Les Misérables · Chapter
VII: The Wisdom of Tholomyès explained
Tholomyès delivers a long, rambling, and drunken speech to his companions and the grisettes, mixing mock-wisdom, puns, and cynical advice about love, marriage, and moderation, while the others interject with songs and banter.
What happens
Tholomyès delivers a long, rambling, and drunken speech to his companions and the grisettes, mixing mock-wisdom, puns, and cynical advice about love, marriage, and moderation, while the others interject with songs and banter.
Themes in this chapter
Love and Compassion
Tholomyès' cynical and mocking advice about love and marriage contrasts with genuine affection, highlighting the theme's complexity.
The Human Condition and Fate
Tholomyès' reflections on desire, moderation, and the inevitability of folly explore the human struggle with passion and reason.
Characters to notice
- Tholomyès
Delivers a lengthy, witty, and drunken monologue on love, marriage, and moderation, displaying his rhetorical flair and cynicism.
- Fantine
Mentioned as a dreamy, pensive grisette who sings and prays, with Tholomyès praising her freshness and innocence.
- Favorite
Listens attentively to Tholomyès and is addressed by him with flattery and mock-poetic praise.
- Blachevelle
Interjects with comments and leads a song in response to Tholomyès' speech.
- Listolier
Participates in the banter and joins in singing a couplet.
- Fameuil
Calls for down with the tyrant and joins in the singing.
- Zéphine
Addressed by Tholomyès in his speech, described as having an irregular face.
- Dahlia
Mentioned by Tholomyès, who suggests she should call herself Rosa.
Key passages
“Woman is perfidious and disingenuous. She detests the serpent from professional jealousy. The serpent is the shop over the way.”
Tholomyès claims women are deceitful and competitive with serpents out of professional rivalry.
Tholomyès' misogynistic humor during his drunken speech.
“The pun is the dung of the mind which soars. The jest falls, no matter where; and the mind after producing a piece of stupidity plunges into the azure depths.”
Tholomyès compares a pun to excrement from a lofty mind, which then rises again after the joke.
Tholomyès defends puns with a paradoxical metaphor.
“O Fantine, know this: I, Tholomyès, I am an illusion; but she does not even hear me, that blond maid of Chimeras!”
Tholomyès declares himself an illusion and notes that Fantine, lost in her dreams, does not listen to him.
Tholomyès' self-aware yet mocking praise of Fantine's dreaminess.