Les Misérables
who certainly belonged to rich people, and who had already brought in a
great deal of money, and from whom I might have extracted enough to
live on all my life! A girl who would have made up to me for everything
that I lost in that vile cook-shop, where there was nothing but one
continual row, and where, like a fool, I ate up my last farthing! Oh! I
wish all the wine folks drank in my house had been poison to those who
drank it! Well, never mind! Say, now! You must have thought me
ridiculous when you went off with the Lark! You had your cudgel in the
forest. You were the stronger. Revenge. I’m the one to hold the trumps
to-day! You’re in a sorry case, my good fellow! Oh, but I can laugh!
Really, I laugh! Didn’t he fall into the trap! I told him that I was an
actor, that my name was Fabantou, that I had played comedy with
Mamselle Mars, with Mamselle Muche, that my landlord insisted on being
paid tomorrow, the 4th of February, and he didn’t even notice that the
8th of January, and not the 4th of February is the time when the
quarter runs out! Absurd idiot! And the four miserable Philippes which
he has brought me! Scoundrel! He hadn’t the heart even to go as high as
a hundred francs! And how he swallowed my platitudes! That did amuse
me. I said to myself: ‘Blockhead! Come, I’ve got you! I lick your paws
this morning, but I’ll gnaw your heart this evening!’”
Thénardier paused. He was out of breath. His little, narrow chest
panted like a forge bellows. His eyes were full of the ignoble
happiness of a feeble, cruel, and cowardly creature, which finds that
it can, at last, harass what it has feared, and insult what it has
flattered, the joy of a dwarf who should be able to set his heel on the
head of Goliath, the joy of a jackal which is beginning to rend a sick
bull, so nearly dead that he can no longer defend himself, but
sufficiently alive to suffer still.
M. Leblanc did not interrupt him, but said to him when he paused:—
“I do not know what you mean to say. You are mistaken in me. I am a
very poor man, and anything but a millionnaire. I do not know you. You
are mistaking me for some other person.”
“Ah!” roared Thénardier hoarsely, “a pretty lie! You stick to that
pleasantry, do you! You’re floundering, my old buck! Ah! You don’t
remember! You don’t see who I am?”
“Excuse me, sir,” said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent, which at
that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, “I see that you are
a villain!”
Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a
susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this word
“villain,” the female Thénardier sprang from the bed, Thénardier
grasped his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands.
“Don’t you stir!” he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc:—
“Villain! Yes, I know that you call us that, you rich gentlemen! Stop!
it’s true that I became bankrupt, that I am in hiding, that I have no
bread, that I have not a single sou, that I am a villain! It’s three
days since I have had anything to eat, so I’m a villain! Ah! you folks
warm your feet, you have Sakoski boots, you have wadded great-coats,
like archbishops, you lodge on the first floor in houses that have
porters, you eat truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs the bunch
in the month of January, and green peas, you gorge yourselves, and when
you want to know whether it is cold, you look in the papers to see what
the engineer Chevalier’s thermometer says about it. We, it is we who
are thermometers. We don’t need to go out and look on the quay at the
corner of the Tour de l’Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of
cold; we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the ice forming
round our hearts, and we say: ‘There is no God!’ And you come to our
caverns, yes our caverns, for the purpose of calling us villains! But
we’ll devour you! But we’ll devour you, poor little things! Just see
here, Mister millionnaire: I have been a solid man, I have held a
license, I have been an elector, I am a bourgeois, that I am! And it’s
quite possible that you are not!”
Here Thénardier took a step towards the men who stood near the door,
and added with a shudder:—
“When I think that he has dared to come here and talk to me like a
cobbler!”
Then addressing M. Leblanc with a fresh outburst of frenzy:—
“And listen to this also, Mister philanthropist! I’m not a suspicious
character, not a bit of it! I’m not a man whose name nobody knows, and
who comes and abducts children from houses! I’m an old French soldier,
I ought to have been decorated! I was at Waterloo, so I was! And in the
battle I saved a general called the Comte of I don’t know what. He told
me his name, but his beastly voice was so weak that I didn’t hear. All
I caught was Merci [thanks]. I’d rather have had his name than his
thanks. That would have helped me to find him again. The picture that
you see here, and which was painted by David at Bruqueselles,—do you
know what it represents? It represents me. David wished to immortalize
that feat of prowess. I have that general on my back, and I am carrying
him through the grape-shot. There’s the history of it! That general
never did a single thing for me; he was no better than the rest! But
nonetheless, I saved his life at the risk of my own, and I have the
certificate of the fact in my pocket! I am a soldier of Waterloo, by
all the furies! And now that I have had the goodness to tell you all
this, let’s have an end of it. I want money, I want a deal of money, I
must have an enormous lot of money, or I’ll exterminate you, by the
thunder of the good God!”
Marius had regained some measure of control over his anguish, and was
listening. The last possibility of doubt had just vanished. It
certainly was the Thénardier of the will. Marius shuddered at that
reproach of ingratitude directed against his father, and which he was
on the point of so fatally justifying. His perplexity was redoubled.
