This, no doubt, was the encouragement the other mother had been hoping for. Taking Mme Thénardier’s hand, she turned to her and said:
‘Will you look after my daughter for me?’
The Thénardier woman started slightly, expressing neither acceptance nor refusal. Fantine went on:
‘I can’t take her with me where I’m going. I have to find work, and it’s not easy if you have a child. The people in those parts are so absurd. I think it was the hand of God that guided me here. When I saw your children, so happy and clean and pretty, I thought to myself, “That’s a good mother.” As you say, they would be like sisters. And besides, I shall soon come to fetch her. Will you look after her for me?’
‘We shall have to think about it,’ said Mme Thénardier.
‘I could pay six francs a month.’
At this point a man’s voice called from inside the house:
‘Not less than seven, and six months in advance.’
‘Six times seven makes forty-two,’ said Mme Thénardier.
‘Very well.’
‘And another fifteen francs for extras,’ called the man.
‘Total, fifty-seven francs,’ said the Thénardier woman, and while making the calculation she hummed a few bars of her song.
‘You shall have them,’ said Cosette’s mother. ‘I’ve got eighty francs. I shall still have enough to get me to my own country if I go on foot, and I’ll find work and when I’ve saved a little money I’ll come for her.’
The man’s voice asked: ‘Has she enough clothes?’
‘That’s my husband,’ said Mme Thénardier.
‘I guessed as much. Certainly she has enough clothes. She has a beautiful wardrobe, plenty of everything and silk dresses like a lady. They’re all in my bag.’
‘You’ll have to let us have them,’ said the man’s voice.
‘Well, naturally. Did you think I’d leave my daughter to go naked?’
The man’s face appeared in the doorway. ‘All right,’ he said.
And so the bargain was concluded. Fantine stayed the night at the tavern, paid the money, left her daughter and the clothes, and set off next morning with a greatly lightened bag, expecting soon to return. It had happened quietly enough, but such partings are loaded with despair. A neighbour who saw her leave the town said later to Mme Thénardier:
‘I’ve just seen a girl in the street sobbing as though her heart would break.’
The man Thénardier said to his wife: ‘Well, that takes care of the bill that falls due tomorrow. I was fifty short. Do you realize I might have been summoned? That was a neat trap you set, you and the kids between you.’
‘And not even meaning to,’ said the lady.
II
First sketch of two mean figures
A modest bag, but to the cat even the smallest mouse is better than none.
Who were these Thénardiers?
We may deal with them briefly for the present; the picture will be filled in later.
They belonged to that indeterminate layer of society, sandwiched between the middle and the lower classes, which consists of riff-raff who have risen in the world and more cultivated persons who have sunk, and which combines the worst qualities of both, having neither the generosity of the worker nor the respectable honesty of the bourgeois.
They were dwarfish natures capable of growing into monsters if ill-chance fostered the process. There was a seed of cruelty in the woman and of blackguardism in the man, and both were highly susceptible to the encroachments of evil. There are human creatures which, like crayfish, always retreat into shadow, going backwards rather than forwards through life, gaining in deformity with experience, going from bad to worse and sinking into even deeper darkness. The Thénardiers were of this kind.
The man especially was a problem for the physiognomist. There are men whom we instantly mistrust, sensing the void that encloses them. They are uneasy at their back and threatening in front. They contain an unknown element, so that one cannot answer for what they have done or will do. The shiftiness of their eyes betrays them. To hear them speak or see them move is to catch a glimpse of dingy secrets in the past and dark mystery in the future.
Thénardier, so he said, had been a soldier, a sergeant who, by his own account, had fought bravely in the 1815 campaign. We shall learn in due course what this amounted to. His tavern-sign bore witness to his feats of arms. He had painted it himself, being a Jack-of-all-trades who did everything badly.
It was the period when historical novels with classical settings, ranging from the works of Mademoiselle de Scudéri to those of Madame Barthélemy-Hadot, high-minded in tone but increasingly vulgar in content, were indulging the romantic tastes of Paris concierges and penetrating further afield. Madame Thénardier had just sufficient intelligence to read books of this kind, and she devoured them, soaking in them what little mind she possessed. Because of this she adopted an attitude of romantic subservience towards her husband, who was a ruffian with a gloss of education, at once crude and plausible, but an admirer of the sentimentalities of Pigault-Lebrun and rigidly conventional ‘in matters of the fair sex’, to use his own words. She was some fifteen years younger than her husband. When later the tearful novelette began to lose its vogue, and Richardson’s Pamela was replaced by harridans, she became nothing but a spiteful woman who had revelled in silly fiction. But one cannot be unaffected by that sort of thing. One of its results was that her elder daughter was named Éponine. The younger, having narrowly escaped being called Guilnare, was christened Azelma.
It may be remarked in passing that this particular aspect of the strange period with which we are concerned, what may be termed the anarchy of baptismal names, was not wholly absurd or trivial. It was a social symptom as well as an offshoot of romantic fiction. Farm lads in the present day quite commonly bear such names as Arthur, Alfred and Alphonse, whereas the Vicomte (if vicomtes still exist) is named Thomas, Pierre or Jacques. This reversal whereby the ‘elegant’ name is bestowed on the rustic and the rustic name on the aristocrat is a manifestation of the spread of equality. The blowing of a new wind is to be felt, here as elsewhere, and behind the paradox we may discern an event of great and profound significance, the French Revolution.
