Les Misérables
lout. His wife was twelve or fifteen years younger than he was. Later
on, when her hair, arranged in a romantically drooping fashion, began
to grow gray, when the Megæra began to be developed from the Pamela,
the female Thénardier was nothing but a coarse, vicious woman, who had
dabbled in stupid romances. Now, one cannot read nonsense with
impunity. The result was that her eldest daughter was named Éponine; as
for the younger, the poor little thing came near being called Gulnare;
I know not to what diversion, effected by a romance of Ducray-Dumenil,
she owed the fact that she merely bore the name of Azelma.
However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous and
superficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which
may be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names. By the side of
this romantic element which we have just indicated there is the social
symptom. It is not rare for the neatherd’s boy nowadays to bear the
name of Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte—if there are
still any vicomtes—to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This
displacement, which places the “elegant” name on the plebeian and the
rustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of
equality. The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there
as everywhere else. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and
a profound thing,—the French Revolution.
CHAPTER III—THE LARK
It is not all in all sufficient to be wicked in order to prosper. The
cook-shop was in a bad way.
Thanks to the traveller’s fifty-seven francs, Thénardier had been able
to avoid a protest and to honor his signature. On the following month
they were again in need of money. The woman took Cosette’s outfit to
Paris, and pawned it at the pawnbroker’s for sixty francs. As soon as
that sum was spent, the Thénardiers grew accustomed to look on the
little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity;
and they treated her accordingly. As she had no longer any clothes,
they dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the
Thénardier brats; that is to say, in rags. They fed her on what all the
rest had left—a little better than the dog, a little worse than the
cat. Moreover, the cat and the dog were her habitual table-companions;
Cosette ate with them under the table, from a wooden bowl similar to
theirs.
The mother, who had established herself, as we shall see later on, at
M. sur M., wrote, or, more correctly, caused to be written, a letter
every month, that she might have news of her child. The Thénardiers
replied invariably, “Cosette is doing wonderfully well.”
At the expiration of the first six months the mother sent seven francs
for the seventh month, and continued her remittances with tolerable
regularity from month to month. The year was not completed when
Thénardier said: “A fine favor she is doing us, in sooth! What does she
expect us to do with her seven francs?” and he wrote to demand twelve
francs. The mother, whom they had persuaded into the belief that her
child was happy, “and was coming on well,” submitted, and forwarded the
twelve francs.
Certain natures cannot love on the one hand without hating on the
other. Mother Thénardier loved her two daughters passionately, which
caused her to hate the stranger.
It is sad to think that the love of a mother can possess villainous
aspects. Little as was the space occupied by Cosette, it seemed to her
as though it were taken from her own, and that that little child
diminished the air which her daughters breathed. This woman, like many
women of her sort, had a load of caresses and a burden of blows and
injuries to dispense each day. If she had not had Cosette, it is
certain that her daughters, idolized as they were, would have received
the whole of it; but the stranger did them the service to divert the
blows to herself. Her daughters received nothing but caresses. Cosette
could not make a motion which did not draw down upon her head a heavy
shower of violent blows and unmerited chastisement. The sweet, feeble
being, who should not have understood anything of this world or of God,
incessantly punished, scolded, ill-used, beaten, and seeing beside her
two little creatures like herself, who lived in a ray of dawn!
Madame Thénardier was vicious with Cosette. Éponine and Azelma were
vicious. Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size
is smaller; that is all.
A year passed; then another.
People in the village said:—
“Those Thénardiers are good people. They are not rich, and yet they are
bringing up a poor child who was abandoned on their hands!”
They thought that Cosette’s mother had forgotten her.
In the meanwhile, Thénardier, having learned, it is impossible to say
by what obscure means, that the child was probably a bastard, and that
the mother could not acknowledge it, exacted fifteen francs a month,
saying that “the creature” was growing and “eating,” and threatening to
send her away. “Let her not bother me,” he exclaimed, “or I’ll fire her
brat right into the middle of her secrets. I must have an increase.”
The mother paid the fifteen francs.
From year to year the child grew, and so did her wretchedness.
As long as Cosette was little, she was the scape-goat of the two other
children; as soon as she began to develop a little, that is to say,
before she was even five years old, she became the servant of the
household.
Five years old! the reader will say; that is not probable. Alas! it is
true. Social suffering begins at all ages. Have we not recently seen
the trial of a man named Dumollard, an orphan turned bandit, who, from
the age of five, as the official documents state, being alone in the
world, “worked for his living and stole”?
Cosette was made to run on errands, to sweep the rooms, the courtyard,
the street, to wash the dishes, to even carry burdens. The Thénardiers
considered themselves all the more authorized to behave in this manner,
since the mother, who was still at M. sur M., had become irregular in
her payments. Some months she was in arrears.
