so i was searching scanned archives of historical books for references to the names of the amis outside of les mis, like you do, in order to try and find clues for why hugo picked the names that he did. i found a few things (which i’ll make a post about later), but i wasn’t having much luck overall… until i found this sentence in a french scientific journal (Cosmos: revue des sciences et de leurs applications) from 1895:
for those of you who don’t speak french, allow me to translate:
A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Grantaire has, near Philadelphia (United States), the largest spider “farm.”
…okay cosmos, you have my attention. the full article is even better:
and another rough translation:
The art of giving bottled wine the appearance of age. – More and more things are counterfeited in our age. This is why there are forged diamonds and other precious stones, ivory, gold, rubber. Now, here’s an example found in the sale of phony old wines, that is, wine stored in bottles having the appearance of age. To make bottles appear older and obtain a better price for their contents, a new industry was created, that of spider cultivation. A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Grantaire has, near Philadelphia (United States), the largest spider “farm.” His stock usually consists of thousands of spiders originating mostly from the selection of spiders imported from France.
This industry also exists in the Loire region, but on a smaller scale. There are however ten establishments devoted to the cultivation of spiders in this department. These spiders are sold for around 60 francs per hundred, and the clientele consists of french wine-growers who use them for a clever, if not recommendable, purpose.
Three months after the introduction of 60 francs’ worth of spiders to a newly stocked wine cellar, the bottles are covered from cork to cork in spiderwebs. The uneducated person, seeing these bottles completely covered in spiderwebs, naturally concludes that the wine which they contain is old, and so one can get a better price for it.
COUNTERFEIT WINE
SPIDER-FARMER GRANTAIRE
IS A THING
and it gets better — apparently this story went “viral,” in a nineteenth-century sense, appearing throughout different american newspapers and journals, including the scientific fucking american. here’s an excerpt from the story about it in the hartford locomotive:
aka:
“average ami raises 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average ami eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Grantaire, who lives in pennsylvania & raises over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted”
here’s the headline of the san francisco call’s article:
HE HAS A MOTHERFUCKING SPIDER FARM.
the text of the article (which we can all read because it is available online, thank the old gods and the new) includes an interview with spiders grantaire, in which he waxes rhapsodically about his charges in exactly the way that you imagine the grantaire of les mis would:
“They think I feed them now,” said Pierre, “but I ford them for you. They have brains, these little creatures. Ah, they are cunning. After you see them and I tell you of them you will not oush them more. You will say, ‘The spider can teach me something. I will Watch him. He is a diplomat, an architect, a mathematician. His knowledge is worth having.’ Ah, there is a fine fellcw running on your neck. Don’t knock him off. He will not bite you. They are harmless. He wishes to give you a bon jour and make your acquaintance. […] “But what money is there in it, you ask. Men Dieu, money, money—always money. I, who love my pets, to be always thinking of what they sell for! I will tell you now, and then you will talk no more of money, and I can show you something. A customer comes to me. He is a wine merchant from New York or Philadelphia, or perhaps he writes. He says that he has just stocked a cellar with five-year-old port or Burgundy, or something else. The bottles have brushed clean in shipping. They look like new and common. They will not sell for old wine. He has attached to them labels of twenty, thirty or forty years ago, some year of a grand vintage. He tells me so many hundred bottles. I know how many of my pets will soon cover his cellar in cobwebs of the finest old kind. I put them in little small paper boxes, a pair in a box. I ship then, in a crate, with many holes for air. Maybe I send 200, 300 or 400 spiders. For them I ask half a franc each, si, for every hundred. In two months you would think his cellar was not disturbed for the last forty years. It has cost him $40, or $50 maybe, but he may sell the wine for $1,000 —yes, more than that—above what it had brought without any pets had dressed the bottles in robes of long ago.”
one million stories, please, about a grantaire who miraculously survives the barricade and moves to the united states where he starts a spider farm and keeps the flame of the revolution alive by bilking snobby fat cats out of their wine money.
If y’all didn’t realize I was going to research the crap out of this just because I could, you clearly don’t understand this blog at all.
So, first off, I seriously doubt there was ever a French military veteran farmer named Pierre Grantaire who moved to Pennsylvania to help wine merchants defraud people and had pet spiders named after Zola and Sarah Bernhardt.
I know it’s sad. And I can’t prove there wasn’t. But you have to understand that “there were articles in a bunch of 19th century newpapers and the notes sections of some scientific journals” is basically the equivalent, accuracy-wise, of saying “I saw it on my tumblr dash”. Which is to say, they shamelessly made stuff up. All the time. And then shamelessly copied it off each other.
I can tell you that there was no person by the name of Grantaire living anywhere in Pennsylvania in the 1880 or 1900 US censuses, though, and nobody with a name even close to Grantaire who was born in France and lived there. (The 1890 records were destroyed in a fire.)
Plus there’s the fact, as needsmoreresearch pointed out, that if you want to make a cellar look spider-y, you don’t use pretty garden spiders that weave neat patterns, you use the cellar spiders that use the fluffy dusty cobwebby silk, which could be a question of art as proposed in needsmoreresearch’s post, but it seems like if you were actually committing fraud you’d go for authenticity over symmetry.
And the earliest version of this story I can find, after checking a bunch of databases, is in the April 16th Edition of the St. Paul Daily Globe. I can’t guarantee that’s the original source, since digitizing of American newspapers is still pretty patchy, but I’d make a fair bet that it is. It’s the full long-form article and includes all the quotes and wording that were copied in the other publications and tbh it really reads like a 19th century newspaper hoax.
Also, unlike any of the other papers, the Daily Globe was advertising it over a week in advance as one of their cool weird stories in the Sunday edition, which none of the other papers did. Including, for several days, under the headline “NOT A FREAK SHEET”. Daily Globe, methinks you may protest too much.
Now you may think it’s sad if this dude did not exist. But. Just imagine: A bunch of Globe reporters just off their alcohol-soaked lunch break, BS-ing about the most click-bait-y hoax stories they can come up with, and one of them says, “I need a name for a weird old rambly French dude who really likes spiders” and another immediately says “Grantaire. Definitely Grantaire.”
And since the ONLY results in Google Books for the word “Grantaire” in all of the 1890s are a) this story, and b) editions of Les Miserables, I am absolutely sure that whoever proposed that name was a Les Mis fan.
In other words, this is totally somebody’s modern-US-AU Grantaire headcanon from the 1890s that got reblogged a lot and is still merrily going viral 125 years later, because Mis fandom never dies.
“Les Mis memes last 3 years” factoid actually just statistical error. Les Mis memes last 1 month if they’re lucky. Spiders Grantaire, a meme going viral for over 125 years and still going strong is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted.
