“His royal renown sometimes attracted singular presents.”
Whew. Okay, two points here.
Gillenormand branding himself as “royal” vindicates my argument from 3.2.4 so haha
More seriously, this phrase is an odd way to say “took advantage of his position of power to have sex with his servants.”
And, wow, does Hugo rhetorically skirt around this fact. For all that he looked sympathetically on Fantine’s circumstances and decried Bamatabois, he seems determined to couch Gillenormand’s actions in vague language. All his allusions to youthful gallantry or royal renown, saying “he had every prejudice, and took every licence” because he was grieving you see, just made me really uncomfortable. I don’t know how this tracks in other translations, but the language is so unbearably passive. You’d think Magnon was just willing children into existence to spite him. For Hugo to shy away from the reality of this situation is weird and disappointing.
“He was of the eighteenth century, frivolous and great.”
Gillenormand is a relic of a time that is never coming back. He’s a move to the countryside away from becoming a full on Miss Havisham with Marius as his Estella.
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Gillenormand continues to be an excellent example of why the Bishop’s philosophy doesn’t work. The Bishop is all about individual charity and nice rich people, right? We dragged him pretty hard for it back in Upright Man. And here’s Gillenormand, a rich person, who, for all his other flaws, is vaguely charitable, and all he’s doing is making the entrenched system worse. Because he has the power to only be charitable to the people he likes, or thinks deserves it. He explicitly does not allow his assets to go into a communal pot, he reserves the right to do precisely as he likes with them. So he’s willing to pay for Magnon’s boys, because she flattered him and he was feeling indulgent, but if he hadn’t there’s nothing else that would have provided for those two children. As he himself says, it’s not their fault, and yet they are, from birth, at the mercy of his generous impulses. Even if all rich people were generous to a fault, generous even to the point of being like the Bishop, there would still be a power imbalance, because that generosity could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice.
And Hugo’s all about being generous to people who haven’t “earned” it. I’ve talked before about how his characters aren’t traditionally likeable, or “deserving.” Jean Valjean, the hardened, dangerous criminal. Fantine, the angry, spiteful, desperate woman. These are not poster children for the deserving poor, they’re bitter people spat out by a system who probably won’t thank you for your charity. And we should help them anyway. The whole point of this book is that we should help them anyway. And the only way to do that is to decouple that help from people’s whims, so that a rich person can’t decide one day that they don’t like you anymore, or that you didn’t thank them enough, or whatever, and ruin your life as a result.
This chapter continues the theme of personal relationships for Gillenormand and his attempts at passing for a ladies’ man yet again. He takes the children in because it flatters him, why could he not have fathered these infants at such an old age if these Ducs and Marquis and other members of the nobility could do it- his continued fascination with the Bourbons and nobility in general is interesting. Although, I feel like Gillenormand is more talk rather than any meaningful actions and all that talk serves to highlight him in the way he wants to be known.
It’s amusing that he knows that these are not really his kids, but he wants other people to believe that they could be. He really is trying to use gossip to his advantage and the servant Magnon uses that to her advantage to get eighty francs for the upkeep of the children. I suppose that he at least pays for their upkeep which might be the only point in his favour but really though being better than Tholomyes is such a low bar to clear and does not make you a good person.
I don’t know if Hugo wants us to have a positive view of Gillenormand from here- his brother the priest was a miser and did not give charity or gave only useless French Revolutionary currency (apparently it is possible to be worse than Gillenormand), this chapter seems to imply that Gillenormand gave charity freely.
I still don’t understand why the narrative makes him out to not be rich, when it has been established that he is rich and living on fifteen thousand francs unless he wants to be super rich like a billionaire and then he would probably give more charity, which does not seem like a good argument and seems more like an easy excuse to get away from giving charity.
But it is obvious that even if he does give charity, he would make a great show of it like he does of everything- the grand bourgeois giving charity to boost his own ego and image.
He wants grand gestures, even in swindles- anything he does, he does for the express purpose of building his image, which is fortunate for the little boys- the momes that we will be introduced to later as they are being supported and taken care of. He does not adopt them and give them the same lifestyle he has, if he really did believe they were his kids would he have kept them with him, maybe, although being in Gillenormand house is not good for kids (poor baby Marius). He does still makes sure they are provided for in some way, which I have to appreciate.
He might be an inverse of Bishop Myriel. Bishop Myriel earned himself the title of Bienvenue through giving charity and doing good deeds freely, he became great while shunning greatness whereas Gillenormand uses every single opportunity to create a particular image of himself which he can feel good about. Everything he does, he does to feel good about himself. What seals the deal, is that he does not believe in God (which is pretty important for Hugo)- for now it seems that Hugo is pointing out that he may have some qualities but is not someone to be liked/admired because he tries to be a grand bourgeois with his big gestures, while not treating others around him well. It maybe also parallel the fact that in the private sphere of family, Gillenormand makes big meaningless gestures the way Napoleon and the Bourbon kings were all keen to reclaim the public memory with big gestures.
We do however have a mention of the family ties that will be important later on, but I do find Madame Pontmercy interesting and I really hope and choose to believe that part of why she married Georges, besides love, was also to spite her father who from the looks of it must have treated her and her sister poorly, the way he does everyone else around him.
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When Gillenormand was 84, a baby was brought before him which his ex-servant claimed was his. Gillenormand claims it isn’t his, but he still agrees to help support it. A year later, the same ex-servant has another child and tells the same story, and again, he promises to help her.
Gillenormand did have two daughters of his own, one from each wife. The eldest never married, and the younger married a soldier who became a colonel at Waterloo, much to Gillenormand’s dismay. The younger daughter died when she was about 30 years old.
The good: M Gillenormand supports two kids who could really use it.
The bad: He gets rather creepy extolling couples with extreme age differences in the process.
This bothers me rather a lot. I think part of it's that the little speech involves Gillenormand knowing (of the top of his head) just how old various men were when they fathered children--as though he spends a lot of time thinking about such things in those terms. The implication that the female partners are likely 20+ (up to 70) years younger in all the cases is not helping.
All the business with Magnon went down when Marius was ~14. This seems relevant to his weirdness towards women. And FWIW the whole 'having a crush on a 15 year old when he's 21' is less creepy than the 85 year-old marrying a 15 year-old, which grandpa is far too eager to shout about.
The line about 'even the rascals in this century are degenerate' is absolutely one I will steal if I ever write "Amis annoying Gillenormand" fic.
Gillenormand uses vous towards the onlookers of the baby scandal.
