One Of My Favorite Bit Characters In Les Mis Is The Poor Random Porter Of Gillenormand Who Has To Deal

One of my favorite bit characters in Les mis is the poor random porter of Gillenormand who has to deal with Jean Valjean and Javert showing up at night with a mostly-dead Marius. He’s just so confused! He hasn’t read the first 1000 pages of Les Miserables so he has no context for Jean Valjean and Javert. He spends the entire conversation being utterly baffled.

POV: you’re just trying to sleep when you hear loud knocking at the door. Outside are two weird old men. One is a bizarre cop who seems to be operating on autopilot— he keeps mechanically saying incorrect nonsense like “here is Gilleormand’s dead’s son” even though Gillenormand has no son and the man they’re carrying isn’t dead. The other old man is some horrible-looking buff weirdo covered in sewage. They clearly have a History but you don’t know what it is.

They try to drag you into their relationship drama. One says Marius is dead, the other says nothing but exhaustedly shakes his head in disagreement in a way that makes him seem very Done with all of this. You are even more confused. You do not want to be part of this drama.

Javert addressed the porter in a tone befitting the government, and the presence of the porter of a factious person.

“Some person whose name is Gillenormand?”

“Here. What do you want with him?”

“His son is brought back.”

“His son?” said the porter stupidly.

“He is dead.”

Jean Valjean, who, soiled and tattered, stood behind Javert, and whom the porter was surveying with some horror, made a sign to him with his head that this was not so.

The porter did not appear to understand either Javert’s words or Jean Valjean’s sign.

Then you try to ask for clarification. The cop just repeats that the not-dead Marius is actually dead, vaguely says he got himself killed at the barricades—and then he very helpfully states that when people die there are funerals, as if he’s just stating a random fact he knows about death. This clarifies nothing. You finally just walk away and make it someone else’s problem. Good for you.

Javert continued:

“He went to the barricade, and here he is.”

“To the barricade?” ejaculated the porter.

“He has got himself killed. Go waken his father.”

The porter did not stir.

“Go along with you!” repeated Javert.

And he added:

“There will be a funeral here to-morrow.”

For Javert, the usual incidents of the public highway were categorically classed, which is the beginning of foresight and surveillance, and each contingency had its own compartment; all possible facts were arranged in drawers, as it were, whence they emerged on occasion, in variable quantities; in the street, uproar, revolt, carnival, and funeral.

The porter contented himself with waking Basque. Basque woke Nicolette; Nicolette roused great-aunt Gillenormand.

And then the two of them leave, and youre left with all the confusion of someone who’s been plunged into the middle of Jean Valjean and Javert’s weirdness without any of the context of Victor Hugo’s hit 1862 novel Les miserables:

The porter watched them take their departure as he had watched their arrival, in terrified somnolence.