Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [281]
M. Leblanc did not interrupt him but said when he stopped:
“I do not know what you mean. You are mistaken. I am a very poor man and anything but a millionaire. I do not know you; you mistake me for another.”
“Ha!” screamed Thénardier, “good mountebank! You stick to that joke yet! You are in the fog, my old boy! Ah! you do not remember! You do not see who I am!”
“Pardon me, monsieur,” answered M. Leblanc, with a tone of politeness which, at such a moment, had a peculiarly strange and powerful effect, “I see that you are a bandit.”
Who has not noticed it, hateful beings have their tender points; monsters are easily annoyed. At this word bandit, the Thénardiess sprang off the bed. Thénardier seized his chair as if he were going to crush it in his hands: “Don’t you stir,” cried he to his wife, and turning towards M. Leblanc:
“Bandit! Yes, I know that you call us so, you rich people! Yes! it is true I’m bankrupt; I am in concealment, I have no bread; I have not a sou, I am a bandit. Here are three days that I have eaten nothing, I am a bandit! Ah! you warm your feet; you have Sacoski pumps, you have wadded overcoats like archbishops, you live on the second floor in houses with a porter, you eat truffles, you eat forty-franc bunches of asparagus in the month of January, and green peas, you stuff yourselves, and when you want to know if it is cold you look in the newspaper to see at what degree the thermometer of the inventor, Chevalier, stands. But we are our own thermometers! We have no need to go to the quai at the corner of the Tour de l‘Horloge, to see how many degrees below freezing it is; we feel the blood stiffen in our veins and the ice reach our hearts, and we say ‘There is no God!’ And you come into our caverns, yes, into our caverns, to call us bandits. But we will eat you! but we will devour you, poor little things! Monsieur Millionaire! know this:—I have been a man established in business, I have been licensed, I have been an elector, I am a citizen, I am! And you, perhaps, are not one?”
Here Thénardier took a step towards the men who were before the door, and added, trembling with rage:
“When I think that he dares to come and talk to me, as if I were a cobbler!”
Then addressing M. Leblanc with a fresh burst of frenzy:
“And know this, too, monsieur philanthropist! I am no shady man. I am not a man whose name nobody knows, and who comes into houses to carry off children. I am a combat veteran; I ought to be decorated. I was at Waterloo, I was, and in that battle I saved a general, named the Comte de Pontmercy. This picture which you see, and which was painted by David at Bruqueselles, do you know who it represents? It represents me. David desired to immortalise that feat of arms.8 I have General Pontmercy on my back, and I am carrying him through the storm of grapeshot. That is history. He has never done anything at all for me, this general; he is no better than other people. But, nevertheless, I saved his life at the risk of my own, and I have my pockets full of certificates. I am a soldier at Waterloo—damn it all! And now that I have had the goodness to tell you all this, let us make an end of it; I must have some money; I must have a good deal of money, I must have an immense deal of money, or I will exterminate you, by God’s lightning!”
Marius had regained some control over his distress, and was listening. The last possibility of doubt had now vanished. It was indeed the Thénardier of the will. Marius shuddered at that reproach of ingratitude flung at his father, and which he was on the point of justifying so fatally. His per plexities were redoubled. Moreover, there was in all these words of Thénardier, in his tone, in his gestures, in his look which flashed out flames at every word, there was in this explosion of an evil nature exposing its entire self, in this mixture of braggadocio and abjectness, of pride and pettiness, of rage and folly in this chaos of real grievances and false sentiments, in this shamelessness of a wicked man tasting the sweetness of violence, in this brazen nakedness