Les Misérables
legitimate grievance, the sum total of the deceptions, the
bankruptcies, and the calamities of their lives,—when all this leaven
was stirred up in him and boiled forth from his mouth and eyes, he was
terrible. Woe to the person who came under his wrath at such a time!
In addition to his other qualities, Thénardier was attentive and
penetrating, silent or talkative, according to circumstances, and
always highly intelligent. He had something of the look of sailors, who
are accustomed to screw up their eyes to gaze through marine glasses.
Thénardier was a statesman.
Every newcomer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame
Thénardier, “There is the master of the house.” A mistake. She was not
even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress. She
worked; he created. He directed everything by a sort of invisible and
constant magnetic action. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a
sign; the mastodon obeyed. Thénardier was a sort of special and
sovereign being in Madame Thénardier’s eyes, though she did not
thoroughly realize it. She was possessed of virtues after her own kind;
if she had ever had a disagreement as to any detail with “Monsieur
Thénardier,”—which was an inadmissible hypothesis, by the way,—she
would not have blamed her husband in public on any subject whatever.
She would never have committed “before strangers” that mistake so often
committed by women, and which is called in parliamentary language,
“exposing the crown.” Although their concord had only evil as its
result, there was contemplation in Madame Thénardier’s submission to
her husband. That mountain of noise and of flesh moved under the little
finger of that frail despot. Viewed on its dwarfed and grotesque side,
this was that grand and universal thing, the adoration of mind by
matter; for certain ugly features have a cause in the very depths of
eternal beauty. There was an unknown quantity about Thénardier; hence
the absolute empire of the man over that woman. At certain moments she
beheld him like a lighted candle; at others she felt him like a claw.
This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her
children, and who did not fear any one except her husband. She was a
mother because she was mammiferous. But her maternity stopped short
with her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys. The
man had but one thought,—how to enrich himself.
He did not succeed in this. A theatre worthy of this great talent was
lacking. Thénardier was ruining himself at Montfermeil, if ruin is
possible to zero; in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees this penniless
scamp would have become a millionaire; but an inn-keeper must browse
where fate has hitched him.
It will be understood that the word _inn-keeper_ is here employed in a
restricted sense, and does not extend to an entire class.
In this same year, 1823, Thénardier was burdened with about fifteen
hundred francs’ worth of petty debts, and this rendered him anxious.
Whatever may have been the obstinate injustice of destiny in this case,
Thénardier was one of those men who understand best, with the most
profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing which is a virtue
among barbarous peoples and an object of merchandise among civilized
peoples,—hospitality. Besides, he was an admirable poacher, and quoted
for his skill in shooting. He had a certain cold and tranquil laugh,
which was particularly dangerous.
His theories as a landlord sometimes burst forth in lightning flashes.
He had professional aphorisms, which he inserted into his wife’s mind.
“The duty of the inn-keeper,” he said to her one day, violently, and in
a low voice, “is to sell to the first comer, stews, repose, light,
fire, dirty sheets, a servant, lice, and a smile; to stop passers-by,
to empty small purses, and to honestly lighten heavy ones; to shelter
travelling families respectfully: to shave the man, to pluck the woman,
to pick the child clean; to quote the window open, the window shut, the
chimney-corner, the armchair, the chair, the ottoman, the stool, the
feather-bed, the mattress and the truss of straw; to know how much the
shadow uses up the mirror, and to put a price on it; and, by five
hundred thousand devils, to make the traveller pay for everything, even
for the flies which his dog eats!”
This man and this woman were ruse and rage wedded—a hideous and
terrible team.
While the husband pondered and combined, Madame Thénardier thought not
of absent creditors, took no heed of yesterday nor of to-morrow, and
lived in a fit of anger, all in a minute.
Such were these two beings. Cosette was between them, subjected to
their double pressure, like a creature who is at the same time being
ground up in a mill and pulled to pieces with pincers. The man and the
woman each had a different method: Cosette was overwhelmed with
blows—this was the woman’s; she went barefooted in winter—that was the
man’s doing.
Cosette ran upstairs and down, washed, swept, rubbed, dusted, ran,
fluttered about, panted, moved heavy articles, and weak as she was, did
the coarse work. There was no mercy for her; a fierce mistress and
venomous master. The Thénardier hostelry was like a spider’s web, in
which Cosette had been caught, and where she lay trembling. The ideal
of oppression was realized by this sinister household. It was something
like the fly serving the spiders.
The poor child passively held her peace.
What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted
God, find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life, very small and in
the midst of men all naked!
CHAPTER III—MEN MUST HAVE WINE, AND HORSES MUST HAVE WATER
Four new travellers had arrived.
Cosette was meditating sadly; for, although she was only eight years
old, she had already suffered so much that she reflected with the
lugubrious air of an old woman. Her eye was black in consequence of a
blow from Madame Thénardier’s fist, which caused the latter to remark
from time to time, “How ugly she is with her fist-blow on her eye!”
