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Part 2, Chapter 7: The Visit
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Magic, Cinema, and Imagination
Friendship, Honesty, and Vulnerability
Meaning and Purpose
Hardship and Maturity
Summary
Analysis
Everyone stands next to Georges’s door to try and figure out what is going on. After a few moments, they hear loud crashes and banging. The noises scare them, so they try to break down the door to get into the room. After that doesn’t work, Hugo instructs Isabelle to pick the door’s lock with her bobby pin, which she does. Isabelle opens the door, and everyone moves inside to find Georges watching films on the projector. The loud noises they heard were him moving around the furniture to get at his old drawings.
The noises make Hugo and Isabelle worry that Georges is attempting to destroy the film, just as he did his old drawings. They are scared that the past may have been too painful for him after all. However, Georges has done the opposite; that is, he seems to have finally confronted his past and accepted it.
Themes
When he sees he has an audience, Georges tells a story about his life. Growing up, his parents made shoes, but he always wanted to become a magician. Eventually, with the help of Jeanne, he succeeded. While performing magic, he built the automaton that Hugo now has in his possession. After performing magic for some time, Georges decided to get into the movie business, which was brand new technology at the time. He was successful for some time, but when World War I came around, he lost everything.
Like Hugo, Georges was a crafty young person who managed to succeed in life through sheer willpower and skill. Like his real-life counterpart, Georges entered the movie business at soon as it started. Notably, many early films were often lost because filmmakers would only make a few copies.
Themes
Georges lost his company and, shortly after, two of his close friends in a car accident. The friends were husband and wife, and the husband worked as a cameraman on Georges’s movies. The only survivor of the car accident was their daughter, Isabelle. To make ends meet, Georges had to sell his movies, many of which a shoe factory melted down and made into heels for shoes. The only part of his past Georges refused to destroy was the automaton, which he gave to the museum where Hugo’s father worked. Now that he knows Hugo has the automaton, Georges asks him to bring it to the apartment. Hugo promises he will, and then heads to the train station to get it.
Here, all of the pieces of the puzzle finally fit into place, as the novel clarifies the relationships between the characters and the origin of the automaton. The circumstances of Méliès’s troubles are a bit vague in the book, but in real life he was forced to hand over the original prints of his films to the French Army, which melted them down into shoe heels. Following the war, Méliès’s films were hard to find for a long time because good copies were rare. Many of Méliès’s films are still lost to this day.
Themes
