Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  ‘Well, come in, my good fellow.’

  The ‘good fellow’ did so. Mme Thénardier looked him over for the second time, taking especial note of his threadbare coat and slightly dented hat. She glanced inquiringly at her husband, who was still seated with the customers, and he responded with a wag of the forefinger and a pursing of the lips which said plainly: ‘Not worth having’. Whereupon she exclaimed:

  ‘I’m sorry. It seems the rooms are all full.’

  ‘You can put me where you like,’ the man said. ‘In the hayloft or the stable. I’ll pay the price of a room.’

  ‘The price is forty sous.’

  ‘Very well, forty sous.’

  ‘All right. We’ll see what we can do.’

  ‘Forty sous,’ a carter murmured to Mme Thénardier as she stepped aside. ‘But the price is only twenty.’

  ‘It’s forty to him,’ she replied in the same undertone. ‘We don’t take his sort for less.’

  ‘Quite right,’ her husband said. ‘Disreputable customers do an establishment no good.’

  The man meanwhile had deposited his stick and bundle on a bench and seated himself at a table where Cosette hurried to place a bottle of wine and a glass. The customer who had demanded water went to see to his horse. Cosette got back under the table with her knitting. After taking a sip of wine the man proceeded to study her with intent interest.

  Cosette was plain. Had she been happier she might have been pretty. We have already given some account of her. She was thin and pale, and so small that although she was eight years old she looked no more than six. Her big eyes in their shadowed sockets seemed almost extinguished by the many tears they had shed. Her lips were drawn in the curve of habitual suffering that is to be seen on the faces of the condemned and the incurably sick. Her hands, as her mother had feared, were ‘smothered with chilblains’. Because she was always shivering she had got into the habit of keeping her knees pressed tightly together. Her clothes were a collection of rags which would have been lamentable in summer and in winter were disgraceful – torn garments of cotton, with no wool anywhere. Here and there her skin was visible, and her many bruises bore witness to her mistress’s attentions. Her bare legs were rough and red, and the hollow between her shoulder-blades was pathetic. Everything about her, her general attitude and bearing, her quavering and hesitant speech, her gaze, her silence, her every movement expressed a single impulse, that of fear.

  Fear emanated from her so that she might be said to be enveloped in it. Fear caused her to draw her elbows in at her sides and her feet beneath her skirt, to take up as little room as possible and to draw no unnecessary breath; it had become, so to speak, the habit of her body, impossible of alteration except that it must grow worse. In the depths of her eyes there was the haggard gleam of terror.

  So great was her fear that when she had come back soaked to the skin she had not dared to dry herself at the fire but had gone silently on with her work. She was eight years old, but her expression was ordinarily so apathetic, and sometimes so witless, that it seemed at moments that she must be turning into an idiot, or else a devil. Not only had she never been taught to pray, she had never set foot inside a church. ‘When do I have the time?’ Mme Thénardier demanded.

  The man in the yellow coat continued to observe Cosette until suddenly Mme Thénardier exclaimed:

  ‘Now I think of it, what about that loaf?’

  Cosette, as she always did when the woman raised her voice, came hastily out from under the table. She had forgotten all about the loaf, and she now resorted to the time-honoured expedient of frightened children. She lied.

  ‘The bakery was shut, madame.’

  ‘You should have knocked.’

  ‘I did knock but he didn’t open.’

  ‘Well, I shall find out tomorrow if that’s true or not,’ said Mme Thénardier. ‘Heaven help you if it isn’t. Meanwhile give me back the fifteen sous.’

  Cosette plunged her hand into her apron-pocket and turned green. The coin was not there.

  ‘Do you hear me?’ said Mme Thénardier. ‘I’m waiting.’

  Cosette turned her pocket inside out but there was nothing in it. She had no notion what had become of the money. Words failed her and she stood petrified.

  ‘So you’ve lost it, have you?’ Mme Thénardier thundered. ‘Or are you trying to steal it?’ And she reached for the strap hanging above the chimney-piece.

  The ominous gesture gave Cosette the strength to cry for mercy.

  ‘Please, madame! Please!’

  Mme Thénardier unhooked the strap.

  While this was going on the man in the yellow coat had been feeling unobtrusively in his waistcoat pocket; in any case the other customers were too absorbed with their drink or cards to be interested in anything else.

  Cosette was now huddled in the chimney-corner, trying frantically to hide or protect her half-naked limbs. Mme Thénardier raised her arm.

  ‘Pardon me, madame,’ the stranger said. ‘I noticed something roll on the floor just now and I think it may have fallen out of the child’s pocket. Perhaps I can find it.’ He bent down as though to look. ‘Yes, here it is.’ And he held out a coin to Mme Thénardier.

  ‘That’s it,’ the lady said, although it was not. It was a twenty-sou piece, but so much the better. Pocketing the coin, she contented herself with a final glare at Cosette, saying, ‘All the same, mind it doesn’t happen again.’

  Cosette returned to what her mistress referred to as her ‘nook’, and her big eyes, fixed upon the stranger, shone with an expression hitherto unknown to them, mainly of innocent astonishment, but also with a kind of incredulous trust.

  ‘By the way,’ Mme Thénardier said to him, ‘do you want any supper?’

  He did not answer, seeming plunged in thought.

