Les Misérables
and regained a little courage.
At this epoch she said to a neighbor, “Bah! I say to myself, by only
sleeping five hours, and working all the rest of the time at my sewing,
I shall always manage to nearly earn my bread. And, then, when one is
sad, one eats less. Well, sufferings, uneasiness, a little bread on one
hand, trouble on the other,—all this will support me.”
It would have been a great happiness to have her little girl with her
in this distress. She thought of having her come. But what then! Make
her share her own destitution! And then, she was in debt to the
Thénardiers! How could she pay them? And the journey! How pay for that?
The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life
of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious
with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even
towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign
herself Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.
There are many such virtuous people in this lower world; some day they
will be in the world above. This life has a morrow.
At first, Fantine had been so ashamed that she had not dared to go out.
When she was in the street, she divined that people turned round behind
her, and pointed at her; every one stared at her and no one greeted
her; the cold and bitter scorn of the passers-by penetrated her very
flesh and soul like a north wind.
It seems as though an unfortunate woman were utterly bare beneath the
sarcasm and the curiosity of all in small towns. In Paris, at least, no
one knows you, and this obscurity is a garment. Oh! how she would have
liked to betake herself to Paris! Impossible!
She was obliged to accustom herself to disrepute, as she had accustomed
herself to indigence. Gradually she decided on her course. At the
expiration of two or three months she shook off her shame, and began to
go about as though there were nothing the matter. “It is all the same
to me,” she said.
She went and came, bearing her head well up, with a bitter smile, and
was conscious that she was becoming brazen-faced.
Madame Victurnien sometimes saw her passing, from her window, noticed
the distress of “that creature” who, “thanks to her,” had been “put
back in her proper place,” and congratulated herself. The happiness of
the evil-minded is black.
Excess of toil wore out Fantine, and the little dry cough which
troubled her increased. She sometimes said to her neighbor, Marguerite,
“Just feel how hot my hands are!”
Nevertheless, when she combed her beautiful hair in the morning with an
old broken comb, and it flowed about her like floss silk, she
experienced a moment of happy coquetry.
CHAPTER X—RESULT OF THE SUCCESS
She had been dismissed towards the end of the winter; the summer
passed, but winter came again. Short days, less work. Winter: no
warmth, no light, no noonday, the evening joining on to the morning,
fogs, twilight; the window is gray; it is impossible to see clearly at
it. The sky is but a vent-hole. The whole day is a cavern. The sun has
the air of a beggar. A frightful season! Winter changes the water of
heaven and the heart of man into a stone. Her creditors harrassed her.
Fantine earned too little. Her debts had increased. The Thénardiers,
who were not promptly paid, wrote to her constantly letters whose
contents drove her to despair, and whose carriage ruined her. One day
they wrote to her that her little Cosette was entirely naked in that
cold weather, that she needed a woollen skirt, and that her mother must
send at least ten francs for this. She received the letter, and crushed
it in her hands all day long. That evening she went into a barber’s
shop at the corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her
admirable golden hair fell to her knees.
“What splendid hair!” exclaimed the barber.
“How much will you give me for it?” said she.
“Ten francs.”
“Cut it off.”
She purchased a knitted petticoat and sent it to the Thénardiers. This
petticoat made the Thénardiers furious. It was the money that they
wanted. They gave the petticoat to Éponine. The poor Lark continued to
shiver.
Fantine thought: “My child is no longer cold. I have clothed her with
my hair.” She put on little round caps which concealed her shorn head,
and in which she was still pretty.
Dark thoughts held possession of Fantine’s heart.
When she saw that she could no longer dress her hair, she began to hate
every one about her. She had long shared the universal veneration for
Father Madeleine; yet, by dint of repeating to herself that it was he
who had discharged her, that he was the cause of her unhappiness, she
came to hate him also, and most of all. When she passed the factory in
working hours, when the workpeople were at the door, she affected to
laugh and sing.
An old workwoman who once saw her laughing and singing in this fashion
said, “There’s a girl who will come to a bad end.”
She took a lover, the first who offered, a man whom she did not love,
out of bravado and with rage in her heart. He was a miserable scamp, a
sort of mendicant musician, a lazy beggar, who beat her, and who
abandoned her as she had taken him, in disgust.
She adored her child.
The lower she descended, the darker everything grew about her, the more
radiant shone that little angel at the bottom of her heart. She said,
“When I get rich, I will have my Cosette with me;” and she laughed. Her
cough did not leave her, and she had sweats on her back.
One day she received from the Thénardiers a letter couched in the
following terms: “Cosette is ill with a malady which is going the
rounds of the neighborhood. A miliary fever, they call it. Expensive
drugs are required. This is ruining us, and we can no longer pay for
them. If you do not send us forty francs before the week is out, the
little one will be dead.”
She burst out laughing, and said to her old neighbor: “Ah! they are
good! Forty francs! the idea! That makes two napoleons! Where do they
think I am to get them? These peasants are stupid, truly.”