Moreover, there was in all these words of Thénardier, in his accent, in
his gesture, in his glance which darted flames at every word, there
was, in this explosion of an evil nature disclosing everything, in that
mixture of braggadocio and abjectness, of pride and pettiness, of rage
and folly, in that chaos of real griefs and false sentiments, in that
immodesty of a malicious man tasting the voluptuous delights of
violence, in that shameless nudity of a repulsive soul, in that
conflagration of all sufferings combined with all hatreds, something
which was as hideous as evil, and as heart-rending as the truth.
The picture of the master, the painting by David which he had proposed
that M. Leblanc should purchase, was nothing else, as the reader has
divined, than the sign of his tavern painted, as it will be remembered,
by himself, the only relic which he had preserved from his shipwreck at
Montfermeil.
As he had ceased to intercept Marius’ visual ray, Marius could examine
this thing, and in the daub, he actually did recognize a battle, a
background of smoke, and a man carrying another man. It was the group
composed of Pontmercy and Thénardier; the sergeant the rescuer, the
colonel rescued. Marius was like a drunken man; this picture restored
his father to life in some sort; it was no longer the signboard of the
wine-shop at Montfermeil, it was a resurrection; a tomb had yawned, a
phantom had risen there. Marius heard his heart beating in his temples,
he had the cannon of Waterloo in his ears, his bleeding father, vaguely
depicted on that sinister panel terrified him, and it seemed to him
that the misshapen spectre was gazing intently at him.
When Thénardier had recovered his breath, he turned his bloodshot eyes
on M. Leblanc, and said to him in a low, curt voice:—
“What have you to say before we put the handcuffs on you?”
M. Leblanc held his peace.
In the midst of this silence, a cracked voice launched this lugubrious
sarcasm from the corridor:—
“If there’s any wood to be split, I’m there!”
It was the man with the axe, who was growing merry.
At the same moment, an enormous, bristling, and clayey face made its
appearance at the door, with a hideous laugh which exhibited not teeth,
but fangs.
It was the face of the man with the butcher’s axe.
“Why have you taken off your mask?” cried Thénardier in a rage.
“For fun,” retorted the man.
For the last few minutes M. Leblanc had appeared to be watching and
following all the movements of Thénardier, who, blinded and dazzled by
his own rage, was stalking to and fro in the den with full confidence
that the door was guarded, and of holding an unarmed man fast, he being
armed himself, of being nine against one, supposing that the female
Thénardier counted for but one man.
During his address to the man with the pole-axe, he had turned his back
to M. Leblanc.
M. Leblanc seized this moment, overturned the chair with his foot and
the table with his fist, and with one bound, with prodigious agility,
before Thénardier had time to turn round, he had reached the window. To
open it, to scale the frame, to bestride it, was the work of a second
only. He was half out when six robust fists seized him and dragged him
back energetically into the hovel. These were the three
“chimney-builders,” who had flung themselves upon him. At the same time
the Thénardier woman had wound her hands in his hair.
At the trampling which ensued, the other ruffians rushed up from the
corridor. The old man on the bed, who seemed under the influence of
wine, descended from the pallet and came reeling up, with a
stone-breaker’s hammer in his hand.
One of the “chimney-builders,” whose smirched face was lighted up by
the candle, and in whom Marius recognized, in spite of his daubing,
Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, lifted above M.
Leblanc’s head a sort of bludgeon made of two balls of lead, at the two
ends of a bar of iron.
Marius could not resist this sight. “My father,” he thought, “forgive
me!”
And his finger sought the trigger of his pistol.
The shot was on the point of being discharged when Thénardier’s voice
shouted:—
“Don’t harm him!”
This desperate attempt of the victim, far from exasperating Thénardier,
had calmed him. There existed in him two men, the ferocious man and the
adroit man. Up to that moment, in the excess of his triumph in the
presence of the prey which had been brought down, and which did not
stir, the ferocious man had prevailed; when the victim struggled and
tried to resist, the adroit man reappeared and took the upper hand.
“Don’t hurt him!” he repeated, and without suspecting it, his first
success was to arrest the pistol in the act of being discharged, and to
paralyze Marius, in whose opinion the urgency of the case disappeared,
and who, in the face of this new phase, saw no inconvenience in waiting
a while longer.
Who knows whether some chance would not arise which would deliver him
from the horrible alternative of allowing Ursule’s father to perish, or
of destroying the colonel’s saviour?
A herculean struggle had begun. With one blow full in the chest, M.
Leblanc had sent the old man tumbling, rolling in the middle of the
room, then with two backward sweeps of his hand he had overthrown two
more assailants, and he held one under each of his knees; the wretches
were rattling in the throat beneath this pressure as under a granite
millstone; but the other four had seized the formidable old man by both
arms and the back of his neck, and were holding him doubled up over the
two “chimney-builders” on the floor.
Thus, the master of some and mastered by the rest, crushing those
beneath him and stifling under those on top of him, endeavoring in vain
to shake off all the efforts which were heaped upon him, M. Leblanc