Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (43 page)

The other Thénardier was a little man, meagre, pale, angular, bony, and lean, who appeared to be sick, and whose health was excellent; here his knavery began. He smiled habitually as a matter of business, and tried to be polite to everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused a penny. He had the look of a weazel, and the mien of a man of letters. He had a strong resemblance to the portraits of the Abbé Delille. He affected drinking with waggoners. Nobody ever saw him drunk. He smoked a large pipe. He wore a smock, and under it an old black tuxedo coat. He made pretensions to literature and materialism. There were names which he often pronounced in support of anything whatever that he might say. Voltaire, Raynal, Parny, and, oddly enough, St. Augustine. He professed to have “a system.” For the rest, a great swindler. A
filou-sophe.
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There is such a variety. It will be remembered, that he pretended to have been in the service; he related with some pomp that at Waterloo, being sergeant in a Sixth or Ninth Light something, he alone, against a squadron of Hussars of Death, had covered with his body, and saved amid a shower of grapeshot, “a general dangerously wounded.” Hence the flamboyant picture on his sign, and the name of his inn, which was spoken of in the region as the “tavern of the sergeant of Waterloo.” He was liberal, classical, and a Bonapartist. He had contributed to the homeless shelter. It was said in the village that he had studied for the priesthood.

We believe
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that he had only studied in Holland to be an innkeeper. This mongrel cur was, according to all probability, some Fleming of Lille in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris, a Belgian in Brussels, conveniently on the fence between the two frontiers. We are acquainted with his prowess at Waterloo. As we have seen, he exaggerated it a little. Ebb and flow, wandering, adventure, was his element; a violated conscience is followed by a loose life; and without doubt, at the stormy epoch of the 18th of June, 1815, Thénardier belonged to that species of marauding canteen owners of whom we have spoken, scouring the country, robbing here and selling there, and travelling in family style, man, woman, and children, in some rickety carry-all, in the wake of marching troops, with the instinct to attach himself always to the victorious army. This campaign over, having, as he said, some funds, he had opened an eatery at Montfermeil.

These funds, composed of purses and watches, gold rings and silver crosses, gathered at the harvest time in the furrows sown with corpses, did not form a great total, and had not lasted this canteen owner, now become a tavern-keeper, very long.

Thénardier had that indescribable stiffness of gesture which, with an oath, reminds you of the barracks, and, with a sign of the cross of the seminary. He was a fine talker. He was fond of being thought learned. Nevertheless, the schoolmaster remarked that he made mistakes in pronunciation. He made out travellers’ bills in a superior style, but practised eyes sometimes found them faulty in orthography. Thénardier was sly, greedy, lounging, and clever. He did not disdain servant girls, consequently his wife had no more of them. This giantess was jealous. It seemed to her that this little, lean, and yellow man must be the object of universal desire.

Thénardier, above all a man of astuteness and poise, was a rascal of the subdued order. This is the worst species; there is hypocrisy in it.

Not that Thénardier was not on occasion capable of anger, quite as much as his wife; but that was very rare, and at such times, as if he were at war with the whole human race, as if he had in him a deep furnace of hatred, as if he were of those who are perpetually avenging themselves, who accuse everybody about them of the evils that befall them, and are always ready to throw on the first comer, as legitimate grievance, the sum-total of the deceptions, failures, and calamities of their life—as all this leaven worked in him, and boiled up into his mouth and eyes, he was frightful. Woe to him who came within reach of his fury, then!

Besides all his other qualities, Thénardier was attentive and penetrating, silent or talkative as occasion required, and always with great intelligence. He had somewhat the look of sailors accustomed to squinting the eye in looking through spy-glasses. Thenardier was a statesman.

