But that is not to say that he could not, on occasion, fly into a rage at least as great as those of his wife. It happened very rarely, but when it did, since in these moments he detested the whole human race (and he possessed a great store of hatred, being one of those who blame external circumstance for every mischance that befalls them and are always ready to visit upon their fellows the sum of their disappointments and frustrations), the fury would come foaming out of his mouth and eyes, and he was terrible. Woe to those who on such occasions fell foul of his wrath!
Apart from all this, Thénardier was highly observant, silent or talkative as circumstances required, and always perspicacious, with something of the look of a seaman wrinkling his eyes as he scans the horizon through his glass. A statesman, in short.
A new visitor to the tavern, seeing Mme Thénardier for the first time, invariably concluded that she was the real master of the house. It was a mistake. She was not even its mistress. Her husband was master and mistress both. She acted but he did the thinking. He controlled everything by a kind of invisible, unwearying magnetism. A word from him, even a gesture, sufficed and the monstrous woman obeyed. Without her giving much thought to the matter, Thénardier was to her a unique and superior being. She had the virtues of her failings; never would she have disagreed with her husband on any point of principle, and still less – the thing was unthinkable – would she have disputed any matter with him in public. Never would she have been guilty of that act so common to married women which parliamentarians call ‘undermining the throne’. Although their union produced nothing that was good, there was a transcendent quality in Mme Thénardier’s submission to her husband. That mountain of sound and flesh could be moved by the puny despot’s little finger. Viewed in its grotesque physical aspect this may be seen as the manifestation of a universal law, the subjugation of matter by the spirit: for there are forms of ugliness which have their roots in abiding beauty. There was something unknowable in Thénardier, and it was this that accounted for his absolute domination over his wife. At moments she saw him as a lighted lamp, at other times felt him like a claw.
The formidable woman loved nothing but her children and feared no one but her husband. She was a mother because she was a female. But her mother-love was confined to her daughters; it did not, as we shall later see, extend to her son. As for the man, he had only one interest in life, which was to get rich.
In this he had failed. No stage worthy of his considerable talents had thus far opened to him. He was ruining himself in Montfermeil, if ruin is possible on that level. Established in Switzerland or the Pyrenees, he would have made a fortune. But an innkeeper has to live off the land in which he finds himself – the word ‘innkeeper’ being here applied to a particular individual and not to the class as a whole. In that year of 1823 Thénardier’s urgent debts amounted to about 1500 francs, and he was a worried man.
Ironically enough he was one of those men who understand most thoroughly, and in the most modern terms, something that is a virtue among savage peoples and a commodity among the civilized – namely, hospitality. For the rest, he was a skilful poacher and renowned as a marksman. He had a cool, quiet laugh which was particularly dangerous.
His views on innkeeping escaped him now and then in flashes, professional aphorisms uttered as a rule for the benefit of his wife. ‘An innkeeper’s business,’ he once said furiously and in a low voice, ‘is to dispense to all comers food, rest, light, heat, dirty sheets, maidservants, fleas and smiles; to lure the passer-by, empty small purses and legitimately lighten large ones; to afford the travelling family respectful shelter and fleece the lot of them, men, women, and children; to reckon the cost of everything – the open window and the closed window, the chimney-corner, the armchair, the straight-backed chair, the stool, the settle, the feather-bed, the hair mattress, and the truss of straw; to know how much a mirror wears out in darkness and take this into account – and, by God, make the traveller pay for everything, down to the very flies his dog eats.’
They were an ugly and dreadful pair, the Thénardiers, a marriage of cunning and fury; but whereas the man calculated and manoeuvred, the woman gave no thought to absent creditors and cared nothing for yesterday or tomorrow, but lived vigorously and wholly in the moment.
And Cosette existed between the two of them, subject to pressure from either side like a creature that is at once ground between millstones and torn apart by pincers. Each had his own way of treating her. The blows she received came from the woman; the fact that she went barefoot in winter was due to the man. She ran upstairs and down, washed, swept, scrubbed and polished, drudged and gasped for breath, carried heavy burdens and performed arduous tasks, small though she was. There was no mercy to be expected from either mistress or master. The inn was a trap in which she was caught and held, her state of servitude the very pattern of oppression, herself the fly trembling and powerless in a spider’s web.
The child endured and said nothing; but what goes on in the souls of those helpless creatures, newly arrived from God, when they find themselves thus flung naked into the world of men?
III
Men need wine and horses need water
Four new travellers had arrived and Cosette was a prey to gloomy misgivings. Although she was only eight, her life had been so hard that she viewed the world already with an old woman’s eyes. Her face was bruised by a blow from Mme Thénardier, which caused that lady to remark, ‘she looks a sight with that black eye’.
She was thinking as she sat under the table that the night was very dark, and that the jugs and pitchers in the bedrooms of the new arrivals had had to be filled, so that there was no more water in the house. There was some reassurance in the fact that not much water was drunk in the tavern. They had no lack of thirsty customers, but it was a thirst calling for wine, not water. Nevertheless she was given cause to tremble. Mme Thénardier lifted the lid of a cooking pot bubbling on the stove, then seized a glass and went over to the water-butt, while the little girl watched her in alarm. Only a thin trickle came when she turned the tap, half-filling the glass, and she exclaimed, ‘Bother! We’re out of water.’
