Sketching Chapter 3.3.2 - One Of The Red Specters Of That Time
1. The backstory of Colonel Georges Pontmercy!
We all know the story: a great soldier, fallen in disgrace because of the fall of Napoleon. Forbidden to see his son after his wife died, lest the kid be disinherited. Georges lives in the smallest house he could find. His enclosure has flowers of all kinds because "not being able to have his child he set about loving flowers". In the drawing I put a chrysanthemum because it's a chinese flower (Hugo says he plants some asian plants!) and because I read somewhere they can mean platonic love, of familial love. Idk if this is true but I like the idea and I declare now that it is so!
2. Gillenormand doesn't have a lot of money but his first daughter is the only living descendent of her maternal grandparents, so Marius will inherit their fortune. Georges didn't argue.
3. Marius never knew why exactly growing up, but the looks and the sneers were enough that he internalized shame regarding his father.
4. George is a Colonel and a Baron and wears the ribbon of the legion of honour, but since all of that was given by Napoleon it is not recognized by the restoration. So he was forbidden from wearing the ribbon. He asked the officer who gave him the news if he could still wear his scar.
5. Sometimes he sneaks out to Paris, in defiance of his surveillance and his father-in-law, to see Marius from behind a pillar in church. That is how he meets abbé Mabeuf, the curé of the church. They make friends and he tells Mabeuf his whole story.
6. He writes to his son, but Gillenormand takes his letters. Mlle Gillenoemand dictates the letters Marius writes back, so the boy never knew how tender his father was to him. And how much his father loved him.
7. I still! think! Marius would've been better off with his dad! In their little house with their flowers! And a little enclosure! And their friend Mabeuf the botanist curé! I can't deal with how happy Marius' childhood could have been if Gillenormand removed that massive stick from up his butt and let the kid have his father
