Brick Club 3.2.6 - 3.2.7
“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.
