Les Misérables
Louis Philippe, he was a great provincial lawyer, wealthy and
influential, a wise elector, and a very severe juryman; he was still a
man of pleasure.
Towards the middle of the day, after having, from time to time, for the
sake of resting herself, travelled, for three or four sous a league, in
what was then known as the _Petites Voitures des Environs de Paris_,
the “little suburban coach service,” Fantine found herself at
Montfermeil, in the alley Boulanger.
As she passed the Thénardier hostelry, the two little girls, blissful
in the monster swing, had dazzled her in a manner, and she had halted
in front of that vision of joy.
Charms exist. These two little girls were a charm to this mother.
She gazed at them in much emotion. The presence of angels is an
announcement of Paradise. She thought that, above this inn, she beheld
the mysterious HERE of Providence. These two little creatures were
evidently happy. She gazed at them, she admired them, in such emotion
that at the moment when their mother was recovering her breath between
two couplets of her song, she could not refrain from addressing to her
the remark which we have just read:—
“You have two pretty children, Madame.”
The most ferocious creatures are disarmed by caresses bestowed on their
young.
The mother raised her head and thanked her, and bade the wayfarer sit
down on the bench at the door, she herself being seated on the
threshold. The two women began to chat.
“My name is Madame Thénardier,” said the mother of the two little
girls. “We keep this inn.”
Then, her mind still running on her romance, she resumed humming
between her teeth:—
“It must be so; I am a knight,
And I am off to Palestine.”
This Madame Thénardier was a sandy-complexioned woman, thin and
angular—the type of the soldier’s wife in all its unpleasantness; and
what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal of
romances. She was a simpering, but masculine creature. Old romances
produce that effect when rubbed against the imagination of cook-shop
woman. She was still young; she was barely thirty. If this crouching
woman had stood upright, her lofty stature and her frame of a
perambulating colossus suitable for fairs, might have frightened the
traveller at the outset, troubled her confidence, and disturbed what
caused what we have to relate to vanish. A person who is seated instead
of standing erect—destinies hang upon such a thing as that.
The traveller told her story, with slight modifications.
That she was a working-woman; that her husband was dead; that her work
in Paris had failed her, and that she was on her way to seek it
elsewhere, in her own native parts; that she had left Paris that
morning on foot; that, as she was carrying her child, and felt
fatigued, she had got into the Villemomble coach when she met it; that
from Villemomble she had come to Montfermeil on foot; that the little
one had walked a little, but not much, because she was so young, and
that she had been obliged to take her up, and the jewel had fallen
asleep.
At this word she bestowed on her daughter a passionate kiss, which woke
her. The child opened her eyes, great blue eyes like her mother’s, and
looked at—what? Nothing; with that serious and sometimes severe air of
little children, which is a mystery of their luminous innocence in the
presence of our twilight of virtue. One would say that they feel
themselves to be angels, and that they know us to be men. Then the
child began to laugh; and although the mother held fast to her, she
slipped to the ground with the unconquerable energy of a little being
which wished to run. All at once she caught sight of the two others in
the swing, stopped short, and put out her tongue, in sign of
admiration.
Mother Thénardier released her daughters, made them descend from the
swing, and said:—
“Now amuse yourselves, all three of you.”
Children become acquainted quickly at that age, and at the expiration
of a minute the little Thénardiers were playing with the newcomer at
making holes in the ground, which was an immense pleasure.
The newcomer was very gay; the goodness of the mother is written in the
gayety of the child; she had seized a scrap of wood which served her
for a shovel, and energetically dug a cavity big enough for a fly. The
grave-digger’s business becomes a subject for laughter when performed
by a child.
The two women pursued their chat.
“What is your little one’s name?”
“Cosette.”
For Cosette, read Euphrasie. The child’s name was Euphrasie. But out of
Euphrasie the mother had made Cosette by that sweet and graceful
instinct of mothers and of the populace which changes Josepha into
Pepita, and Françoise into Sillette. It is a sort of derivative which
disarranges and disconcerts the whole science of etymologists. We have
known a grandmother who succeeded in turning Theodore into Gnon.
“How old is she?”
“She is going on three.”
“That is the age of my eldest.”
In the meantime, the three little girls were grouped in an attitude of
profound anxiety and blissfulness; an event had happened; a big worm
had emerged from the ground, and they were afraid; and they were in
ecstasies over it.