III
The Lark
Mere lack of scruple does not ensure prosperity. The tavern was doing badly.
Thanks to their visitor’s fifty-seven francs, Thénardier was able to honour his signature and escape a summons, but a month later they were again short of money. Mme Thénardier took Cosette’s wardrobe to Paris and pawned it for sixty francs. When this was spent the couple came to regard her as a charity child and to treat her accordingly. Since she no longer had any clothes of her own she was dressed in the Thénardier children’s discarded garments – that is to say, in rags. She was fed on the family leavings, a little better than the dog and rather worse than the cat. Indeed, the cat and dog were her companions, for she ate with them under the table from a wooden bowl like their own.
Fantine, as we shall see in due course, found employment in Montreuil-sur-mer and wrote a monthly letter – or, to be exact, had one written for her – asking for news of her daughter. The Thénardiers invariably replied that Cosette was in splendid health.
When the first six months expired, Fantine sent them the agreed monthly sum of seven francs, and she continued to do so each month. But by the end of the year Thénardier was saying, ‘Handsome, isn’t it? What’s the good of seven francs?’ He wrote demanding twelve, and Fantine, being persuaded that her child was happy and ‘doing fine’, meekly paid up.
There are natures which must compensate for love with hate. Because she doted on her own children, Mme Thénardier came to detest the outsider. It is sad to reflect that mother-love can have its ugly side. Small though the demands were which Cosette made upon her, she felt that they were at the expense of her own children, as though they were being robbed of part of the very air they breathed. Like many women of her kind,
she had only a limited store of kindness and malice to bestow. Had it not been for Cosette, her daughters, adored though they were, would have come in for the lot. Thanks to the newcomer, they were spared the blows and only received the caresses. Cosette could scarcely move without bringing on herself a storm of violent and undeserved chastisement. This was the atmosphere she lived in, a gentle, defenceless little creature knowing nothing of the world or of God, constantly nagged at, slapped and punished and seeing in contrast two children like herself who were showered with affection.
Since Mme Thénardier ill-treated Cosette, Éponine and Azelma did the same, imitating their mother as children of that age commonly do.
Thus two years passed.
The village gossips said: ‘Those Thénardiers are good people. They’re not rich, but they’re bringing up a pauper child who was planted on them.’ It was believed that Cosette had been abandoned by her mother.
Meanwhile Thénardier, having by some devious means discovered that the child was probably illegitimate, had raised the price to fifteen francs. The creature, as he called her, was growing and never stopped eating, and he threatened to return her to her mother. ‘She’d better not argue,’ he said to his wife, ‘or I’ll dump the brat on her and give the show away. I’ve got to have more.’ Fantine paid the fifteen francs.
The years went by, the child grew and so did her state of wretchedness. While she was still very small she had served as a scapegoat for the other two; but as she grew older – that is to say, by the time she was five – she became the household drudge.
At the age of five this may seem inconceivable, but alas it is true. Social oppression may begin at any age. Have we not recently witnessed the trial of a youth named Dumolard, an orphan turned thief who, according to the official report, being left destitute at the age of five, ‘worked for his living and stole’?
Cosette was made to run errands, scrub floors, sweep the yard and the pavement, wash the dishes and even carry large burdens, and the Thénardiers felt this treatment to be the more justified since her mother, who was still in Montreuil, was no longer paying regularly. She was some months in arrears.
If Fantine had returned to Montfermeil at the end of three years she would not have known her daughter. The bright, pretty child she had left at the inn was now thin and pale-faced. She had a furtive air – ‘sly’, the Thénardiers said.
Ill-treatment had made her sullen and misery had made her ugly. Only the beauty of her eyes remained, and this was the more distressing because, being large, they mirrored a greater measure of unhappiness. It was heartrending to see her, a child not yet six, shivering in scanty, tattered garments, busy before daybreak on a winter’s morning sweeping the pavement outside the house with a broom far too big for her small chapped hands.
She was known locally as l’Alouette, the Lark. The village people, with instinctive symbolism, had thought it a suitable name for the apprehensive, trembling little creature, scarcely more than a bird, who was always first up in that house and out of doors before dawn. But this was a lark that never sang.
Book Five
Degradation
I
A tale of progress in the making of beads
MEANWHILE, WHAT of the mother who, as the people of Mont-fermeil supposed, had abandoned her child?
After leaving Cosette with the Thénardiers, Fantine had journeyed on to Montreuil-sur-mer. This, we may recall, was in the year 1818.
It was ten years since she had left the district, and in that time things had greatly changed. While she had been sinking into the depths of poverty, her native town had grown prosperous. During the past two years there had occurred one of those industrial developments which are major events in the life of a small community.
We must give some account of this matter, and indeed dwell upon it, since it is of some importance.
