Chapter Chapter 39 · FIRST SKETCH OF TWO UNPREPOSSESSING FIGURES

The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the cat

rejoices even over a lean mouse.

Who were these Thénardiers?

Let us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the sketch later

on.

These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people

who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended

in the scale, which is between the class called “middle” and the class

denominated as “inferior,” and which combines some of the defects of

the second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing

the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the

bourgeois.

They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to

warm them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a

substratum of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard.

Both were susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous

progress which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist

crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness,

retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to

augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more

and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and

woman possessed such souls.

Thénardier, in particular, was troublesome for a physiognomist. One can

only look at some men to distrust them; for one feels that they are

dark in both directions. They are uneasy in the rear and threatening in

front. There is something of the unknown about them. One can no more

answer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadow

which they bear in their glance denounces them. From merely hearing

them utter a word or seeing them make a gesture, one obtains a glimpse

of sombre secrets in their past and of sombre mysteries in their

future.

This Thénardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier—a

sergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815,

and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. We

shall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of his

hostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it

himself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.

It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after

having been _Clélie_, was no longer anything but _Lodoïska_, still

noble, but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle

de Scudéri to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to

Madame Barthélemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the

portresses of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some

extent. Madame Thénardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort

of books. She lived on them. In them she drowned what brains she

possessed. This had given her, when very young, and even a little

later, a sort of pensive attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a

certain depth, a ruffian lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse

and fine at one and the same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was

concerned, given to the perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and “in what

concerns the sex,” as he said in his jargon—a downright, unmitigated

lout. His wife was twelve or fifteen years younger than he was. Later

on, when her hair, arranged in a romantically drooping fashion, began

to grow gray, when the Megæra began to be developed from the Pamela,

the female Thénardier was nothing but a coarse, vicious woman, who had

dabbled in stupid romances. Now, one cannot read nonsense with

impunity. The result was that her eldest daughter was named Éponine; as

for the younger, the poor little thing came near being called Gulnare;

I know not to what diversion, effected by a romance of Ducray-Dumenil,

she owed the fact that she merely bore the name of Azelma.

However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous and

superficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which

may be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names. By the side of

this romantic element which we have just indicated there is the social

symptom. It is not rare for the neatherd’s boy nowadays to bear the

name of Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte—if there are

still any vicomtes—to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This

displacement, which places the “elegant” name on the plebeian and the

rustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of

equality. The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there

as everywhere else. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and

a profound thing,—the French Revolution.