OMG so many chapters in this week’s installment of the Villette Readalong, and it was a busy week, with cleaning and unpacking and houseguests and small road trips. So if you find that I have missed crucial nuance in this section of Villette, please try to forgive me. I spent yesterday gazing sadly at the very small number of dirty dishes in my sink and feeling utterly daunted by them.
I started Chapter Six with very warm feelings toward Lucy Snowe, because she had just come to a new city, and she was comforted in the midst of all the strangeness by realizing that she resides in the shadow of St. Paul’s. That’s some relatable stuff right there. But then she’s gotta go and be a d-bag again immediately.
I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, LUCINDA.
And then, even though she has discovered how marvelous London is (and she is right, London is marvelous), she decides immediately to set sail for France instead of trying to make her way in the city in which she already resides and whose language she speaks.
Apart from being mad at Lucy for ditching the city she has immediately recognized as THE BEST, I kind of liked the whole sequence where she decides to sail off to France. I like how she’s just like, “w/e, maybe things will be fun in France,” and I like how she’s not great at arranging her transportation, and everyone she encounters is like:
Then there is like an eternity of Lucy Snowe knowing nothing and being bounced around from shitty lodging to shitty lodging. By an enormous stroke of good fortunate (or, in retrospect, maybe because the drama teacher had a little crush on her), she randomly gets a job for which she admits openly she has no qualifications, working for a lady named Madame Beck who creeps into her room the first night she comes to stay and stares at her for fifteen minutes.
Lucy quickly becomes an English teacher at the school, fine fine fine, and then matters pick up when a hot young doctor starts coming around the Beck household to tend to the elder Beck daughter’s imaginary illness. Lucy Snowe pays a lot of attention to him, but not because she’s into him. Not for that reason. Nope. Definitely not.
Dr. John, as it turns out, has a thing for somebody else, who he swears he is not into, but whom he nevertheless describes as spotless and good and unspeakably beautiful. Through a series of ridiculous circumstances, Lucy agrees to help protect the object of Dr. John’s affections from the attention of a crude and lame guy who’s also into her. This is all fairly boring to me.
NOT AT ALL BORING: Lucy makes a new friend, the drama teacher M. Paul, who talks her into helping out on the school play, locks her in a garret room to run lines, and then feeds her a sumptuous feast when she cops to being hungry. I love him. He is my favorite thing about this book so far.
I was irritable, because excited, and I could not help turning upon [the costume mistress] and saying, that if she were not a lady and I a gentleman, I should feel disposed to call her out.
“After the play, after the play,” said M. Paul. “I will then divide my pair of pistols between you, and we will settle the dispute according to form: it will only be the old quarrel of France and England.”
Ahahahaha. And then, to add compliment to gift (we really should have a positive version of “add insult to injury”), Lucy Snowe becomes abruptly awesome by spending the whole afterparty receiving confidence after confidence from hen-witted, beautiful little Ginevra and responding to them thus:
Um, and then everyone leaves for vacation, and Lucy gets incredibly depressed. But not depressed enough to ever consider becoming Catholic, because ew.