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. She was a mother to her daughters only. There her maternity ended. Her hatred of the human race began with her own sons. She detested the eldest; she cursed the other two. Why? Because. The most terrible of motives, the most unanswerable of retorts. I have no need of a litter of squalling brats, said this mother. The woman Magnon, who had succeeded in making old Gillenormand support the two children which she had had, lived on the Quai des Celestins. During the great epidemic of croup which ravaged the river districts of the Seine, Magnon lost both her boys, 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, punctually paid in the name of Gillenormand by the collector of his rents. The children dead, the income was at an end. 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. 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. The old grandfather 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. 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? Is what we have done permissible? 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 shared her lodgings with a clever gallicized English thief, 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, is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult counter-society which pursues its existence beneath public society. 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 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: the 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 nearby. 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.
