Kabanata Kabanata 95 · TWO COMPLETE PORTRAITS

So far in this book the Thénardiers have been viewed only in profile;

the moment has arrived for making the circuit of this couple, and

considering it under all its aspects.

Thénardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thénardier 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

Thénardier 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 Thénardier 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.

Thénardier 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 Abbé 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, Thénardier 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.

Thénardier 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.12

He composed the travellers’ tariff card in a superior manner, but

practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it.

Thénardier 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.

Thénardier, 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 Thénardier 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 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, Thénardier 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.

Thénardier was a statesman.

Every newcomer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame

Thénardier, “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. Thénardier was a sort of special and

sovereign being in Madame Thénardier’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

Thénardier,”—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 Thénardier’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 Thénardier; 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. Thénardier 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, Thénardier 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,

Thénardier 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 passers-by,

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 armchair, 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 Thénardier 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 upstairs 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 Thénardier 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!