He wore his working-man’s waistcoat, brown linen trousers, and his cap with the long visor hid his face.I really like this sentence because of its grammatical structure. As far as what it's saying, it's not too interesting, but the underlying structure is fascinating and says a lot about English's relatively simple case arrangement.
In this sentence, cap is simultaneously the third in the list and the subject of the second clause. You could just as easily write, "He wore his working-man's waistcoat, brown linen trousers, and his cap with the long visor" and "His cap with the long visor hid his face." But the two clauses are combined. And since his cap with the long visor works both as direct object and subject, it gives the whole sentence a nice, uninterrupted flow.
I got thinking about this some more, and I didn't know whether to attribute this to Hugo or the translator C.E. Wilbur. Then I realised that the grammatical structure could give me a clue. English doesn't inflect its nouns to indicate case. You could come across a word like cap, and you wouldn't know whether it's in the nominative case or accusative case (or any other case). In some languages, nouns are inflected to indicate their case. But since it's been about five years since I last took a French class, I couldn't remember if French did this or not. So I looked it up, and it turns out the French doesn't (though, like English, it does inflect its pronouns to indicate case). So I still couldn't tell if this grammatical structure was the work of Hugo or Wilbur.
However! This still illustrates something. Since I started learning about languages that inflect their nouns to indicate cases, I've come to view those that don't (particularly English) as, well, sort of inferior. After all, one of the points of grammar is to communicate clearly, and when the language you're using doesn't differentiate between cases, your sentences can be interpreted in ways that you hadn't intended.
But this sentence kind of argues against that clarity. The ambiguity of cap's case creates this wonderful flow between the two clauses. With a language that differentiates cases, that would not be possible. It's only because English doesn't inflect its nouns to indicate cases that something like this is even possible; in a language that does, the two clauses would have to be split because you could not inflect a noun in two different ways simultaneously. Here, that ambiguity of case creates an uninterrupted rhythm.
