Chaucer

Your chances were probably better if you couldn't afford him.

The doctor/surgeon whose training and methods are described in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales.

Lines 411 - 444.

When did that change, I wonder?

In the last few days I have been lucky enough to obtain a fine, like-new but used, hard-cover copy of The Riverside Chaucer for $15 and a new Wordsworth paperback edition of The Canterbury Tales for $7, both beautiful books.

And bargains!

I have read the Tales before only in Modern English translation.

Not this time.

It is a religion, thinks Hugo

But he has no idea that means it is driveling nonsense.

Marius, shaken by his republican friends, is close to abandoning Bonaparte.

Feminist crazies with assault rifles

And you thought it was only neo-Nazis and other right wing nuts who did this sort of thing.

Armed anarchists rally at Brock Turner's home: 'Try this again, we'll shoot you'

The nature of the thing

I say again that at least nearly half the voters would go for their candidate if either major American party nominated a goat.

He could even win.

It wasn't only Caligula.

The Donald leads by two, says CNN

Nine weeks out, a near even race

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton start the race to November 8 on essentially even ground, with Trump edging Clinton by a scant two points among likely voters, and the contest sparking sharp divisions along demographic lines in a new CNN/ORC Poll.

Trump tops Clinton 45% to 43% in the new survey, with Libertarian Gary Johnson standing at 7% among likely voters in this poll and the Green Party's Jill Stein at just 2%.

The current NBC poll of registered voters shows her ahead by 4 in a four way race.

The Friends of the A B C

Abaisee means the abased, the downtrodden.

They were the people, says Hugo.

It's a pun.

Anyway, Hugo's liberalism is not ours.

One of his heroic young men, Feuilly, a poor fan-maker, within himself "nurtured, with the deep instinct of the man of the people, what we now call the idea of nationality."

Hugo damns utterly the Partitions of Poland that, in 1795, caused Poland to disappear completely from the map of Europe for 130 years, in the name of that idea.

A convinced idealist, he mocks and denigrates the only skeptic among the Friends of the A B C, Grantaire.

The others are great fans of the Revolution.

Of Napoleon, not so much.

Marius is befriended by them.

One of the group, Legle de Meaux, is nicknamed Bossuet, after the famous bishop of that town.

Not that he is a devout Catholic, a clergyman, or an ardent believer in divine right absolute monarchy.

It's another pun.

L'Aigle (the Eagle) for Legle.

So, the Eagle of Meaux, Bossuet.

Les Miserables.

Bonaparte

It is now 1827, and the dead Louis XVIII has been succeeded by the reactionary "ultra," Charles X.

Marius is about 18.

Marius secretly comes to admire both his dead father, whose grave he regularly visits, and Bonaparte, with Hugo's approval.

He shouts out a window, "Vive l'empereur!"

He orders a hundred cards bearing the name "Baron Marius Pontmercy."

He travels to Montfermeil to visit Thenardier, but the innkeeper has failed, the inn is closed, and the man has gone off no one knows where.

His grandfather, M. Gillenormand, the Voltairian bourgeois and royalist supporter of the Bourbon Restoration, discovers the cards.

There is a scene, the old man shouts, "You are no more a baron than my slipper!"

And he throws Marius out of the house.

He orders his daughter, an old maid who lives with him, to send the lad 60 pistoles every six months.

That's 600 francs, in gold.

Les Miserables.

Fantasy politics

Protest and prayer: Donald Trump visits black church in Detroit

"No white supremacy in the White House."

"What have we got to lose? How about voting rights, civil rights, human rights?"

His last few months in office, what will he do?

This is not acceptable.

Barack Obama 'deliberately snubbed' by Chinese in chaotic arrival at G20

Apparently, nothing.

Revolt against the elites

The French Revolution was a long time ago, and was a revolt against hereditary, feudal, and clerical elites that put into power bourgeois, lay elites.

Likewise, the American Revolution.

From the 20th Century on, revolts can only be against the very same bourgeois elites.

But there are no others to take their places.

And so revolt against the bourgeoisie has empowered only monsters: Mussolini, Hitler, and the Bolsheviks, and all their dreadful epigones.