In part 5 of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, M. Gillenormand toasts the married couple, Marius and Cosette:
“Il est impossible de s'imaginer que Dieu nous ait faits pour autre chose que ceci: idolâtrer, roucouler, adoniser, être pigeon, être coq, becqueter ses amours du matin au soir, se mirer dans sa petite femme, être fier, être triomphant, faire jabot; voilà le but de la vie. Voilà, ne vous en déplaise, ce que nous pensions, nous autres, dans notre temps dont nous étions les jeunes gens. Ah! vertu-bamboche! qu'il y en avait donc de charmantes femmes, à cette époque-là, et des minois, et des tendrons! J'y exerçais mes ravages.”
Victor Hugo (1862), Les Misérables, volume 8, page 66. Paris: J. Hetzel.
What is the sense of Gillenormand’s exclamation “vertu-bamboche”? Looking this up in dictionaries roughly contemporary with Hugo, I find that “vertu” means “virtue”, and “bamboche” means “a marionette or puppet” (or, figuratively, someone small or doll-like), “a bamboo cane”, or “a prank or trick”. I guess of these the “marionette” sense is most plausible, if Gillenormand is comparing young people to puppets or dolls, but if that’s right, I don’t get the sense of prefixing “vertu”. That there is some difficulty here is suggested by Isabel Hapgood leaving the phrase untranslated:
“It is impossible to imagine that God could have made us for anything but this: to idolize, to coo, to preen ourselves, to be dove-like, to be dainty, to bill and coo our loves from morn to night, to gaze at one’s image in one’s little wife, to be proud, to be triumphant, to plume oneself; that is the aim of life. There, let not that displease you which we used to think in our day, when we were young folks. Ah! vertu-bamboche! what charming women there were in those days, and what pretty little faces and what lovely lasses! I committed my ravages among them.”
Translated by Isabel Hapgood (1887), The Works of Victor Hugo, volume 11, page 201. New York: Thomas Crowell.
