Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [143]
2
TWO PORTRAITS COMPLETED
THE THÉNARDIERS have hitherto been seen in this book in profile only; the time has come to turn this couple about and look at them on all sides.
Thénardier has just passed his fiftieth year; Madame Thénardier had reached her fortieth, which is the fiftieth for woman, so that there was an equilibrium of age between the husband and wife.
The reader has perhaps, since her first appearance, preserved some remembrance of this huge Thénardiess;—for such we shall call the female of this species,—tall, blond, red, fat, brawny, square, enormous, and agile; she belonged, as we have said, to the race of those colossal wild women who pose at fairs with paving-stones hung in their hair. She did everything about the house, the cleaning and bedmaking, the washing, the cooking, anything she pleased, and played the deuce generally. Cosette was her only servant; a mouse in the service of an elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice; windows and furniture as well as people. Her broad face, covered with freckles, had the appearance of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was the ideal of a butcher’s boy dressed in petticoats. She swore splendidly; she prided herself on being able to crack a nut with her fist. Apart from the novels she had read, which at times gave you an odd glimpse of the affected lady under the ogress, the idea of calling her a woman never would have occurred to anybody. This Thénardiess seemed like a cross between a wench and a fishwoman. If you heard her speak, you would say it is a gendarme; if you saw her drink, you would say it is a carter; if you saw her handle Cosette, you would say it is the hangman. When she was at rest, a tooth protruded from her mouth.
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.be 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 believebf 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