Their radiant brows touched each other; one would have said that there
were three heads in one aureole.
“How easily children get acquainted at once!” exclaimed Mother
Thénardier; “one would swear that they were three sisters!”
This remark was probably the spark which the other mother had been
waiting for. She seized the Thénardier’s hand, looked at her fixedly,
and said:—
“Will you keep my child for me?”
The Thénardier made one of those movements of surprise which signify
neither assent nor refusal.
Cosette’s mother continued:—
“You see, I cannot take my daughter to the country. My work will not
permit it. With a child one can find no situation. People are
ridiculous in the country. It was the good God who caused me to pass
your inn. When I caught sight of your little ones, so pretty, so clean,
and so happy, it overwhelmed me. I said: ‘Here is a good mother. That
is just the thing; that will make three sisters.’ And then, it will not
be long before I return. Will you keep my child for me?”
“I must see about it,” replied the Thénardier.
“I will give you six francs a month.”
Here a man’s voice called from the depths of the cook-shop:—
“Not for less than seven francs. And six months paid in advance.”
“Six times seven makes forty-two,” said the Thénardier.
“I will give it,” said the mother.
“And fifteen francs in addition for preliminary expenses,” added the
man’s voice.
“Total, fifty-seven francs,” said Madame Thénardier. And she hummed
vaguely, with these figures:—
“It must be, said a warrior.”
“I will pay it,” said the mother. “I have eighty francs. I shall have
enough left to reach the country, by travelling on foot. I shall earn
money there, and as soon as I have a little I will return for my
darling.”
The man’s voice resumed:—
“The little one has an outfit?”
“That is my husband,” said the Thénardier.
“Of course she has an outfit, the poor treasure.—I understood perfectly
that it was your husband.—And a beautiful outfit, too! a senseless
outfit, everything by the dozen, and silk gowns like a lady. It is
here, in my carpet-bag.”
“You must hand it over,” struck in the man’s voice again.
“Of course I shall give it to you,” said the mother. “It would be very
queer if I were to leave my daughter quite naked!”
The master’s face appeared.
“That’s good,” said he.
The bargain was concluded. The mother passed the night at the inn, gave
up her money and left her child, fastened her carpet-bag once more, now
reduced in volume by the removal of the outfit, and light henceforth
and set out on the following morning, intending to return soon. People
arrange such departures tranquilly; but they are despairs!
A neighbor of the Thénardiers met this mother as she was setting out,
and came back with the remark:—
“I have just seen a woman crying in the street so that it was enough to
rend your heart.”
When Cosette’s mother had taken her departure, the man said to the
woman:—
“That will serve to pay my note for one hundred and ten francs which
falls due to-morrow; I lacked fifty francs. Do you know that I should
have had a bailiff and a protest after me? You played the mouse-trap
nicely with your young ones.”
“Without suspecting it,” said the woman.
CHAPTER II—FIRST SKETCH OF TWO UNPREPOSSESSING FIGURES
The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the cat
rejoices even over a lean mouse.
Who were these Thénardiers?
Let us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the sketch later
on.
These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people
who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended
in the scale, which is between the class called “middle” and the class
denominated as “inferior,” and which combines some of the defects of
the second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing
the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the
bourgeois.
They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to
warm them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a
substratum of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard.
Both were susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous
progress which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist
crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness,
retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to
augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more
and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and
woman possessed such souls.
Thénardier, in particular, was troublesome for a physiognomist. One can
only look at some men to distrust them; for one feels that they are
dark in both directions. They are uneasy in the rear and threatening in
front. There is something of the unknown about them. One can no more
answer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadow
which they bear in their glance denounces them. From merely hearing
them utter a word or seeing them make a gesture, one obtains a glimpse
of sombre secrets in their past and of sombre mysteries in their
future.
This Thénardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier—a
sergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815,
and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. We
shall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of his
hostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it
himself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.
It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after
having been _Clélie_, was no longer anything but _Lodoïska_, still
noble, but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle
de Scudéri to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to
Madame Barthélemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the
portresses of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some
extent. Madame Thénardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort
of books. She lived on them. In them she drowned what brains she
possessed. This had given her, when very young, and even a little
later, a sort of pensive attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a
certain depth, a ruffian lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse
and fine at one and the same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was
concerned, given to the perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and “in what
concerns the sex,” as he said in his jargon—a downright, unmitigated