Nevertheless she went to a dormer window in the staircase and read the
letter once more. Then she descended the stairs and emerged, running
and leaping and still laughing.
Some one met her and said to her, “What makes you so gay?”
She replied: “A fine piece of stupidity that some country people have
written to me. They demand forty francs of me. So much for you, you
peasants!”
As she crossed the square, she saw a great many people collected around
a carriage of eccentric shape, upon the top of which stood a man
dressed in red, who was holding forth. He was a quack dentist on his
rounds, who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates,
powders and elixirs.
Fantine mingled in the group, and began to laugh with the rest at the
harangue, which contained slang for the populace and jargon for
respectable people. The tooth-puller espied the lovely, laughing girl,
and suddenly exclaimed: “You have beautiful teeth, you girl there, who
are laughing; if you want to sell me your palettes, I will give you a
gold napoleon apiece for them.”
“What are my palettes?” asked Fantine.
“The palettes,” replied the dental professor, “are the front teeth, the
two upper ones.”
“How horrible!” exclaimed Fantine.
“Two napoleons!” grumbled a toothless old woman who was present.
“Here’s a lucky girl!”
Fantine fled and stopped her ears that she might not hear the hoarse
voice of the man shouting to her: “Reflect, my beauty! two napoleons;
they may prove of service. If your heart bids you, come this evening to
the inn of the _Tillac d’Argent_; you will find me there.”
Fantine returned home. She was furious, and related the occurrence to
her good neighbor Marguerite: “Can you understand such a thing? Is he
not an abominable man? How can they allow such people to go about the
country! Pull out my two front teeth! Why, I should be horrible! My
hair will grow again, but my teeth! Ah! what a monster of a man! I
should prefer to throw myself head first on the pavement from the fifth
story! He told me that he should be at the _Tillac d’Argent_ this
evening.”
“And what did he offer?” asked Marguerite.
“Two napoleons.”
“That makes forty francs.”
“Yes,” said Fantine; “that makes forty francs.”
She remained thoughtful, and began her work. At the expiration of a
quarter of an hour she left her sewing and went to read the
Thénardiers’ letter once more on the staircase.
On her return, she said to Marguerite, who was at work beside her:—
“What is a miliary fever? Do you know?”
“Yes,” answered the old spinster; “it is a disease.”
“Does it require many drugs?”
“Oh! terrible drugs.”
“How does one get it?”
“It is a malady that one gets without knowing how.”
“Then it attacks children?”
“Children in particular.”
“Do people die of it?”
“They may,” said Marguerite.
Fantine left the room and went to read her letter once more on the
staircase.
That evening she went out, and was seen to turn her steps in the
direction of the Rue de Paris, where the inns are situated.
The next morning, when Marguerite entered Fantine’s room before
daylight,—for they always worked together, and in this manner used only
one candle for the two,—she found Fantine seated on her bed, pale and
frozen. She had not lain down. Her cap had fallen on her knees. Her
candle had burned all night, and was almost entirely consumed.
Marguerite halted on the threshold, petrified at this tremendous
wastefulness, and exclaimed:—
“Lord! the candle is all burned out! Something has happened.”
Then she looked at Fantine, who turned toward her her head bereft of
its hair.
Fantine had grown ten years older since the preceding night.
“Jesus!” said Marguerite, “what is the matter with you, Fantine?”
“Nothing,” replied Fantine. “Quite the contrary. My child will not die
of that frightful malady, for lack of succor. I am content.”
So saying, she pointed out to the spinster two napoleons which were
glittering on the table.
“Ah! Jesus God!” cried Marguerite. “Why, it is a fortune! Where did you
get those louis d’or?”
“I got them,” replied Fantine.
At the same time she smiled. The candle illuminated her countenance. It
was a bloody smile. A reddish saliva soiled the corners of her lips,
and she had a black hole in her mouth.
The two teeth had been extracted.
She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil.
After all it was a ruse of the Thénardiers to obtain money. Cosette was
not ill.
Fantine threw her mirror out of the window. She had long since quitted
her cell on the second floor for an attic with only a latch to fasten
it, next the roof; one of those attics whose extremity forms an angle
with the floor, and knocks you on the head every instant. The poor
occupant can reach the end of his chamber as he can the end of his
destiny, only by bending over more and more.
She had no longer a bed; a rag which she called her coverlet, a
mattress on the floor, and a seatless chair still remained. A little
rosebush which she had, had dried up, forgotten, in one corner. In the
other corner was a butter-pot to hold water, which froze in winter, and
in which the various levels of the water remained long marked by these
circles of ice. She had lost her shame; she lost her coquetry. A final
sign. She went out, with dirty caps. Whether from lack of time or from
indifference, she no longer mended her linen. As the heels wore out,
she dragged her stockings down into her shoes. This was evident from
the perpendicular wrinkles. She patched her bodice, which was old and
worn out, with scraps of calico which tore at the slightest movement.