Every new-comer who entered the tavern said, on seeing the Thénardiess: There is the master of the house. It was an error. She was not even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress. She performed, he created. He directed everything by a sort of invisible and continuous magnetic action. A word sufficed, sometimes a sign; the mastodon obeyed. Thénardier was to her, without her being really aware of it, a sort of being apart and sovereign. She had the virtues of her order of creation; never would she have differed in any detail with “Monsieur Thénardier”—nor—impossible supposition—would she have publicly quarrelled with her husband, on any matter whatever. Never had she committed “before company” that fault of which women are so often guilty, and which is called in parliamentary language: discovering the crown. Although their accord had no other result than evil, there was food for contemplation in the submission of the Thénardiess to her husband. This bustling mountain of flesh moved under the little finger of this frail despot. It was, viewed from its dwarfed and grotesque side, this great universal fact: the homage of matter to spirit; for certain deformities have their origin in the depths even of eternal beauty. There was somewhat of the unknown in Thénardier; hence the absolute empire of this man over this woman. At times, she looked upon him as upon a lighted candle; at others, she felt him like a claw.

This woman was a formidable creation, who loved nothing but her children, and feared nothing but her husband. She was a mother because she was a mammal. Her maternal feelings stopped with her girls, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys. The man had but one thought—to get rich.

He did not succeed. His great talents had no adequate opportunity. Thénardier at Montfermeil was ruining himself, if ruin is possible at zero. In Switzerland, or in the Pyrenees, this penniless rogue would have become a millionaire. But where fate places the innkeeper he must browse.

It is understood that the word
innkeeper
is employed here in a restricted sense, and does not extend to an entire class.

In this same year, 1823, Thénardier owed about fifteen hundred francs, of pressing debts, which rendered him moody.

However obstinately unjust destiny was to him, Thénardier was one of those men who best understood, to the greatest depth and in the most modem style, that which is a virtue among the barbarous, and an article of commerce among the civilised—hospitality. He was, besides, an admirable poacher, and was counted an excellent shot. He had a certain cool and quiet laugh, which was particularly dangerous.
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His theories of innkeeping sometimes sprang from him by flashes. He had certain professional aphorisms which he inculcated in the mind of his wife. “The duty of the innkeeper,” said he to her one day, emphatically, and in a low voice, “is to sell to the first comer, food, rest, light, fire, dirty linen, servants, fleas, and smiles; to stop travellers, empty small purses, and honestly lighten large ones; to receive families who are travelling with respect: scrape the man, pluck the woman, and pick the child; to charge for the open window, the closed window, the chimney corner, the sofa, the chair, the stool, the bench, the feather bed, the mattress, and the straw bed; to know how much the mirror is worn, and to tax that; and, by the five hundred thousand devils, to make the traveller pay for everything, even to the flies that his dog eats!”

This man and this woman were cunning and rage married—a hideous and terrible pair.

While the husband calculated and schemed, the Thénardiess thought not of absent creditors, took no care either for yesterday or the morrow, and lived passionately in the present moment.

Such were these two beings. Cosette was between them, undergoing their double pressure, like a creature who is at the same time being bruised by a millstone, and lacerated with pincers. The man and the woman had each a different way. Cosette was beaten unmercifully; that came from the woman. She went barefoot in winter; that came from the man.

Cosette ran up stairs and down stairs; washed, brushed, scrubbed, swept, ran, slaved, got out of breath, lifted heavy things, and, puny as she was, did the rough work. No pity; a ferocious mistress, a malignant master. The Thénardier tavern was like a snare, in which Cosette had been caught, and was trembling. The ideal of oppression was realised by this dismal servitude. It was something like a fly serving spiders.

The poor child was passive and silent.

When they find themselves in such condition at the dawn of existence, so young, so feeble, among men, what passes in these souls fresh from God!

FOUR NEW GUESTS had just come in.

Cosette was musing sadly; for, though she was only eight years old, she had already suffered so much that she mused with the mournful air of an old woman.

She had a black eye from a blow of the Thénardiess’s fist, which made the Thénardiess say from time to time, “How ugly she is with her bruise.”

