1.C.3.2. TWO COMPLETE PORTRAITS
So far in this book the Thenardiers have been viewed
only in profile; the moment has arrived for making the
circuit of this couple, and considering it under all its
aspects.
Thenardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame
Thenardier 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 Thenardier 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 Thenardier 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.
Thenardier 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 Abbe 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, Thenardier 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.
Thenardier 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.
He composed the travellers' tariff card in a superior
manner, but practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical
errors in it. Thenardier 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.
Thenardier, 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 Thenardier 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
ually 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 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, Thenardier 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. Thenardier was a statesman.
Every
new-comer who entered the tavern said, on catching
sight of Madame Thenardier, "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. Thenardier was a
sort of special and sovereign being in Madame Thenardier'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 Thenardier,"—
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 Thenardier'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 Thenardier; 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. Thenardier 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, Thenardier 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, Thenardier 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 passersby, 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 arm-chair, 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 Thenardier
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 up stairs 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 Thenardier
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 Thenardier'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 Thenardier
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
Thenardier 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 Thenardier, 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 Thenardier.
"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 Thenardier, "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 Thenardier.
Cosette crawled out of the sort of hole in which she had
hidden herself. The Thenardier resumed:—
"Mademoiselle Dog-lack-name, go and water that horse."
"But, Madame," said Cosette, feebly, "there is no
water."
The Thenardier 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 Thenardier 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 Thenardier.
Cosette went out. The door closed behind her.