Les Misérables
“Mercy, Madame, Madame! I will not do so any more!”
The Thénardier took down the whip.
In the meantime, the man in the yellow coat had been fumbling in the
fob of his waistcoat, without any one having noticed his movements.
Besides, the other travellers were drinking or playing cards, and were
not paying attention to anything.
Cosette contracted herself into a ball, with anguish, within the angle
of the chimney, endeavoring to gather up and conceal her poor half-nude
limbs. The Thénardier raised her arm.
“Pardon me, Madame,” said the man, “but just now I caught sight of
something which had fallen from this little one’s apron pocket, and
rolled aside. Perhaps this is it.”
At the same time he bent down and seemed to be searching on the floor
for a moment.
“Exactly; here it is,” he went on, straightening himself up.
And he held out a silver coin to the Thénardier.
“Yes, that’s it,” said she.
It was not it, for it was a twenty-sou piece; but the Thénardier found
it to her advantage. She put the coin in her pocket, and confined
herself to casting a fierce glance at the child, accompanied with the
remark, “Don’t let this ever happen again!”
Cosette returned to what the Thénardier called “her kennel,” and her
large eyes, which were riveted on the traveller, began to take on an
expression such as they had never worn before. Thus far it was only an
innocent amazement, but a sort of stupefied confidence was mingled with
it.
“By the way, would you like some supper?” the Thénardier inquired of
the traveller.
He made no reply. He appeared to be absorbed in thought.
“What sort of a man is that?” she muttered between her teeth. “He’s
some frightfully poor wretch. He hasn’t a sou to pay for a supper. Will
he even pay me for his lodging? It’s very lucky, all the same, that it
did not occur to him to steal the money that was on the floor.”
In the meantime, a door had opened, and Éponine and Azelma entered.
They were two really pretty little girls, more bourgeois than peasant
in looks, and very charming; the one with shining chestnut tresses, the
other with long black braids hanging down her back, both vivacious,
neat, plump, rosy, and healthy, and a delight to the eye. They were
warmly clad, but with so much maternal art that the thickness of the
stuffs did not detract from the coquetry of arrangement. There was a
hint of winter, though the springtime was not wholly effaced. Light
emanated from these two little beings. Besides this, they were on the
throne. In their toilettes, in their gayety, in the noise which they
made, there was sovereignty. When they entered, the Thénardier said to
them in a grumbling tone which was full of adoration, “Ah! there you
are, you children!”
Then drawing them, one after the other to her knees, smoothing their
hair, tying their ribbons afresh, and then releasing them with that
gentle manner of shaking off which is peculiar to mothers, she
exclaimed, “What frights they are!”
They went and seated themselves in the chimney-corner. They had a doll,
which they turned over and over on their knees with all sorts of joyous
chatter. From time to time Cosette raised her eyes from her knitting,
and watched their play with a melancholy air.
Éponine and Azelma did not look at Cosette. She was the same as a dog
to them. These three little girls did not yet reckon up four and twenty
years between them, but they already represented the whole society of
man; envy on the one side, disdain on the other.
The doll of the Thénardier sisters was very much faded, very old, and
much broken; but it seemed nonetheless admirable to Cosette, who had
never had a doll in her life, _a real doll_, to make use of the
expression which all children will understand.
All at once, the Thénardier, who had been going back and forth in the
room, perceived that Cosette’s mind was distracted, and that, instead
of working, she was paying attention to the little ones at their play.
“Ah! I’ve caught you at it!” she cried. “So that’s the way you work!
I’ll make you work to the tune of the whip; that I will.”
The stranger turned to the Thénardier, without quitting his chair.
“Bah, Madame,” he said, with an almost timid air, “let her play!”
Such a wish expressed by a traveller who had eaten a slice of mutton
and had drunk a couple of bottles of wine with his supper, and who had
not the air of being frightfully poor, would have been equivalent to an
order. But that a man with such a hat should permit himself such a
desire, and that a man with such a coat should permit himself to have a
will, was something which Madame Thénardier did not intend to tolerate.
She retorted with acrimony:—
“She must work, since she eats. I don’t feed her to do nothing.”
“What is she making?” went on the stranger, in a gentle voice which
contrasted strangely with his beggarly garments and his porter’s
shoulders.
The Thénardier deigned to reply:—
“Stockings, if you please. Stockings for my little girls, who have
none, so to speak, and who are absolutely barefoot just now.”
The man looked at Cosette’s poor little red feet, and continued:—
“When will she have finished this pair of stockings?”
“She has at least three or four good days’ work on them still, the lazy
creature!”
“And how much will that pair of stockings be worth when she has
finished them?”
The Thénardier cast a glance of disdain on him.
“Thirty sous at least.”
“Will you sell them for five francs?” went on the man.
“Good heavens!” exclaimed a carter who was listening, with a loud
laugh; “five francs! the deuce, I should think so! five balls!”
Thénardier thought it time to strike in.
“Yes, sir; if such is your fancy, you will be allowed to have that pair
of stockings for five francs. We can refuse nothing to travellers.”
“You must pay on the spot,” said the Thénardier, in her curt and
peremptory fashion.