Cosette was then thinking that it was evening, late in the evening, that she unexpectedly had to fill the bowls and pitchers in the rooms of the travellers who had arrived, and that there was no more water in the cistern.

One thing comforted her a little; they did not drink much water in the Thénardier tavern. There were plenty of people there who were thirsty; but it was that kind of thirst which reaches rather towards the jug than the pitcher. Had anybody asked for a glass of water among these glasses of wine, he would have seemed a savage to all those men. However, there was an instant when the child trembled; the Thénardiess raised the cover of a kettle which was boiling on the range, then took a glass and hastily approached the cistern. She turned the faucet; the child had raised her head and followed all her movements. A thin stream of water ran from the faucet, and filled the glass half full.

“Here,” said she, “there is no more water!” Then she was silent for a moment. The child held her breath.

“Pshaw!” continued the Thénardiess, examining the half-filled glass, “there is enough of it, such as it is.”

Cosette resumed her work, but for more than a quarter of an hour she felt her heart leaping into her throat like a great ball.

She counted the minutes as they thus rolled away, and eagerly wished it were morning.

From time to time, one of the drinkers would look out into the street and exclaim:—“It is as black as an oven!” or, “It would take a cat to go along the street without a lantern to-night!” And Cosette shuddered.

All at once, one of the pedlars who lodged in the tavern came in, and said in a harsh voice:

“You have not watered my horse.”

“Yes, we have, sure,” said the Thénardiess.

“I tell you no, ma‘am,” replied the pedlar.

Cosette came out from under the table.

“Oh, yes, monsieur!” said she, “the horse did drink; he drank in the bucket, the bucket full, and ‘twas me that carried it to him, and I talked to him.”

This was not true. Cosette lied.

“Here is a girl as big as my fist, who can tell a lie as big as a house,” exclaimed the pedlar. “I tell you that he has not had any water, little wench! He has a way of blowing when he has not had any water, that I know well enough.”

Cosette persisted, and added in a voice stifled with anguish, and which could hardly be heard:

“But he did drink a good deal.”

“Come,” continued the pedlar, in a passion, “that is enough; give my horse some water, and say no more about it.”

Cosette went back under the table.

“Well, of course that is right,” said the Thénardiess; “if the beast has not had any water, she must have some.”

Then looking about her:

“Well, what has become of that girl?”

She stooped down and discovered Cosette crouched at the other end of the table, almost under the feet of the drinkers.

“Aren’t you coming?” cried the Thénardiess.

Cosette came out of the kind of hole where she had hidden. The Thénardiess continued:

“Mademoiselle Dog-without-a-name, go and carry some drink to this horse.”

“But, ma‘am,” said Cosette feebly, “there is no water.”

The Thénardiess threw the street door wide open.

“Well, go after some!”

Cosette hung her head, and went for an empty bucket that was by the chimney corner.

The bucket was larger than she, and the child could have sat down in it comfortably.

The Thénardiess went back to her range, and tasted what was in the kettle with a wooden spoon, grumbling the while.

“There is some at the spring. It’s as simple as that. I think ‘twould have been better if I’d left out the onions.”

Then she fumbled in a drawer where there were some pennies, pepper, and scallions.

“Here, Mamselle Toad,” added she, “get a big loaf at the baker‘s, as you come back. Here is fifteen sous.”

Cosette had a little pocket in the side of her apron; she took the coin without saying a word, and put it in that pocket.

Then she remained motionless, bucket in hand, the open door before her. She seemed to be waiting for somebody to come to her aid.

“Get along!” cried the Thénardiess.

Cosette went out. The door closed.
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THE ROW of booths extended along the street from the church, the reader will remember, as far as the Thénardier tavern. These booths, on account of the approaching passage of the citizens on their way to the midnight mass, were all illuminated with candles, burning in paper cones, which, as the schoolmaster of Montfermeil, who was at that moment seated at one of Thénardier’s tables, said, produced a magical effect. On the other hand, not a star was to be seen in the sky.