The traditional local industry of Montreuil-sur-mer was the manufacture of imitation English jet beads and the ‘black glass’ of Germany. Because of the cost of raw materials the industry had never been prosperous and its workers had been underpaid, but this situation had recently been transformed. Towards the end of 1815 a newcomer to the town had had the idea of substituting shellac for resin, and had also devised a simpler and less expensive form of clasp for such things as bracelets. These trifling changes amounted to a revolution. They greatly reduced costs, which in the first place enabled the trade to pay higher wages, and thus benefited the district. And they made it possible to reduce prices while increasing the manufacturer’s profit. Three beneficial results; and in less than three years the innovator had grown rich, which is good, and had spread prosperity around him, which is better.
He was a stranger to the district. Nothing was known of his origins and little about how he started in life. He was said to have arrived in the town with very little money, a few hundred francs; and with this scanty capital, applied to the service of an ingenious idea and fostered with order and shrewdness, he had made a fortune for himself and for the community.
His clothes, his general appearance and his speech, when he came to Montreuil-sur-mer, had been those of a labourer. But it seems that on the December evening when he unobtrusively entered the town, with a pack on his back and a thorn stick in his hand, a serious fire had broken out in the Town Hall. Plunging into the flames he had, at the risk of his life, rescued two children whose father, as it turned out, was the Captain of Gendarmerie. So no one had asked to see his identity papers. He went by the name of Père Madeleine.
II
Madeleine
He was a man of about fifty, reserved in manner but good-hearted, and this was all that could be said about him.
Thanks to the rapid growth of the industry which he so admirably reorganized, Montreuil-sur-mer became a place of some consequence. Large orders came from Spain, which absorbs a great quantity of jet. Sales reached a scale almost rivalling those of London and Berlin, and Père Madeleine’s profits were so great that in the second year he was able to build a new factory consisting of two large workshops, one for men and the other for women. The needy had only to apply, and they could be sure of finding employment and a living wage. Père Madeleine demanded goodwill from the men, pure morals from the women, and honesty from all. He separated the sexes so that the women could remain virtuous. In this he was inflexible, but it was the only matter in which he could be said to be intolerant; and since Montreuil-sur-mer was a garrison town, with ample opportunities for backsliding, his severity was the more justified. In general his coming had been providential for the whole region, once so stagnant, which now pulsed with the vigour of healthy industry. Unemployment and extreme poverty were forgotten. No pocket was so humble that it did not contain a little money, no dwelling so obscure that it did not shelter a little happiness.
Through the stir of activity of which he was the cause and centre, Père Madeleine, as we have said, had made a fortune for himself; but, strangely in a man of business, this did not seem to be his principal concern. He seemed to give far more thought to others than to himself. In 1820 he was known to have a credit of 635,000 francs at the banking-house of Laffitte; but, in addition to setting aside this sum, he had spent more than a million on the town and the poor.
The hospital was under-financed; he had endowed ten more beds. Montreuil was divided into an Upper and a Lower Town. The Lower Town, where he lived, had only one school, of which the ancient building was crumbling in ruins. He built two new schools, one for girls and the other for boys, and out of his own income doubled the meagre official salaries of the schoolmaster and mistress. To someone who expressed surprise at this he said, ‘The first two servants of the State are the nurse and the teacher.’ He established an old people’s home, a thing then almost unknown in France, and a fund for the assistance of old and infirm workpeople. With the building of the new factory, a new residential area had sprung up around it in which there were a good many poor families, so he installed a free apothecary’s shop.
At first the town gossips said of him, ‘He’s simply out to make money.’ When it was found that he enriched the community before enriching himself they said, ‘He has political ambitions.’ This seemed the more likely since he was religious and attended church service, which was considered highly commendable at that time. He went to early mass every Sunday. The local deputy, always on his guard against competition, viewed this religious tendency with some apprehension. He had himself been a member of the corps législatif under the Empire, and he shared the religious views of an ex-Jesuit named Fouché, the Duke of Otranto, whose creature and friend he had been. In private he was amiably derisive of God. But when he learned that Madeleine, the wealthy manufacturer, went to seven o’clock mass, he scented a possible rival and resolved to outdo him. He engaged a Jesuit confessor and went to high mass and vespers. Political rivalry in those days was, almost literally, a race to the altar-steps. The poor, as well as God, benefited by the deputy’s misgivings, for he also endowed two hospital beds – making twelve in all.
In 1819 it was rumoured in the town that on the recommendation of the prefect, and in consideration of his public services, the king was to nominate M. Madeleine mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer. Those who had declared him to be a political careerist seized upon this with the delight men always feel in exclaiming, ‘I told you so.’ The town was in a state of high excitement. And the rumour turned out to be correct. A few days later the nomination appeared in Le Moniteur. The next day M. Madeleine refused it.
During that same year, 1819, the products of Madeleine’s new manufacturing process were displayed at the Industrial Exhibition, and acting on the jury’s report the king appointed the inventor to be a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. This led to a new theory in the town – ‘So that’s what he was really after!’ But M. Madeleine refused to accept the Grand Cross.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 18
