The mouse which has been caught is a pitiful specimen; the cat rejoices even over a lean mouse. Who were these Thénardiers? They belong to that bastard class between middle and inferior: coarse people who have succeeded, intelligent people who have gone down. They combine the defects of one with the vices of the other, without the workingman's generous impulse or the bourgeois's honest order. They are dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warm them, easily become monstrous. In the woman there is a substratum of the brute; in the man, the material for a blackguard. Crab-like souls, retreating toward darkness, using experience to augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse.
Thénardier is troublesome for a physiognomist: dark in both directions, uneasy in the rear, threatening in front. One can no more answer for what they have done than for what they will do. He says he has been a soldier, a sergeant; he has probably been through 1815, and conducted himself with tolerable valour. The sign of the hostelry alludes to one of his feats of arms. He painted it himself, for he knows how to do a little of everything, and badly. Madame Thénardier is just intelligent enough to read the late classical romances that still inflame the portresses of Paris. She lives on them. She drowns what brains she possesses. This has given her, when young, a pensive attitude toward a husband who is a ruffian lettered to the extent of the grammar, and, in what concerns the sex, a downright lout. She is twelve or fifteen years younger. Later the Megaera will develop from the Pamela. One cannot read nonsense with impunity. The eldest daughter is named Éponine. The younger nearly becomes Gulnare, and owes Azelma to a diversion by Ducray-Dumenil.
Yet everything is not ridiculous in that anarchy of baptismal names. The neatherd's boy now bears Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse; the vicomte, if any remain, is called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. Elegant names on the plebeian, rustic names on the aristocrat: an eddy of equality. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and a profound thing. The French Revolution.
