Les Miserables: Volume 3, Book 2 Summary & Analysis

Chapter 1 The narrator fills in the backstory about Marius. In the Rue de Saintonge a few old inhabitants still remember an even older man named M. Gillenormand, an 18th-century bourgeois who is over 90 years old in 1831. He had always had good health, and is passionate and hot-tempered. He has a 50-year-old daughter whom he chastises severely, and his wife is a flirtatious barber-ess. He enjoys discussing how civilization is essentially barbaric.

Chapter 2 Gillenormand now lives in the Marais, the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. In his youth he had been a sullen husband but charming lover, so his wives had cheated on him, but never his mistresses. He follows the fashions, and dismisses the French Revolution.

Chapter 3 Sometimes Gillenormand recalls lovers from his youth, and speaks of them crudely.

Chapter 4 Gillenormand despises all mention of 1789, and often says he hopes he won’t see ’93 twice.

Chapter 5 Gillenormand often says that the way to rid oneself of a disagreeable wife is to give her the purse-strings, so she becomes extremely busy and no longer bothers him. He had done just this, and his second wife had lost his fortune: now there’s just enough for him to live on with Basque, his male servant, and a few female ones, all of whom he calls Nicolette, regardless of their real names.

Chapter 6 Gillenormand takes many liberties, and isn’t at all surprised when a servant-maid named Magnon accuses the 84-year-old of having fathered her child. He takes on the child, referring to several famous figures who had children at very advanced ages. But when the woman sends him another boy the next year, he sends them back along with a monthly maintenance. Gillenormand often gives alms, and is kind and charitable. He had a daughter by his first wife and another by his second. This second daughter had married a soldier who had made colonel at Waterloo, before she died around the age of 30 (Gillenormand calls him the disgrace of his family).

Chapter 7 The narrator notes that Gillenormand is both frivolous and great, in the style of the 18th century. On abandoning society as a retired man, he eats at 5:00 each evening and only receives people afterwards, calling daytime “vulgar.”

Chapter 8 As young women, Gillenormand’s daughters had been quite different: one charming, musical, and artistic, the other shrewd and hoping to catch a wealthy husband. The younger married the man she loved, but then died; the older never married. Now the latter, Mademoiselle Gillenormand is overly demure, not exposing any parts of her body whatsoever. She had never been malicious, and is now vaguely melancholy at her life that never really started. She lives with her father and with his grandson, a little boy whom Gillenormand idolizes, though he usually addresses him in a severe shout.