The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the cat
rejoices even over a lean mouse.
Who were these Thénardiers?
Let us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the sketch later
on.
These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people
who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended
in the scale, which is between the class called “middle” and the class
denominated as “inferior,” and which combines some of the defects of
the second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing
the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the
bourgeois.
They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to
warm them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a
substratum of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard.
Both were susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous
progress which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist
crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness,
retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to
augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more
and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and
woman possessed such souls.
Thénardier, in particular, was troublesome for a physiognomist. One can
only look at some men to distrust them; for one feels that they are
dark in both directions. They are uneasy in the rear and threatening in
front. There is something of the unknown about them. One can no more
answer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadow
which they bear in their glance denounces them. From merely hearing
them utter a word or seeing them make a gesture, one obtains a glimpse
of sombre secrets in their past and of sombre mysteries in their
future.
This Thénardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier—a
sergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815,
and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. We
shall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of his
hostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it
himself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.
It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after
having been _Clélie_, was no longer anything but _Lodoïska_, still
noble, but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle
de Scudéri to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to
Madame Barthélemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the
portresses of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some
extent. Madame Thénardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort
of books. She lived on them. In them she drowned what brains she
possessed. This had given her, when very young, and even a little
later, a sort of pensive attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a
certain depth, a ruffian lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse
and fine at one and the same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was
concerned, given to the perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and “in what
concerns the sex,” as he said in his jargon—a downright, unmitigated
lout. His wife was twelve or fifteen years younger than he was. Later
on, when her hair, arranged in a romantically drooping fashion, began
to grow gray, when the Megæra began to be developed from the Pamela,
the female Thénardier was nothing but a coarse, vicious woman, who had
dabbled in stupid romances. Now, one cannot read nonsense with
impunity. The result was that her eldest daughter was named Éponine; as
for the younger, the poor little thing came near being called Gulnare;
I know not to what diversion, effected by a romance of Ducray-Dumenil,
she owed the fact that she merely bore the name of Azelma.
However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous and
superficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which
may be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names. By the side of
this romantic element which we have just indicated there is the social
symptom. It is not rare for the neatherd’s boy nowadays to bear the
name of Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte—if there are
still any vicomtes—to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This
displacement, which places the “elegant” name on the plebeian and the
rustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of
equality. The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there
as everywhere else. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and
a profound thing,—the French Revolution.