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THE MALICIOUS PLAYFULNESS OF THE WIND
Since 1823, when the tavern of Montfermeil was on the way
to shipwreck and was being gradually engulfed, not in the abyss
of a bankruptcy, but in the cesspool of petty debts, the Thenardier
pair had had two other children; both males.
That made five; two girls and three boys.
Madame Thenardier had got rid of the last two, while they
were still young and very small, with remarkable luck.
Got rid of is the word.
There was but a mere fragment of nature in that woman.
A phenomenon, by the way, of which there is more than one
example extant.
Like the Marechale de La Mothe-Houdancourt, the Thenardier
was a mother to her daughters only. There her maternity ended.
Her hatred of the human race began with her own sons.
In the direction of her sons her evil disposition was uncompromising,
and her heart had a lugubrious wall in that quarter.
As the reader has seen, she detested the eldest; she cursed
the other two.
Why?
Because.
The most terrible of motives, the most unanswerable of retorts--Because.
"I have no need of a litter of squalling brats," said
this mother.
Let us explain how the Thenardiers had succeeded in getting
rid of their last two children; and even in drawing profit from
the operation.
The woman Magnon, who was mentioned a few pages further back,
was the same one who had succeeded in making old Gillenormand
support the two children which she had had.
She lived on the Quai des Celestins, at the corner of this
ancient street of the Petit-Musc which afforded her the opportunity
of changing her evil repute into good odor. The reader will remember
the great epidemic of croup which ravaged the river districts
of the Seine in Paris thirty-five years ago, and of which science
took advantage to make experiments on a grand scale as to the
efficacy of inhalations of alum, so beneficially replaced at the
present day by the external tincture of iodine. During this epidemic,
the Magnon lost both her boys, who were still very young, one
in the morning, the other in the evening of the same day. This
was a blow.
These children were precious to their mother; they represented
eighty francs a month.
These eighty francs were punctually paid in the name of M.
Gillenormand, by collector of his rents, M. Barge, a retired tip-staff,
in the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. The children dead, the income was
at an end.
The Magnon sought an expedient. In that dark free-masonry
of evil of which she formed a part, everything is known, all secrets
are kept, and all lend mutual aid. Magnon needed two children;
the Thenardiers had two.
The same sex, the same age.
A good arrangement for the one, a good investment for the
other.
The little Thenardiers became little Magnons. Magnon quitted
the Quai des Celestins and went to live in the Rue Clocheperce.
In Paris, the identity which binds an individual to himself
is broken between one street and another.
The registry office being in no way warned, raised no objections,
and the substitution was effected in the most simple manner in
the world.
Only, the Thenardier exacted for this loan of her children,
ten francs a month, which Magnon promised to pay, and which she
actually did pay.
It is unnecessary to add that M. Gillenormand continued to
perform his compact.
He came to see the children every six months.
He did not perceive the change. "Monsieur," Magnon
said to him, "how much they resemble you!"
Thenardier, to whom avatars were easy, seized this occasion
to become Jondrette.
His two daughters and Gavroche had hardly had time to discover
that they had two little brothers.
When a certain degree of misery is reached, one is overpowered
with a sort of spectral indifference, and one regards human beings
as though they were spectres.
Your nearest relations are often no more for you than vague
shadowy forms, barely outlined against a nebulous background of
life and easily confounded again with the invisible.
On the evening of the day when she had handed over her two
little ones to Magnon, with express intention of renouncing them
forever, the Thenardier had felt, or had appeared to feel, a scruple.
She said to her husband:
"But this is abandoning our children!"
Thenardier, masterful and phlegmatic, cauterized the scruple
with this saying: "Jean Jacques Rousseau did even better!"
From scruples, the mother proceeded to uneasiness:
"But what if the police were to annoy us? Tell me, Monsieur
Thenardier, is what we have done permissible?" Thenardier
replied:
"Everything is permissible.
No one will see anything but true blue in it.
Besides, no one has any interest in looking closely after
children who have not a sou."
Magnon was a sort of fashionable woman in the sphere of crime.
She was careful about her toilet.
She shared her lodgings, which were furnished in an affected
and wretched style, with a clever gallicized English thief.
This English woman, who had become a naturalized Parisienne,
recommended by very wealthy relations, intimately connected with
the medals in the Library and Mademoiselle Mar's diamonds, became
celebrated later on in judicial accounts. She was called Mamselle
Miss.
The two little creatures who had fallen to Magnon had no reason
to complain of their lot.
Recommended by the eighty francs, they were well cared for,
as is everything from which profit is derived; they were neither
badly clothed, nor badly fed; they were treated almost like "little
gentlemen,"--better by their false mother than by their real
one.
Magnon played the lady, and talked no thieves' slang in their
presence.
Thus passed several years.
Thenardier augured well from the fact. One day, he chanced
to say to Magnon as she handed him his monthly stipend of ten
francs:
"The father must give them some education."
All at once, these two poor children, who had up to that time
been protected tolerably well, even by their evil fate, were abruptly
hurled into life and forced to begin it for themselves.
A wholesale arrest of malefactors, like that in the Jondrette
garret, necessarily complicated by investigations and subsequent
incarcerations, is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult
counter-society which pursues its existence beneath public society;
an adventure of this description entails all sorts of catastrophes
in that sombre world. The Thenardier catastrophe involved the
catastrophe of Magnon.
One day, a short time after Magnon had handed to Eponine
the note relating to the Rue Plumet, a sudden raid was made by
the police in the Rue Clocheperce; Magnon was seized, as was also
Mamselle Miss; and all the inhabitants of the house, which was
of a suspicious character, were gathered into the net.
While this was going on, the two little boys were playing
in the back yard, and saw nothing of the raid. When they tried
to enter the house again, they found the door fastened and the
house empty.
A cobbler opposite called them to him, and delivered to them
a paper which "their mother" had left for them. On this
paper there was an address:
M. Barge, collector of rents, Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, No. 8.
The proprietor of the stall said to them: "You cannot
live here any longer.
Go there.
It is near by. The first street on the left.
Ask your way from this paper."
The children set out, the elder leading the younger, and holding
in his hand the paper which was to guide them.
It was cold, and his benumbed little fingers could not close
very firmly, and they did not keep a very good hold on the paper.
At the corner of the Rue Clocheperce, a gust of wind tore
it from him, and as night was falling, the child was not able
to find it again.
They began to wander aimlessly through the streets.
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