Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [71]
SIGNED: BLACHEVILLE,
FAMEUIL,
LISTOLIER,
FÉLIX THOLOMYÈS.
“P.S. The dinner is paid for.”
The four girls gazed at each other.
Favourite was the first to break silence.
“Well!” said she, “it is a good farce all the same.”
“It is very droll,” said Zéphine.
“It must have been Blacheville that had the idea,” resumed Favourite. “This makes me in love with him. Soon loved, soon gone. That is the story.”
“No,” said Dahlia, “it is an idea of Tholomyès. This is clear.”
“In that case,” returned Favourite, “down with Blacheville, and long live Tholomyès!”
“Long live Tholomyès!” cried Dahlia and Zéphine.
And they burst into laughter.
Fantine laughed like the rest.
An hour afterwards, when she had returned to her bedroom, she wept. It was her first love, as we have said; she had given herself to this Tholomyès as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child.
BOOK FOUR
TO ENTRUST IS SOMETIMES TO ABANDON
1
ONE MOTHER MEETS ANOTHER
THERE WAS, during the first quarter of the present century, at Montfermeil, near Paris, a sort of tavern; it is not there now. It was kept by a man and his wife, named Thénardier and was situated in the Boulanger Alley. Above the door, nailed flat against the wall, was a board, upon which something was painted that looked like a man carrying on his back another man wearing the heavy epaulettes of a general, gilt and with large silver stars; red blotches typified blood; the remainder of the picture was smoke, and probably represented a battle. Beneath was this inscription: THE SERGEANT OF WATERLOO PLACE.
Nothing is commoner than a cart or wagon before the door of an inn; nevertheless the vehicle, or more properly speaking, the fragment of a vehicle which obstructed the street in front of the Sergeant of Waterloo one evening in the spring of 1818, certainly would have attracted by its bulk the attention of any painter who might have been passing.
It was the fore-carriage of one of those drays for carrying heavy articles, used in wooded countries for transporting beams and trunks of trees: it consisted of a massive iron axle-tree with a pivot to which a heavy pole was attached, and which was supported by two enormous wheels. As a whole, it was squat, crushing, and misshapen: it might have been fancied a gigantic gun-carriage.
The ruts in the roads had covered the wheels, rims, hubs, axle, and the pole with a coating of hideous yellow-hued mud, similar in tint to that with which cathedrals are sometimes decorated. The wood had disappeared beneath mud; and the iron beneath rust.
Under the axle-tree hung festooned a huge chain fit for a Goliath of the galleys.
The middle of the chain was hanging quite near the ground under the axle; and upon the bend, as on a swinging rope, two little girls were seated that evening in exquisite grouping, the smaller, eighteen months old, in the lap of the larger, who was two years and a half old.
A handkerchief carefully knotted kept them from falling. A mother, looking upon this frightful chain, had said: “Ah! there is a plaything for my children!”
The radiant children, picturesquely and tastefully decked, might be fancied two roses twining the rusty iron, with their triumphantly sparkling eyes, and their blooming, laughing faces. One was a rosy blonde, the other a brunette; their artless faces were two ravishing surprises; the perfume that was shed upon the air by a flowering shrub near by seemed to emanate from them; the smaller one was showing her pretty little body with the chaste indecency of babyhood. Above and around these delicate heads moulded in happiness and bathed in light, the gigantic carriage, black with rust and almost frightful with its entangled curves and abrupt angles, arched like the mouth of a cavern.
The mother, a woman whose appearance was rather forbidding, but touching at this moment, was seated a few steps away on the sill of the inn, swinging the two children by a long string, while she brooded them with her eyes for fear of accident with that animal but