Fantine's degradation is skillfully portrayed, and every detail of Hugo's rather lengthy earlier description of her carries weight here, as the golden hair becomes a cropped stubble, the voluptuous lips give a gap-toothed grimace, and the dainty white blouse turns into a patched bodice topped by a dirty cap. The final touch of the snowball down the back is in the best traditions of realism, which involves us in the scene by an almost photographic accuracy of impression rather than by any commentary. By comparing M. Bamatabois and Félix Tholomyès in his essay on dandies, however, Hugo subtly underlines the point that Fantine's last torment, like her first, is the work of masculine vanity and callousness. The snowball incident was actually seen by Hugo in 1841. He waited over twenty years to find exactly the right place to use it in fiction.
The scene in the police office is again a graphic rather than a literary one, and in posing and lighting the three principal characters, Hugo may have been influenced by a theme common in medieval painting — the struggle between an angel and a devil for the possession of a cringing soul. Indeed, in their taste for local color and specific detail, as opposed to general truths, the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century are much alike.
