Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [145]
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.bg
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!
3
MEN MUST HAVE WINE AND HORSES WATER
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.