Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [75]
“You must leave that here,” put in the man’s voice.
“Of course I shall give it to you,” said the mother; “it would be strange if I should leave my child naked.”
The face of the master appeared.
“It is all right,” said he.
The bargain was concluded. The mother passed the night at the inn, gave her money and left her child, fastened again her carpet-bag, diminished by her child’s wardrobe, and very light now, and set off next morning, expecting soon to return. These partings are arranged tranquilly, but they are full of despair.
A neighbour of the Thénardiers met this mother on her way, and came in, saying:
“I have just met a woman in the street, who was crying as if her heart would break.”
When Cosette’s mother had gone, the man said to his wife:
“That will do me for my note of 110 francs which falls due tomorrow; I was fifty francs short. Do you realize I would have received a summons? You have proved a good mousetrap with your little ones.”
“Without knowing it,” said the woman.
2
FIRST SKETCH OF TWO SUSPICIOUS-LOOKING FACES
THE CAPTURED MOUSE was a very puny one, but the cat exulted even over a lean mouse.
What were the Thénardiers?
We will say but a word just here; by-and-by the sketch shall be completed.
They belonged to that bastard class formed of low people who have risen, and intelligent people who have fallen, which lies between the classes called middle and lower, and which unites some of the faults of the latter with nearly all the vices of the former, without possessing the generous impulses of the workman, or the respectability of the bourgeois.
They were of those dwarfish natures, which, if perchance heated by some sullen fire, easily become monstrous. The woman was at heart a brute; the man a blackguard: both in the highest degree capable of that hideous species of progress which can be made towards evil. There are souls which, crablike, crawl continually towards darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it; using what experience they have to increase their deformity ; growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness. Such souls were this man and this woman.
The man especially would have been a puzzle to a physiognomist. We have only to look at some men to distrust them, for we feel the darkness of their souls in two ways. They are uneasy as to what is behind them, and threatening as to what is before them. They are full of mystery. We can no more answer for what they have done, than for what they will do. The shadow in their looks denounces them. If we hear them utter a word, or see them make a gesture, we catch glimpses of guilty secrets in their past, and dark mysteries in their future.
This Thénardier, if we may believe him, had been a soldier, a sergeant he said; he probably had made the campaign of 1815, and had even borne himself bravely according to all that appeared. We shall see hereafter in what his bravery consisted. The sign of his inn was an allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it himself, for he knew how to do a little of everything—badly.
3
THE LARK
TO BE WICKED does not insure prosperity—for the inn did not turn a profit.
Thanks to Fantine’s fifty-seven francs, Thénardier had been able to avoid a protest and to honour his signature. The next month they were still in need of money, and the woman carried Cosette’s wardrobe to Paris and pawned it for sixty francs. When this sum was spent, the Thénardiers began to look upon the little girl as a child which they sheltered for charity, and treated her as such. Her clothes being gone, they dressed her in the cast-off garments of the little Thénardiers, that is in rags. They fed her on the leftovers, a little better than the dog, and a little worse than the cat. The dog and cat were her messmates. Cosette ate with them under the table in a wooden dish like theirs.
Her mother, as we shall see hereafter, who had found employment at M—sur M—, wrote, or rather had some one write for her every month, inquiring news of