Brick Club 5.5.5, 5.5.6
I don’t have the resources or know-how to determine just how much 584,000 francs represents, but best I can hack it, this makes Marius and Cosette multimillionaires, like tens of millions possibly. Where did we put that guillotine again? Valjean could be funding a lot of public works projects is all I’m saying. If we’re going to give Marius shit for choosing to live in poverty, we should be giving Valjean equal shit for his wealth hoarding. That’s just my socialist onion.
We learn Javert’s death has been discovered and “a paper left by this man, otherwise irreproachable and highly esteemed by his chiefs, led to a belief that he had committed suicide during a fit of mental aberration.” This suggests that Javert has been biting back his ideas for reform specifically because he knew they would be seen as radical and suspect. Nothing else about his note hints at the moral breakdown Javert experienced, it’s simply a laundry list of ideas for structural change that Javert apparently never shared with anyone before his death. This is more intriguing than it has the right to be, considering Hugo has snatched away what would have been a brilliant redemption arc. Why did Javert, if he really did earnestly believe the in system as it was, harbor these ideas for change? And was he really so set in his ways that it was only his imminent death that convinced him to communicate them? Or was it the outside pressure of society that kept him silent?
I’m just now learning that the age of majority for women in France at this time, both for marriage and other rights (which I’m guessing means independent money stuff) was 21 years? But a man needed to be 25 years old just to marry without parental consent which was changed from 21 under the Directory. There’s also a disturbing but not entirely surprising trend of girls coming into “legal puberty” years earlier than boys. It’s good to know that Cosette is only just past the minimum age for marriage.
“[Cosette] had Marius. The young man came, the goodman faded away, such is life.” Okay, I’m supposed to buy that Valjean just starts fading from Cosette’s memory the second he isn’t her sole provider and parent, but she’s simultaneously enamored of Gillenormand because…he’s giving her trinkets and clothes and such? I can understand Valjean feeling that way, but Cosette doesn’t have friends or a social circle of peers and Valjean has been the first and only constant in her life for near a decade. She’s consistently shown herself willing to sacrificing her own comfort to be closer to him. This would never happen, bite me, Hugo.
Gillenormand, like so many characters, is on the cusp of a moment of genuine social awareness. “Dry happiness is like dry bread.” Ah, yes, people need money to live. “I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.” Hey, remember how two abandoned children, that Gillenormand once cared for, were so hungry they ate cake out of a public fountain meant for ducks? Try not letting people starve and then we can talk about the emperor levels of extravagance Gillenormand favors.
It’s also worth noting how close Mlle. Gillenormand came to becoming a Dickensian villain. The sociopathy of these people, I swear, “it was clear she could do not do otherwise than leave her fortune to these young people, since they no longer needed it.” It’s all really so much. Gillenormand should have quietly died like right after the barricades fell or something. Marius’s father never got the satisfaction of seeing his son again, why should Gillenormand see his grandson? His happiness, along with his money, is all stolen and hoarded away from the people who earned it.