There was a moment of silence while Cosette held her breath.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Thénardier, looking at the half-filled glass. ‘That’ll be enough.’
Cosette went on with her work, but her heart was thumping. She counted the minutes as they dragged by, praying for it to be tomorrow morning. Every now and then a customer would put his head outside and say, ‘It’s black as pitch. You’d need to be a cat to get about without a lantern on a night like this,’ and she would tremble afresh.
Then a travelling huckster who was stopping in the house came into the general room and said angrily:
‘My horse hasn’t been watered.’
‘Indeed it has,’ said Mme Thénardier.
‘I tell you it hasn’t, mistress,’ the man said.
Cosette scrambled out from under the table.
‘But he has, monsieur. I took him water myself, a whole bucketful, and I talked to him.’
This was not true. Cosette was lying.
‘No higher than my knee and lies like a trooper!’ the huckster cried. ‘I tell you he hasn’t, my girl. I know it for sure. When he’s thirsty he snorts in a particular way.’
Cosette stuck to her guns, speaking in a voice so stifled with terror as to be scarcely audible.
‘All the same, he has.’
‘Look,’ said the man angrily, ‘there’s not much in watering a horse, is there? Why not just do it?’
Cosette dived back under the table.
‘Well, that’s right,’ said Mme Thénardier. ‘If the horse hasn’t been watered it ought to be. Where’s the girl got to now?’ She peered under the table and saw her crouched at the far end, almost under the drinkers’ feet. ‘Come out of there, you!’
Cosette crept out again.
‘Now, Miss good-for-nothing, go and water that horse’
‘But, mada
me,’ said Cosette faintly, ‘there’s no water left.’
Mme Thénardier’s answer was to fling open the street door.
‘Then go and get some,’ she said.
Disconsolately Cosette fetched an empty bucket from a corner of the hearth. It was larger than herself, large enough for her to have sat in it. Mme Thénardier turned back to her stove and dipping in a wooden spoon tasted the contents of the pot.
‘Plenty of water in the spring,’ she muttered. ‘No trouble at all. I think this could have done without the onions.’
She went over to a drawer in which she kept small change and other oddments.
‘Here, Miss Toad,’ she said. ‘Here’s a fifteen-sou piece. While you’re about it you can get a large loaf at the baker’s.’
Cosette took the coin without a word and put it carefully in the pocket of her apron. Then, with the bucket in her hand, she stood hesitating in the doorway, as though hoping someone would rescue her.
‘Get a move on,’ cried Mme Thénardier.
Cosette went out and the door closed behind her.
IV
The doll
The row of open-air stalls extended, as we have said, from the church as far as the Thénardiers’ tavern. All were brightly lit to attract the custom of the village people who would presently be going to midnight mass. In the words of the Montfermeil schoolmaster, at that moment seated in the tavern, the numerous candles in their paper lanterns produced ‘a magical effect’. But there was not a star to be seen in the sky.
The last of the stalls, exactly opposite the tavern door, dealt in bric-à-brac and glittered with trinkets, glasswork, and wonderful metal contrivances, and in the front, against a background of white drapery, the stallkeeper had set a large doll nearly two feet high, clad in a dress of pink crêpe, with a wreath of golden fronds on its head and with real hair and enamel eyes. This marvel had been on display all day, to the ravishment of all passers-by under the age of ten, without any Montfermeil mother having been rich enough, or lavish enough, to buy it for her child. Éponine and Azelma had spent hours gazing at it, and even Cosette had dared to glance at it now and then.
But now when she came out of the inn, tired and wretched though she was, she could not restrain herself from crossing the narrow street to examine that prodigious doll – ‘the lady’, as she called it. She stood entranced, not having seen it so close before. The stall to her was like a palace, and the doll was something more than a doll. It was a vision of delight and splendour, of wealth and happiness, flooding with a dreamlike radiance the squalor of her own bleak world. With the innocent and sad shrewdness of childhood, Cosette reckoned the distance separating the doll from herself. One would need to be a queen or at least a princess to own anything so magnificent. She considered the beautiful pink dress, the soft, fair hair, and thought, ‘How happy that doll must be!’ She could not tear herself away from the stall, and the more she gazed the more she marvelled. It was like Heaven. There were other dolls behind the big one, and these to her were fairies or angels, and the owner, pacing up and down at the back of the stall, was near to being the Eternal Father himself.
So enthralled was she that she quite forgot her errand until a harsh voice called her abruptly back to earth. ‘Why, you slut, haven’t you started yet? What do you think you’re doing standing there? Just you wait – I’m coming after you.’
Mme Thénardier had happened to look out into the street. Cosette snatched up her bucket and ran.
