So far in this book the Thenardiers have been viewed only in profile. The moment has arrived for making the circuit of this couple. Thenardier has just passed his fiftieth birthday. Madame Thenardier is approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman, so that there exists a balance of age between husband and wife. Our readers may remember this Thenardier woman: tall, blond, red, fat, angular, square, enormous, and agile, of the race of those colossal wild women who contort themselves at fairs with paving-stones hanging from their hair. She did everything about the house. Cosette was her only servant: a mouse in the service of an elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice. She had a beard. She swore splendidly. She boasted of being able to crack a nut with one blow of her fist. Except for the romances she had read, which made the affected lady peep through the ogress at times, the idea would never have occurred to anyone to say of her, that is a woman. When one heard her speak, one said, that is a gendarme. When one saw her drink, one said, that is a carter. When one saw her handle Cosette, one said, that is the hangman.
Thenardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, feeble man, who had a sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy. His cunning began here. He smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite to everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing. He had the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters. He made pretensions to literature and to materialism. He declared that he had a system. In addition, he was a great swindler. A scientific thief. The species does exist. He pretended to have served in the army. He related with exuberance how, being a sergeant at Waterloo, he had alone, in the presence of a squadron of death-dealing hussars, covered with his body and saved from death a general who had been dangerously wounded. Thence arose the flaring sign, and for his inn the name it bore in the neighbourhood: the cabaret of the Sergeant of Waterloo. The reader is already acquainted with that prowess. It will be perceived that he exaggerated it a trifle. At the stormy epoch of June 18, 1815, Thenardier belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers beating about the country, selling to some, stealing from others, travelling like a family man in a rickety cart in the rear of the victorious army. This quibus, composed of purses and watches, of gold rings and silver crosses, gathered in harvest-time in furrows sown with corpses, did not amount to a large total. He had come to Montfermeil and set up an inn there. Thenardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever. He did not disdain his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them. This giantess was jealous. Every newcomer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame Thenardier, there is the master of the house. A mistake. She was not even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress. She worked. He created. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a sign. The mastodon obeyed. At certain moments she beheld him like a lighted candle. At others she felt him like a claw.
This woman loved no one except her children, and she did not fear any one except her husband. Her maternity stopped short with her daughters and did not extend to boys. The man had but one thought: how to enrich himself. He did not succeed. In this same year, 1823, he was burdened with about fifteen hundred francs' worth of petty debts, and this rendered him anxious. He understood hospitality in the most modern fashion: a virtue among barbarous peoples, an object of merchandise among civilised peoples. His theories as a landlord sometimes burst forth. The duty of the inn-keeper, he said to her one day, violently, and in a low voice, is to sell to the first comer stews, repose, light, fire, dirty sheets, a servant, lice, and a smile; to empty small purses, and to honestly lighten heavy ones; to shave the man, to pluck the woman, to pick the child clean; and, by five hundred thousand devils, to make the traveller pay for everything, even for the flies which his dog eats. This man and this woman were ruse and rage wedded, a hideous and terrible team. Cosette was between them, subjected to their double pressure, like a creature who is at the same time being ground up in a mill and pulled to pieces with pincers. The woman overwhelmed her with blows. The man sent her barefooted in winter. The Thenardier hostelry was like a spider's web, in which Cosette had been caught, and where she lay trembling. The poor child passively held her peace. What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted God, and find themselves, at the very dawn of life, very small and in the midst of men all naked.
