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FIRST SKETCH OF TWO UNPREPOSSESSING FIGURES
The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but
the cat rejoices even over a lean mouse.
Who were these Thenardiers?
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.
Thenardier, 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 Thenardier, 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 Clelie, was no longer anything but Lodoiska,
still noble, but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from
Mademoiselle de Scuderi to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame
de Lafayette to Madame Barthelemy-Hadot, was setting the loving
hearts of the portresses of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the
suburbs to some extent. Madame Thenardier 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 Magaera began to be developed
from the Pamela, the female Thenardier 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 Eponine; 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.
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