V
Little girl alone
Since the Thénardier tavern was at the church end of the village, Cosette had to go for water to the woodland spring on the way to Chelles. Along the Ruelle du Boulanger and in the neighbourhood of the church the glare from the stalls lighted her way, but this light soon dwindled and then she was in darkness. She did what she could to allay her nervousness by rattling the bucket, which made a companionable sound. The darkness deepened as she went on. Not a soul was abroad in the streets except one woman who turned to stare at her as she went past, murmuring, ‘What is a child doing out at this hour? Is it a phantom child?’ Then, recognizing Cosette, she said, ‘Why, it’s the lark!’
Thus the little girl made her way through the tangle of narrow streets which mark the outskirts of Montfermeil on the Chelles side. While she still had houses or even bare walls on either side of her, she walked on bravely enough. Now and then the gleam of a candle showed through the cracks in a shutter, and this reminder of light and life, of human presence, sustained her courage. But her pace gradually slowed, and when she had passed the last house she came to a stop. To leave the lighted stalls behind had been hard enough; to leave the houses seemed impossible. She put down the bucket and stood slowly rubbing her head with the gesture common to frightened, bewildered children. She was no longer in the village but amid the surrounding fields, enclosed by empty blackness in which there were animals and perhaps evil spirits. She stood in despair, listening to the sounds of cattle and half-believing already that she could discern the flitting forms of ghosts. She picked up the bucket, rendered defiant by sheer terror – ‘Well,’ she thought, ‘I’ll simply say that there wasn’t any water in the spring.’ And she turned resolutely back towards the village.
But after going a little way she stopped again and again stood rubbing her head. She was thinking now of her mistress, the huge violent woman, anger blazing from her eyes. She looked despairingly about her. What was she to do? Ahead of her that formidable figure and behind her the shades of darkness and the woods. Mme Thénardier was the more real menace.
She turned again and this time broke into a run, running blindly and unhearing, pausing only for a moment to get her breath, and not ceasing to run until she had entered the wood.
By now she was on the verge of tears, surrounded by the nighttime stirrings of the trees, as unable to think as she was to see. The night closed in upon her, all the immensity of darkness bearing down upon the tiny creature that she was.
The spring was only a few minutes’ walk from me edge of the wood and Cosette was familiar with the path, having followed it often in daylight. So, being guided by habit, she did not lose her way. Looking to neither left nor right, for fear of seeing something in the undergrowth, she finally came to it.
It was a small, natural pool some two feet deep, carved by the flow of water in the clay soil, bordered by moss and fern, and edged with a few large stones. The stream rippled tranquilly as it flowed on beyond it.
Without pausing to rest, Cosette groped in the darkness for the small oak-tree growing by the pool which she was accustomed to use on these occasions. Seizing one of its branches, she clung to this while she leaned over and dropped her bucket into the water. Her state of nervous tension was such that she seemed to possess twice her normal strength; but it also accounted for the fact that she saw and heard nothing when, as she leaned forward, the fifteen-sou piece slipped out of her apron-pocket and fell into the water. She pulled up the bucket, nearly full, and set it down on the grass.
This done she found that she was exhausted. She would gladly have started back at once, but the effort of filling the bucket had been so great that she could scarcely move. She had to rest, and she sat down on the grass.
She shut her eyes and opened them again, not knowing why but feeling compelled to do so. The water trembling in the bucket was making rings like circles of pale fire. The sky above her was filled with dark clouds like huge puffs of smoke. The tragic masks of darkness seemed to be peering remotely down at her.
Jupiter hung in the sky, and she gazed distractedly up at that star which she did not know and which frightened her. The planet was, in fact, low on the horizon and passing through a thick layer of mist which lent it an uncanny, reddish tinge and so enlarged it that it looked like a luminous wound.
A cold wind was blowing over the land. There were no leaves rustling on the trees, and no reflected gleam, no play of light such as may be seen on a night in summer, relieved the darkness of the w
ood. The great bare branches rose ominously above her, and stunted, shapeless bushes rustled in the clearings, while the tall grasses writhed like so many eels beneath the wind and the long stems of brambles waved like tendrils seeking a prey. Dry wisps, borne on the wind, sped past as though they were flying in terror to escape pursuit. There was chill and melancholy everywhere.
Darkness afflicts the soul. Mankind needs light. To be cut off from the day is to know a shrinking of the heart. Where the eye sees darkness the spirit sees dismay. Even for the strongest there is apprehension in an eclipse, in the dead of night, in the blackness of a thunderclap. No man walks alone through the night-time forest without a tremor. Shadows and trees form two awe-inspiring layers in which a chimerical reality resides. The inconceivable appears with a spectral clarity almost at arm’s length, and we see, floating in space or in our own mind, things as vague and intangible as the dreams of sleeping flowers. Wild shapes haunt the distance, the air we breathe is a black emptiness, we want to look back and are afraid. The hollows of night, all things grown stark, silent forms that vanish as we approach, the hint of unseen presences in the immensity of a tomblike silence, tree-trunks and overhanging branches and tall, quivering grass – against all this we have no defence; no man is so bold that he does not tremble and feel close to panic. There is something ugly at work, as though the very soul were becoming merged in darkness. And all this is inexpressibly terrible to a child. The dark forest is an apocalypse and the small wings of a child’s soul flutter in anguish beneath its overhanging boughs.
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