Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge
of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne. At
the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year
through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois. In
1823 there were at Montfermeil neither so many white houses nor so many
well-satisfied citizens: it was only a village in the forest. Some
pleasure-houses of the last century were to be met with there, to be
sure, which were recognizable by their grand air, their balconies in
twisted iron, and their long windows, whose tiny panes cast all sorts
of varying shades of green on the white of the closed shutters; but
Montfermeil was nonetheless a village. Retired cloth-merchants and
rusticating attorneys had not discovered it as yet; it was a peaceful
and charming place, which was not on the road to anywhere: there people
lived, and cheaply, that peasant rustic life which is so bounteous and
so easy; only, water was rare there, on account of the elevation of the
plateau.
It was necessary to fetch it from a considerable distance; the end of
the village towards Gagny drew its water from the magnificent ponds
which exist in the woods there. The other end, which surrounds the
church and which lies in the direction of Chelles, found drinking-water
only at a little spring half-way down the slope, near the road to
Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil.
Thus each household found it hard work to keep supplied with water. The
large houses, the aristocracy, of which the Thénardier tavern formed a
part, paid half a farthing a bucketful to a man who made a business of
it, and who earned about eight sous a day in his enterprise of
supplying Montfermeil with water; but this good man only worked until
seven o’clock in the evening in summer, and five in winter; and night
once come and the shutters on the ground floor once closed, he who had
no water to drink went to fetch it for himself or did without it.
This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the reader has
probably not forgotten,—little Cosette. It will be remembered that
Cosette was useful to the Thénardiers in two ways: they made the mother
pay them, and they made the child serve them. So when the mother ceased
to pay altogether, the reason for which we have read in preceding
chapters, the Thénardiers kept Cosette. She took the place of a servant
in their house. In this capacity she it was who ran to fetch water when
it was required. So the child, who was greatly terrified at the idea of
going to the spring at night, took great care that water should never
be lacking in the house.
Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil.
The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow
nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained
permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street
of the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection of
the same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square,
and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader will
perhaps remember, the Thénardiers’ hostelry was situated. These people
filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated to that tranquil
little district a noisy and joyous life. In order to play the part of a
faithful historian, we ought even to add that, among the curiosities
displayed in the square, there was a menagerie, in which frightful
clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence, exhibited to the
peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those horrible Brazilian
vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not possess until 1845, and
which have a tricolored cockade for an eye. I believe that naturalists
call this bird Caracara Polyborus; it belongs to the order of the
Apicides, and to the family of the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist
soldiers, who had retired to the village, went to see this creature
with great devotion. The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored
cockade was a unique phenomenon made by God expressly for their
menagerie.
On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters, and peddlers, were
seated at table, drinking and smoking around four or five candles in
the public room of Thénardier’s hostelry. This room resembled all
drinking-shop rooms,—tables, pewter jugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers;
but little light and a great deal of noise. The date of the year 1823
was indicated, nevertheless, by two objects which were then fashionable
in the bourgeois class: to wit, a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed
tin. The female Thénardier was attending to the supper, which was
roasting in front of a clear fire; her husband was drinking with his
customers and talking politics.
Besides political conversations which had for their principal subjects
the Spanish war and M. le Duc d’Angoulême, strictly local parentheses,
like the following, were audible amid the uproar:—
“About Nanterre and Suresnes the vines have flourished greatly. When
ten pieces were reckoned on there have been twelve. They have yielded a
great deal of juice under the press.” “But the grapes cannot be ripe?”
“In those parts the grapes should not be ripe; the wine turns oily as
soon as spring comes.” “Then it is very thin wine?” “There are wines
poorer even than these. The grapes must be gathered while green.” Etc.
Or a miller would call out:—
“Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in them a
quantity of small seed which we cannot sift out, and which we are
obliged to send through the mill-stones; there are tares, fennel,
vetches, hempseed, fox-tail, and a host of other weeds, not to mention
pebbles, which abound in certain wheat, especially in Breton wheat. I
am not fond of grinding Breton wheat, any more than long-sawyers like
to saw beams with nails in them. You can judge of the bad dust that
makes in grinding. And then people complain of the flour. They are in
the wrong. The flour is no fault of ours.”
In a space between two windows a mower, who was seated at table with a
landed proprietor who was fixing on a price for some meadow work to be
performed in the spring, was saying:—
“It does no harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better. Dew is a good
thing, sir. It makes no difference with that grass. Your grass is young
and very hard to cut still. It’s terribly tender. It yields before the
iron.” Etc.
Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar of the kitchen
table near the chimney. She was in rags; her bare feet were thrust into
wooden shoes, and by the firelight she was engaged in knitting woollen
stockings destined for the young Thénardiers. A very young kitten was
playing about among the chairs. Laughter and chatter were audible in
the adjoining room, from two fresh children’s voices: it was Éponine
and Azelma.
In the chimney-corner a cat-o’-nine-tails was hanging on a nail.
At intervals the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere in the
house, rang through the noise of the dram-shop. It was a little boy who
had been born to the Thénardiers during one of the preceding
winters,—“she did not know why,” she said, “the result of the
cold,”—and who was a little more than three years old. The mother had
nursed him, but she did not love him. When the persistent clamor of the
brat became too annoying, “Your son is squalling,” Thénardier would
say; “do go and see what he wants.” “Bah!” the mother would reply, “he
bothers me.” And the neglected child continued to shriek in the dark.