Questions for the Learned and the Wise (and a link or two)

[heliopausa]

3.  In Les Miserables, a character is described thus:  "Everything failed him and everybody deceived him; what he was building tumbled down on top of him. If he were splitting wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily discovered that he had a friend also. Some misfortune happened to him every moment."  I don't get why the friend

Comments

[heliopausa]

Oh, good idea - that his mistress is a woman he's maybe only seen or spoken to, and likes the look of and unwisely tells his friend about - and the friend moves in first.
(If the friend broke up an existing relationship - especially more than once, as seems to be implied, I would expect he'd be redefined as not a friend.)

[asakiyume]

Maybe the friend wouldn't be breaking up the relationship--maybe it's just that any time he takes a lover, he finds that she's already sleeping with, or has slept with, someone from among his friends. That liaison could already be over; it could just be the chagrin of discovering she wasn't his special find, if you know what I mean.

[heliopausa]

:) I do! Oh, the tricky complications of love!

[todayiamadaisy]

1. Do the hair and the top of the cloak look like he might be Erestor?

3. I wonder if that's an odd translation, and it's meant to be something like If he had a mistress, he speedily discovered that his friend did too.?

[heliopausa]

Thank you very much for Erestor! I didn't know about him, but I do now, having taken your tip and quickly ransacked the internet for info. He does seem a likely fit, and I'm glad to have widened my LotR knowledge. :) I'll take it that it's him from now on.

Inspired by you, I chased up the original for Les Miserables. What comes up is:
"...S'il fendait du bois, il se coupait un doigt. S'il avait une maîtresse, il découvrait bientôt qu'il avait aussi un ami..."
which at least looks to me as if he cuts his finger, rather than cuts off his finger, which is some relief, but leaves us with pretty much the original problem, re: the friend.
I think I'll go with blueinkedpalm's suggestion, that it's a mistress in the aspirational sense, because otherwise repeated swoopings in and breakings up by the friend would be too much to contemplate.

[asakiyume]

The shy octopus is very, very sweet.

Regarding the mistress and friend, I'd go with the comment above--that the friend has the same mistress. It would be funny, though, if this was a 200+ years earlier prefiguring of the complaint about being "friendzoned"--i.e., where the object of your affections says, "I like you, but only as a friend."

[heliopausa]

That would have been funny! :) But I looked at the French, and it's a male friend he's talking about. The idea certainly turns up in nineteenth-century novels, though - Laurie in Little Women spends half a book grumping about being friendzoned, and Trollope's Johnny Eames is the same with Lily Dale. ("I'll be a sister to you" is the line that friendzoners seem to favour in nineteenth-century novels!)