

Within the framework of ordinary psychology, it would be plausible for two persons to see each other across a crowded room at a large social gathering, fall in love at first sight, and get the opportunity to exchange names only at the very end of the night. But it would not be plausible for two persons to wait to exchange names only at the very end of an intimate, self-revealing, hour-long conversation.

So what could explain the passage quoted above?

These two characters are being treated, not as real persons, but as alternate personalities. As I’ve explained in a number of past posts, it is only in multiple personality that namelessness is commonly found, or that personalities who do have names may reserve their names to be the last thing about themselves that they will divulge.

The multiple personality way of thinking about names is apparently ordinary psychology for this author.