“I will buy that pair of stockings,” replied the man, “and,” he added,
drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and laying it on the table,
“I will pay for them.”
Then he turned to Cosette.
“Now I own your work; play, my child.”
The carter was so much touched by the five-franc piece, that he
abandoned his glass and hastened up.
“But it’s true!” he cried, examining it. “A real hind wheel! and not
counterfeit!”
Thénardier approached and silently put the coin in his pocket.
The Thénardier had no reply to make. She bit her lips, and her face
assumed an expression of hatred.
In the meantime, Cosette was trembling. She ventured to ask:—
“Is it true, Madame? May I play?”
“Play!” said the Thénardier, in a terrible voice.
“Thanks, Madame,” said Cosette.
And while her mouth thanked the Thénardier, her whole little soul
thanked the traveller.
Thénardier had resumed his drinking; his wife whispered in his ear:—
“Who can this yellow man be?”
“I have seen millionaires with coats like that,” replied Thénardier, in
a sovereign manner.
Cosette had dropped her knitting, but had not left her seat. Cosette
always moved as little as possible. She picked up some old rags and her
little lead sword from a box behind her.
Éponine and Azelma paid no attention to what was going on. They had
just executed a very important operation; they had just got hold of the
cat. They had thrown their doll on the ground, and Éponine, who was the
elder, was swathing the little cat, in spite of its mewing and its
contortions, in a quantity of clothes and red and blue scraps. While
performing this serious and difficult work she was saying to her sister
in that sweet and adorable language of children, whose grace, like the
splendor of the butterfly’s wing, vanishes when one essays to fix it
fast.
“You see, sister, this doll is more amusing than the other. She twists,
she cries, she is warm. See, sister, let us play with her. She shall be
my little girl. I will be a lady. I will come to see you, and you shall
look at her. Gradually, you will perceive her whiskers, and that will
surprise you. And then you will see her ears, and then you will see her
tail and it will amaze you. And you will say to me, ‘Ah! Mon Dieu!’ and
I will say to you: ‘Yes, Madame, it is my little girl. Little girls are
made like that just at present.’”
Azelma listened admiringly to Éponine.
In the meantime, the drinkers had begun to sing an obscene song, and to
laugh at it until the ceiling shook. Thénardier accompanied and
encouraged them.
As birds make nests out of everything, so children make a doll out of
anything which comes to hand. While Éponine and Azelma were bundling up
the cat, Cosette, on her side, had dressed up her sword. That done, she
laid it in her arms, and sang to it softly, to lull it to sleep.
The doll is one of the most imperious needs and, at the same time, one
of the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for, to
clothe, to deck, to dress, to undress, to redress, to teach, scold a
little, to rock, to dandle, to lull to sleep, to imagine that something
is some one,—therein lies the whole woman’s future. While dreaming and
chattering, making tiny outfits, and baby clothes, while sewing little
gowns, and corsages and bodices, the child grows into a young girl, the
young girl into a big girl, the big girl into a woman. The first child
is the continuation of the last doll.
A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as
impossible, as a woman without children.
So Cosette had made herself a doll out of the sword.
Madame Thénardier approached _the yellow man_; “My husband is right,”
she thought; “perhaps it is M. Laffitte; there are such queer rich
men!”
She came and set her elbows on the table.
“Monsieur,” said she. At this word, _Monsieur_, the man turned; up to
that time, the Thénardier had addressed him only as _brave homme_ or
_bonhomme_.
“You see, sir,” she pursued, assuming a sweetish air that was even more
repulsive to behold than her fierce mien, “I am willing that the child
should play; I do not oppose it, but it is good for once, because you
are generous. You see, she has nothing; she must needs work.”
“Then this child is not yours?” demanded the man.
“Oh! mon Dieu! no, sir! she is a little beggar whom we have taken in
through charity; a sort of imbecile child. She must have water on the
brain; she has a large head, as you see. We do what we can for her, for
we are not rich; we have written in vain to her native place, and have
received no reply these six months. It must be that her mother is
dead.”
“Ah!” said the man, and fell into his reverie once more.
“Her mother didn’t amount to much,” added the Thénardier; “she
abandoned her child.”
During the whole of this conversation Cosette, as though warned by some
instinct that she was under discussion, had not taken her eyes from the
Thénardier’s face; she listened vaguely; she caught a few words here
and there.
Meanwhile, the drinkers, all three-quarters intoxicated, were repeating
their unclean refrain with redoubled gayety; it was a highly spiced and
wanton song, in which the Virgin and the infant Jesus were introduced.
The Thénardier went off to take part in the shouts of laughter.
Cosette, from her post under the table, gazed at the fire, which was
reflected from her fixed eyes. She had begun to rock the sort of baby
which she had made, and, as she rocked it, she sang in a low voice, “My
mother is dead! my mother is dead! my mother is dead!”
On being urged afresh by the hostess, the yellow man, “the
millionaire,” consented at last to take supper.
“What does Monsieur wish?”
“Bread and cheese,” said the man.
“Decidedly, he is a beggar” thought Madame Thénardier.