Les Miserables: Volume 3, Book 3 Summary & Analysis

Chapter 1 Gillenormand had always been well-received in society because of his wit. Around 1817, he had often gone to see Madame la Baronne de T., whose late husband had been an ambassador under Louis XVI, at her salon or intellectual gathering. The group would gather to complain about the new century’s horrors and would parody the Revolution.

Chapter 2 At Vernon around that time could be seen a 50-year-old man, Georges Pontmercy, living alone and working often in his garden. He was timid and shy. As a young man, he had fought in the Revolution for Napoleon and against the English in 1805, and then at Austerlitz and Waterloo, among other battles. After Waterloo, where he’d been pulled out of the hollow ravine, he’d been sent to Vernon, on half-pay, as Louis XVIII didn’t recognize the grades or awards he’d received under Napoleon. During the Empire, he’d married the younger Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who had died after giving birth.

Though Pontmercy adores his son Marius, the boy’s grandfather, Gillenormand, had threatened to disinherit him if Pontmercy did not allow Marius to live with his grandfather. Gillenormand never allows the colonel to visit Marius. The boy is the heir of Gillenormand’s sister, who had quite a large fortune. Twice a year, Marius writes letters to his father, but his grandfather hides the return letters.

Chapter 3 Marius knows nothing of the world but Madame la Baronne de T.’s salon, making him a grave, melancholy child, his mind filled with stories against Napoleon’s Empire and against revolution. The narrator lists dozens of names, all of whom constitute Parisian high royalist society. Old manners reign there, and men and actions are judged harshly in the salon. The guests are “ultra,” meaning they “go beyond”—they attack everything for not being sufficiently correct, the king for not being royal enough, the night for being too lit up, etc.

From 1814 to 1820, this kind of thought is typical of the Restoration. The salon has its own literature, politics, and history, though towards 1820 it begins to disintegrate into absolutism and thus, paradoxically, confused ideals. Marius attends college and law school as a fanatical Royalist, and emerges as a cold but noble, generous, and proud young man.

Chapter 4 In 1827, Marius has just turned 17, and he returns home one evening to hear Gillenormand order him to set off to Vernon tomorrow to see his father, who is ill and demands his presence. Marius arrives the next evening. A woman answers the door, weeping, and points him towards a ground-floor room. Pontmercy had been attacked by brain fever three days previously, and he has just died; his son has arrived too late. Marius gazes upon his father’s face and a chill runs through him, though his sorrow is that of a man’s death, not his father’s, whom he does not know well enough to love.

The servant gives Marius a note from his father, who writes that he wishes to give Marius the title of Baron that he himself received at Waterloo. He also writes that a sergeant saved his life at Waterloo—Thenardier—and asks Marius to do any good he can to the man should he ever meet him. Marius remains two days in Vernon, and returns to Paris without thinking much more of his father.

Chapter 5 Marius goes to Mass the Sunday after his father’s death, and as he sits down, an old man tells Marius that he’s taken his place. After Mass, the old man explains that he enjoys sitting in that spot because for the last ten years, he’s seen a father come regularly to catch a glimpse of his child, hiding behind a pillar. The old man, Mabeuf, was moved by this love and this spot has become holy for him. The man, he says, had a father-in-law who threatened to disinherit the child if his father saw him, and he sacrificed himself so that his son could one day be rich. He lived at Vernon and was called something like Pontmarie or Montpercy. “Pontmercy,” Marius suggests, and reveals to the old man that he is the son.

Marius accompanies the man home, and the next day he asks Gillenormand for permission to leave for three days for a hunting-party with friends.

Chapter 6 After three days (which the narrator will tell of later on) Marius returns to Paris and asks for the law school library’s files of the Moniteur newspapers. He reads all the history books he can find, and feverishly searches for his father’s name among the army bulletins. He goes to see the generals under whom his father had served, and comes to know his father better in that way. He’s so preoccupied that Gillenormand assumes a love affair is the cause.

Slowly, Marius’s opinions and ideas begin to shift radically. Initially astonished by his reading about the Republic and Empire, he stops considering their major characters with terror and scorn but rather considers them heroic and good. He considers the Republic as a moment of mass sovereignty and civil rights, and the Empire as the sovereignty of the French idea in Europe. He realizes how little he had understood his country and his father, and is filled with regret at not having known either.

From his childhood, Marius had been taught to despise Napoleon as a monster. Only slowly, by reading carefully, does he begin to rehabilitate the man in his mind. As he pores over volumes of army battles, he feels closer to his father and can almost picture the battles in his mind’s eye. He is intoxicated by this conversion and, the narrator notes, embraces a good deal of error while on his way to the truth. Finally, though, he becomes a true democratic revolutionist. Slowly he withdraws from Gillenormand, feeling greater aversion for the man who cut him off from his father. He spends less and less time at home, once attempting to see Thenardier in Montfermeil, though the inn is closed.

Chapter 7 One morning, Marius again asks his grandfather’s permission to take a trip. Gillenormand still thinks it’s for a love affair, but Mademoiselle Gillenormand is starting to be suspicious. Later that day, Marius’s distant cousin Theodule, a lieutenant, whom Marius has never met, arrives unannounced to say hello to his aunt. Mademoiselle Gillenormand asks him if he would follow Marius a little that evening to see what he was up to. That evening, Marius sets off for Vernon in a diligence (stage coach), which Theodule enters as well. He watches Marius buy flowers from a peasant girl and follows him around the corner, where he sees Marius strewing his bouquet across a grave and sobbing before it. The stone is engraved with “Colonel Baron Pontmercy.”

Chapter 8 Marius has come here every time he’s been “sleeping out.” Theodule slips away and decides not to write to his aunt at all. Marius returns on the third day, and quickly leaves his room to take a bath. Gillenormand mounts the stairs to greet Marius. In the empty room, he sees a great coat, with a black ribbon strung to a medallion portrait case, on the bed: he seizes them and goes back downstairs. He and his daughter open the case and read the note from the colonel giving his son the title of Baron. They are stunned. In the pocket of the great coat are dozens of cards printed with “Le Baron Marius Pontmercy.”

For an hour, the two sit in silence. Then Marius comes downstairs, and sees his grandfather holding one of his cards. Gillenormand asks what the meaning of this is, and Marius, with downcast eyes, says that his father was a hero who served the Republic and France and who loved his son. Gillenormand turns purple and curses at Marius, calling all those men assassins and thieves, traitors who fled the true king. Now Marius grows enraged, but is torn between his father and grandfather. After several moments, however, he cries “Down with the Bourbons and with Louis XVIII!” Gillenormand turns white, and after pacing the room, says quietly that he and a baron like his grandson cannot continue to live under the same roof. He orders Marius to leave.

The next day, Gillenormand tells his daughter to send Marius money every six months, but to never mention his name. Marius, meanwhile, has only 30 francs in his pocket. He heads towards the Latin Quarter without knowing what he’ll do.