Chapter Chapter 94 · THE WATER QUESTION AT MONTFERMEIL

Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge

of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne. At

the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year

through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois. In

1823 there were at Montfermeil neither so many white houses nor so many

well-satisfied citizens: it was only a village in the forest. Some

pleasure-houses of the last century were to be met with there, to be

sure, which were recognizable by their grand air, their balconies in

twisted iron, and their long windows, whose tiny panes cast all sorts

of varying shades of green on the white of the closed shutters; but

Montfermeil was nonetheless a village. Retired cloth-merchants and

rusticating attorneys had not discovered it as yet; it was a peaceful

and charming place, which was not on the road to anywhere: there people

lived, and cheaply, that peasant rustic life which is so bounteous and

so easy; only, water was rare there, on account of the elevation of the

plateau.

It was necessary to fetch it from a considerable distance; the end of

the village towards Gagny drew its water from the magnificent ponds

which exist in the woods there. The other end, which surrounds the

church and which lies in the direction of Chelles, found drinking-water

only at a little spring half-way down the slope, near the road to

Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil.

Thus each household found it hard work to keep supplied with water. The

large houses, the aristocracy, of which the Thénardier tavern formed a

part, paid half a farthing a bucketful to a man who made a business of

it, and who earned about eight sous a day in his enterprise of

supplying Montfermeil with water; but this good man only worked until

seven o’clock in the evening in summer, and five in winter; and night

once come and the shutters on the ground floor once closed, he who had

no water to drink went to fetch it for himself or did without it.

This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the reader has

probably not forgotten,—little Cosette. It will be remembered that

Cosette was useful to the Thénardiers in two ways: they made the mother

pay them, and they made the child serve them. So when the mother ceased

to pay altogether, the reason for which we have read in preceding

chapters, the Thénardiers kept Cosette. She took the place of a servant

in their house. In this capacity she it was who ran to fetch water when

it was required. So the child, who was greatly terrified at the idea of

going to the spring at night, took great care that water should never

be lacking in the house.

Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil.

The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow

nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained

permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street

of the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection of

the same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square,

and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader will

perhaps remember, the Thénardiers’ hostelry was situated. These people

filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated to that tranquil

little district a noisy and joyous life. In order to play the part of a

faithful historian, we ought even to add that, among the curiosities

displayed in the square, there was a menagerie, in which frightful

clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence, exhibited to the

peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those horrible Brazilian

vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not possess until 1845, and

which have a tricolored cockade for an eye. I believe that naturalists

call this bird Caracara Polyborus; it belongs to the order of the

Apicides, and to the family of the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist

soldiers, who had retired to the village, went to see this creature

with great devotion. The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored

cockade was a unique phenomenon made by God expressly for their

menagerie.

On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters, and peddlers, were

seated at table, drinking and smoking around four or five candles in

the public room of Thénardier’s hostelry. This room resembled all

drinking-shop rooms,—tables, pewter jugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers;

but little light and a great deal of noise. The date of the year 1823

was indicated, nevertheless, by two objects which were then fashionable

in the bourgeois class: to wit, a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed

tin. The female Thénardier was attending to the supper, which was

roasting in front of a clear fire; her husband was drinking with his

customers and talking politics.

Besides political conversations which had for their principal subjects

the Spanish war and M. le Duc d’Angoulême, strictly local parentheses,

like the following, were audible amid the uproar:—

“About Nanterre and Suresnes the vines have flourished greatly. When

ten pieces were reckoned on there have been twelve. They have yielded a

great deal of juice under the press.” “But the grapes cannot be ripe?”

“In those parts the grapes should not be ripe; the wine turns oily as

soon as spring comes.” “Then it is very thin wine?” “There are wines

poorer even than these. The grapes must be gathered while green.” Etc.

Or a miller would call out:—

“Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in them a

quantity of small seed which we cannot sift out, and which we are

obliged to send through the mill-stones; there are tares, fennel,

vetches, hempseed, fox-tail, and a host of other weeds, not to mention

pebbles, which abound in certain wheat, especially in Breton wheat. I

am not fond of grinding Breton wheat, any more than long-sawyers like

to saw beams with nails in them. You can judge of the bad dust that

makes in grinding. And then people complain of the flour. They are in

the wrong. The flour is no fault of ours.”

In a space between two windows a mower, who was seated at table with a

landed proprietor who was fixing on a price for some meadow work to be

performed in the spring, was saying:—

“It does no harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better. Dew is a good

thing, sir. It makes no difference with that grass. Your grass is young

and very hard to cut still. It’s terribly tender. It yields before the

iron.” Etc.

Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar of the kitchen

table near the chimney. She was in rags; her bare feet were thrust into

wooden shoes, and by the firelight she was engaged in knitting woollen

stockings destined for the young Thénardiers. A very young kitten was

playing about among the chairs. Laughter and chatter were audible in

the adjoining room, from two fresh children’s voices: it was Éponine

and Azelma.

In the chimney-corner a cat-o’-nine-tails was hanging on a nail.

At intervals the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere in the

house, rang through the noise of the dram-shop. It was a little boy who

had been born to the Thénardiers during one of the preceding

winters,—“she did not know why,” she said, “the result of the

cold,”—and who was a little more than three years old. The mother had

nursed him, but she did not love him. When the persistent clamor of the

brat became too annoying, “Your son is squalling,” Thénardier would

say; “do go and see what he wants.” “Bah!” the mother would reply, “he

bothers me.” And the neglected child continued to shriek in the dark.