Les Misérables
seven o’clock in the evening in summer, and five in winter; and night
once come and the shutters on the ground floor once closed, he who had
no water to drink went to fetch it for himself or did without it.
This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the reader has
probably not forgotten,—little Cosette. It will be remembered that
Cosette was useful to the Thénardiers in two ways: they made the mother
pay them, and they made the child serve them. So when the mother ceased
to pay altogether, the reason for which we have read in preceding
chapters, the Thénardiers kept Cosette. She took the place of a servant
in their house. In this capacity she it was who ran to fetch water when
it was required. So the child, who was greatly terrified at the idea of
going to the spring at night, took great care that water should never
be lacking in the house.
Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil.
The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow
nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained
permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street
of the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection of
the same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square,
and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader will
perhaps remember, the Thénardiers’ hostelry was situated. These people
filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated to that tranquil
little district a noisy and joyous life. In order to play the part of a
faithful historian, we ought even to add that, among the curiosities
displayed in the square, there was a menagerie, in which frightful
clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence, exhibited to the
peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those horrible Brazilian
vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not possess until 1845, and
which have a tricolored cockade for an eye. I believe that naturalists
call this bird Caracara Polyborus; it belongs to the order of the
Apicides, and to the family of the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist
soldiers, who had retired to the village, went to see this creature
with great devotion. The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored
cockade was a unique phenomenon made by God expressly for their
menagerie.
On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters, and peddlers, were
seated at table, drinking and smoking around four or five candles in
the public room of Thénardier’s hostelry. This room resembled all
drinking-shop rooms,—tables, pewter jugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers;
but little light and a great deal of noise. The date of the year 1823
was indicated, nevertheless, by two objects which were then fashionable
in the bourgeois class: to wit, a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed
tin. The female Thénardier was attending to the supper, which was
roasting in front of a clear fire; her husband was drinking with his
customers and talking politics.
Besides political conversations which had for their principal subjects
the Spanish war and M. le Duc d’Angoulême, strictly local parentheses,
like the following, were audible amid the uproar:—
“About Nanterre and Suresnes the vines have flourished greatly. When
ten pieces were reckoned on there have been twelve. They have yielded a
great deal of juice under the press.” “But the grapes cannot be ripe?”
“In those parts the grapes should not be ripe; the wine turns oily as
soon as spring comes.” “Then it is very thin wine?” “There are wines
poorer even than these. The grapes must be gathered while green.” Etc.
Or a miller would call out:—
“Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in them a
quantity of small seed which we cannot sift out, and which we are
obliged to send through the mill-stones; there are tares, fennel,
vetches, hempseed, fox-tail, and a host of other weeds, not to mention
pebbles, which abound in certain wheat, especially in Breton wheat. I
am not fond of grinding Breton wheat, any more than long-sawyers like
to saw beams with nails in them. You can judge of the bad dust that
makes in grinding. And then people complain of the flour. They are in
the wrong. The flour is no fault of ours.”
In a space between two windows a mower, who was seated at table with a
landed proprietor who was fixing on a price for some meadow work to be
performed in the spring, was saying:—
“It does no harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better. Dew is a good
thing, sir. It makes no difference with that grass. Your grass is young
and very hard to cut still. It’s terribly tender. It yields before the
iron.” Etc.
Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar of the kitchen
table near the chimney. She was in rags; her bare feet were thrust into
wooden shoes, and by the firelight she was engaged in knitting woollen
stockings destined for the young Thénardiers. A very young kitten was
playing about among the chairs. Laughter and chatter were audible in
the adjoining room, from two fresh children’s voices: it was Éponine
and Azelma.
In the chimney-corner a cat-o’-nine-tails was hanging on a nail.
At intervals the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere in the
house, rang through the noise of the dram-shop. It was a little boy who
had been born to the Thénardiers during one of the preceding
winters,—“she did not know why,” she said, “the result of the
cold,”—and who was a little more than three years old. The mother had
nursed him, but she did not love him. When the persistent clamor of the
brat became too annoying, “Your son is squalling,” Thénardier would
say; “do go and see what he wants.” “Bah!” the mother would reply, “he
bothers me.” And the neglected child continued to shriek in the dark.
CHAPTER II—TWO COMPLETE PORTRAITS
So far in this book the Thénardiers have been viewed only in profile;
the moment has arrived for making the circuit of this couple, and
considering it under all its aspects.
Thénardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thénardier was
approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman; so
that there existed a balance of age between husband and wife.
Our readers have possibly preserved some recollection of this
Thénardier woman, ever since her first appearance,—tall, blond, red,
fat, angular, square, enormous, and agile; she belonged, as we have
said, to the race of those colossal wild women, who contort themselves
at fairs with paving-stones hanging from their hair. She did everything
about the house,—made the beds, did the washing, the cooking, and
everything else. Cosette was her only servant; a mouse in the service
of an elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice,—window
panes, furniture, and people. Her big face, dotted with red blotches,
presented the appearance of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was an
ideal market-porter dressed in woman’s clothes. She swore splendidly;
she boasted of being able to crack a nut with one blow of her fist.
Except for the romances which she had read, and which made the affected
lady peep through the ogress at times, in a very queer way, the idea
would never have occurred to any one to say of her, “That is a woman.”
This Thénardier female was like the product of a wench engrafted on a
fishwife. When one heard her speak, one said, “That is a gendarme”;
when one saw her drink, one said, “That is a carter”; when one saw her
handle Cosette, one said, “That is the hangman.” One of her teeth
projected when her face was in repose.
Thénardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, feeble man, who had
a sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy. His cunning began here;
he smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite to
everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing. He
had the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters. He
greatly resembled the portraits of the Abbé Delille. His coquetry
consisted in drinking with the carters. No one had ever succeeded in
rendering him drunk. He smoked a big pipe. He wore a blouse, and under
his blouse an old black coat. He made pretensions to literature and to
materialism. There were certain names which he often pronounced to
support whatever things he might be saying,—Voltaire, Raynal, Parny,
and, singularly enough, Saint Augustine. He declared that he had “a
system.” In addition, he was a great swindler. A _filousophe_
[philosophe], a scientific thief. The species does exist. It will be
remembered that he pretended to have served in the army; he was in the
habit of relating with exuberance, how, being a sergeant in the 6th or
the 9th light something or other, at Waterloo, he had alone, and in the
presence of a squadron of death-dealing hussars, covered with his body
and saved from death, in the midst of the grape-shot, “a general, who
had been dangerously wounded.” Thence arose for his wall the flaring
sign, and for his inn the name which it bore in the neighborhood, of
“the cabaret of the Sergeant of Waterloo.” He was a liberal, a classic,
and a Bonapartist. He had subscribed for the Champ d’Asile. It was said
in the village that he had studied for the priesthood.
We believe that he had simply studied in Holland for an inn-keeper.
This rascal of composite order was, in all probability, some Fleming
from Lille, in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris, a Belgian at Brussels,
being comfortably astride of both frontiers. As for his prowess at
Waterloo, the reader is already acquainted with that. It will be
perceived that he exaggerated it a trifle. Ebb and flow, wandering,
adventure, was the leven of his existence; a tattered conscience
entails a fragmentary life, and, apparently at the stormy epoch of June
18, 1815, Thénardier belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers of
which we have spoken, beating about the country, selling to some,
stealing from others, and travelling like a family man, with wife and
children, in a rickety cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with
an instinct for always attaching himself to the victorious army. This
campaign ended, and having, as he said, “some quibus,” he had come to
Montfermeil and set up an inn there.
This _quibus_, composed of purses and watches, of gold rings and silver
crosses, gathered in harvest-time in furrows sown with corpses, did not
amount to a large total, and did not carry this sutler turned
eating-house-keeper very far.
Thénardier had that peculiar rectilinear something about his gestures
which, accompanied by an oath, recalls the barracks, and by a sign of
the cross, the seminary. He was a fine talker. He allowed it to be
thought that he was an educated man. Nevertheless, the schoolmaster had
noticed that he pronounced improperly.12
He composed the travellers’ tariff card in a superior manner, but
practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it.
Thénardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever. He did not
disdain his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them. This
giantess was jealous. It seemed to her that that thin and yellow little
man must be an object coveted by all.
Thénardier, who was, above all, an astute and well-balanced man, was a
scamp of a temperate sort. This is the worst species; hypocrisy enters
into it.
It is not that Thénardier was not, on occasion, capable of wrath to
quite the same degree as his wife; but this was very rare, and at such
times, since he was enraged with the human race in general, as he bore
within him a deep furnace of hatred. And since he was one of those
people who are continually avenging their wrongs, who accuse everything
that passes before them of everything which has befallen them, and who
are always ready to cast upon the first person who comes to hand, as a