Les Misérables, Part One, Book Five, Chapter III

I'm still (slowly) reading Les Misérables, the first time for this particular translation and an unabridged edition.  Recently, I read Chapter III ("Sums Deposited with Laffitte") of Part One, Book Five.  This chapter contains one of my favorite lines, but I was a bit disappointed with how it's rendered in this translation:  "Books are remote but reliable friends."  I much prefer the other translation I read, where this line is "Books are cold but sure friends."  I lookt up the original French (which I got as a free e-book years ago) and found that it's "les livres sont des amis froids et sûrs."  I would translate this as "books are cold and sure friends."  "Et" is usually translated "and," but apparently both translators felt that the context permitted a more adversative conjunction.

A couple weeks after I read this, I was still thinking about the original French sentence, and I realized that there's assonance between "livres" and "amis" and that this emphasizes this type of clause.  "Livres" ("books") is the subject nominative, and "amis" ("friends") is the predicate nominative.  Both words have the same semantic weight, so to speak (nouns on opposite sides of a copulative verb), and the assonance between them indicates this balanced relationship.

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Almost as a side-note, I'll add this:  the entire sentence (describing Jean Valjean in the guise of Monsieur Madeleine) is "He loved books; books are remote but reliable friends," and this provides a direct contrast with Javert, described two chapters later (in Chapter V. "Dim Flashes of Lightning on the Horizon"):  "In his rare spare time, although he hated books, he would read...."