If this mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of these three
years, she would not have recognized her child. Cosette, so pretty and
rosy on her arrival in that house, was now thin and pale. She had an
indescribably uneasy look. “The sly creature,” said the Thénardiers.
Injustice had made her peevish, and misery had made her ugly. Nothing
remained to her except her beautiful eyes, which inspired pain,
because, large as they were, it seemed as though one beheld in them a
still larger amount of sadness.
It was a heart-breaking thing to see this poor child, not yet six years
old, shivering in the winter in her old rags of linen, full of holes,
sweeping the street before daylight, with an enormous broom in her tiny
red hands, and a tear in her great eyes.
She was called the _Lark_ in the neighborhood. The populace, who are
fond of these figures of speech, had taken a fancy to bestow this name
on this trembling, frightened, and shivering little creature, no bigger
than a bird, who was awake every morning before any one else in the
house or the village, and was always in the street or the fields before
daybreak.
Only the little lark never sang.
BOOK FIFTH—THE DESCENT
CHAPTER I—THE HISTORY OF A PROGRESS IN BLACK GLASS TRINKETS
And in the meantime, what had become of that mother who according to
the people at Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child? Where
was she? What was she doing?
After leaving her little Cosette with the Thénardiers, she had
continued her journey, and had reached M. sur M.
This, it will be remembered, was in 1818.
Fantine had quitted her province ten years before. M. sur M. had
changed its aspect. While Fantine had been slowly descending from
wretchedness to wretchedness, her native town had prospered.
About two years previously one of those industrial facts which are the
grand events of small districts had taken place.
This detail is important, and we regard it as useful to develop it at
length; we should almost say, to underline it.
From time immemorial, M. sur M. had had for its special industry the
imitation of English jet and the black glass trinkets of Germany. This
industry had always vegetated, on account of the high price of the raw
material, which reacted on the manufacture. At the moment when Fantine
returned to M. sur M., an unheard-of transformation had taken place in
the production of “black goods.” Towards the close of 1815 a man, a
stranger, had established himself in the town, and had been inspired
with the idea of substituting, in this manufacture, gum-lac for resin,
and, for bracelets in particular, slides of sheet-iron simply laid
together, for slides of soldered sheet-iron.
This very small change had effected a revolution.
This very small change had, in fact, prodigiously reduced the cost of
the raw material, which had rendered it possible in the first place, to
raise the price of manufacture, a benefit to the country; in the second
place, to improve the workmanship, an advantage to the consumer; in the
third place, to sell at a lower price, while trebling the profit, which
was a benefit to the manufacturer.
Thus three results ensued from one idea.
In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich,
which is good, and had made every one about him rich, which is better.
He was a stranger in the Department. Of his origin, nothing was known;
of the beginning of his career, very little. It was rumored that he had
come to town with very little money, a few hundred francs at the most.
It was from this slender capital, enlisted in the service of an
ingenious idea, developed by method and thought, that he had drawn his
own fortune, and the fortune of the whole countryside.
On his arrival at M. sur M. he had only the garments, the appearance,
and the language of a workingman.
It appears that on the very day when he made his obscure entry into the
little town of M. sur M., just at nightfall, on a December evening,
knapsack on back and thorn club in hand, a large fire had broken out in
the town-hall. This man had rushed into the flames and saved, at the
risk of his own life, two children who belonged to the captain of the
gendarmerie; this is why they had forgotten to ask him for his
passport. Afterwards they had learned his name. He was called Father
Madeleine.
CHAPTER II—MADELEINE
He was a man about fifty years of age, who had a preoccupied air, and
who was good. That was all that could be said about him.
Thanks to the rapid progress of the industry which he had so admirably
reconstructed, M. sur M. had become a rather important centre of trade.
Spain, which consumes a good deal of black jet, made enormous purchases
there each year. M. sur M. almost rivalled London and Berlin in this
branch of commerce. Father Madeleine’s profits were such, that at the
end of the second year he was able to erect a large factory, in which
there were two vast workrooms, one for the men, and the other for
women. Any one who was hungry could present himself there, and was sure
of finding employment and bread. Father Madeleine required of the men
good will, of the women pure morals, and of all, probity. He had
separated the work-rooms in order to separate the sexes, and so that
the women and girls might remain discreet. On this point he was
inflexible. It was the only thing in which he was in a manner
intolerant. He was all the more firmly set on this severity, since M.
sur M., being a garrison town, opportunities for corruption abounded.
However, his coming had been a boon, and his presence was a godsend.