Cosette was thinking that it was dark, very dark, that the pitchers and
caraffes in the chambers of the travellers who had arrived must have
been filled and that there was no more water in the cistern.
She was somewhat reassured because no one in the Thénardier
establishment drank much water. Thirsty people were never lacking
there; but their thirst was of the sort which applies to the jug rather
than to the pitcher. Any one who had asked for a glass of water among
all those glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to all these
men. But there came a moment when the child trembled; Madame Thénardier
raised the cover of a stew-pan which was boiling on the stove, then
seized a glass and briskly approached the cistern. She turned the
faucet; the child had raised her head and was following all the woman’s
movements. A thin stream of water trickled from the faucet, and half
filled the glass. “Well,” said she, “there is no more water!” A
momentary silence ensued. The child did not breathe.
“Bah!” resumed Madame Thénardier, examining the half-filled glass,
“this will be enough.”
Cosette applied herself to her work once more, but for a quarter of an
hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big snow-flake.
She counted the minutes that passed in this manner, and wished it were
the next morning.
From time to time one of the drinkers looked into the street, and
exclaimed, “It’s as black as an oven!” or, “One must needs be a cat to
go about the streets without a lantern at this hour!” And Cosette
trembled.
All at once one of the pedlers who lodged in the hostelry entered, and
said in a harsh voice:—
“My horse has not been watered.”
“Yes, it has,” said Madame Thénardier.
“I tell you that it has not,” retorted the pedler.
Cosette had emerged from under the table.
“Oh, yes, sir!” said she, “the horse has had a drink; he drank out of a
bucket, a whole bucketful, and it was I who took the water to him, and
I spoke to him.”
It was not true; Cosette lied.
“There’s a brat as big as my fist who tells lies as big as the house,”
exclaimed the pedler. “I tell you that he has not been watered, you
little jade! He has a way of blowing when he has had no water, which I
know well.”
Cosette persisted, and added in a voice rendered hoarse with anguish,
and which was hardly audible:—
“And he drank heartily.”
“Come,” said the pedler, in a rage, “this won’t do at all, let my horse
be watered, and let that be the end of it!”
Cosette crept under the table again.
“In truth, that is fair!” said Madame Thénardier, “if the beast has not
been watered, it must be.”
Then glancing about her:—
“Well, now! Where’s that other beast?”
She bent down and discovered Cosette cowering at the other end of the
table, almost under the drinkers’ feet.
“Are you coming?” shrieked Madame Thénardier.
Cosette crawled out of the sort of hole in which she had hidden
herself. The Thénardier resumed:—
“Mademoiselle Dog-lack-name, go and water that horse.”
“But, Madame,” said Cosette, feebly, “there is no water.”
The Thénardier threw the street door wide open:—
“Well, go and get some, then!”
Cosette dropped her head, and went for an empty bucket which stood near
the chimney-corner.
This bucket was bigger than she was, and the child could have set down
in it at her ease.
The Thénardier returned to her stove, and tasted what was in the
stewpan, with a wooden spoon, grumbling the while:—
“There’s plenty in the spring. There never was such a malicious
creature as that. I think I should have done better to strain my
onions.”
Then she rummaged in a drawer which contained sous, pepper, and
shallots.
“See here, Mam’selle Toad,” she added, “on your way back, you will get
a big loaf from the baker. Here’s a fifteen-sou piece.”
Cosette had a little pocket on one side of her apron; she took the coin
without saying a word, and put it in that pocket.
Then she stood motionless, bucket in hand, the open door before her.
She seemed to be waiting for some one to come to her rescue.
“Get along with you!” screamed the Thénardier.
Cosette went out. The door closed behind her.
CHAPTER IV—ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE OF A DOLL
The line of open-air booths starting at the church, extended, as the
reader will remember, as far as the hostelry of the Thénardiers. These
booths were all illuminated, because the citizens would soon pass on
their way to the midnight mass, with candles burning in paper funnels,
which, as the schoolmaster, then seated at the table at the
Thénardiers’ observed, produced “a magical effect.” In compensation,
not a star was visible in the sky.
The last of these stalls, established precisely opposite the
Thénardiers’ door, was a toy-shop all glittering with tinsel, glass,
and magnificent objects of tin. In the first row, and far forwards, the
merchant had placed on a background of white napkins, an immense doll,
nearly two feet high, who was dressed in a robe of pink crepe, with
gold wheat-ears on her head, which had real hair and enamel eyes. All
that day, this marvel had been displayed to the wonderment of all
passers-by under ten years of age, without a mother being found in
Montfermeil sufficiently rich or sufficiently extravagant to give it to
her child. Éponine and Azelma had passed hours in contemplating it, and
Cosette herself had ventured to cast a glance at it, on the sly, it is
true.
At the moment when Cosette emerged, bucket in hand, melancholy and
overcome as she was, she could not refrain from lifting her eyes to
that wonderful doll, towards _the lady_, as she called it. The poor
child paused in amazement. She had not yet beheld that doll close to.