  ‘Who the devil is this man?’ she muttered to herself. ‘Is he too poor to pay for a meal? Will he even settle for the room? Lucky he didn’t think of stealing the money when he saw it on the floor.’

  At this moment the door opened and Éponine and Azelma appeared.

  They were two very pretty little girls with a look of the town rather than of the country, very charming, the one with glossy chestnut curls and the other with long dark plaits down her back, both of them lively and plump and clean with a glow of freshness and health that was pleasant to see. They were warmly clad but with a maternal skill which ensured that the thickness of the materials did not detract from their elegance. Winter was provided for but spring not forgotten. They brought brightness with them, and they entered like reigning beauties. There was assurance in their looks and gaiety, and in the noise they made. Their mother greeted them in a tone of mock-reproach overflowing with indulgence. ‘So here you are, and high time too!’

  She took them on her knee in turn, smoothed their hair, straightened their ribbons and set them down with a gentle maternal shake exclaiming, ‘Such untidy moppets!’ After which they went and sat in the chimney-corner, cooing over a doll which they shared between them. Cosette looked up now and then from her knitting and mournfully regarded them.

  Éponine and Azelma, for their part, showed no interest in Cosette. She meant no more to them than if she had been the dog. The three little girls, the sum of their ages some twenty-four years, were already an embodiment of human society – envy on one side, indifference on the other. The doll the sisters were playing with was old and battered but it seemed nonetheless wonderful to Cosette, who had never had a doll of her own, a real doll, to use an expression which every child will understand.

  But suddenly Mme Thénardier, busy about the room, caught sight of the child as she sat with her hands idle, watching the other two.

  ‘Look at you!’ she cried. ‘Do you call that working? What you need, my girl, is a touch of the strap!’

  Without rising from his chair the stranger turned towards her. ‘Don’t be too hard on her, madame,’ he said with an almost timid smile. ‘Let her play a little while.’

  If th
e admonition had come from a traveller who had eaten his plate of mutton and washed it down with a couple of bottles of wine, and who did not look like the most undesirable of paupers, it would have amounted to a command. But that a man with a hat and coat like those he was wearing should express a desire of any kind was something that Mme Thénardier did not feel called upon to tolerate. She retorted sharply:

  ‘The girl eats, doesn’t she? So she’s got to work. I don’t feed her for nothing.’

  ‘What exactly is she knitting?’ the stranger asked in the same quiet voice which was so oddly at variance with his beggarly attire and powerful shoulders.

  ‘Stockings, if you must know. Stockings for my daughters, who have scarcely any and will soon be going barefoot.’

  The man glanced at Cosette’s reddened feet.

  ‘And when she’s finished this pair of stockings?’

  ‘It’ll take her a good three or four days, the idle slut.’

  ‘And what will they be worth when they’re done?’

  Mme Thénardier looked contemptuously at him.

  ‘At least thirty sous.’

  ‘Will you sell them to me for five francs?’

  ‘Five francs!’ exploded a customer who was listening. ‘Five francs for a pair of stockings! Upon my word!’

  Thénardier himself saw fit to intervene.

  ‘If it is your humour, monsieur, you may have the stockings for five francs. We can refuse our customers nothing.’

  ‘Cash down,’ said madame in her terse fashion.

  ‘Then I will buy them,’ the man said, and getting a five-franc piece out of his pocket he laid it on the table. ‘There’s the money.’ He turned to Cosette. ‘You’re working for me now, child. I want you to play a little, and rest.’

  The customer was so startled by the sight of the five-franc piece that, deserting his glass, he came over to examine it.

  ‘It’s real, all right,’ he announced. ‘No question about it. It’s a good ’un.’

  Thénardier came up and put the coin calmly in his pouch. Mme Thénardier, deprived of speech, stood biting her lips and glaring. Cosette meanwhile was trembling. She ventured to ask:

  ‘Madame, is it true? Am I really allowed to play?’

  ‘Play for heaven’s sake!’ bellowed Mme Thénardier.

  ‘Thank you, madame.’ But although the words were addressed to her mistress, Cosette’s whole heart went out to the stranger.

  Thénardier returned to his seat. His wife went over and murmured in his ear:

  ‘Who on earth can the man be?’

  ‘I’ve known millionaires to wear coats no better than that,’ he answered in a lordly tone.

  Cosette had put aside her knitting but had not left her place. She always moved as little as possible. From a box on the floor behind her she produced some scraps of material and her tiny lead sword.

  Éponine and Azelma had paid no attention to what was going on, being now absorbed in a highly important matter. They had caught hold of the kitten, letting their doll fall to the floor, and Éponine, the elder, was now dressing it in an assortment of red and blue rags, despite its struggles and mews of protest. While she performed this difficult operation, she was discoursing to her sister in the enchanting language of childhood, whose charm, like the splendour of a butterfly’s wing, vanishes when one seeks to grasp it.

  ‘It’s much nicer than the other kind of doll because it really moves, and it squeaks and it’s warm. I’m going to be a lady and this is going to be my baby that I’m bringing for you to see, and when you see that it’s got a moustache you’ll be very surprised, and when you see its ears and tail you’ll be more surprised than ever, and you’ll say, “Merciful Heavens!” and I’ll say, “It’s my little daughter, madame, and that’s how she was born. Little girls are all like that nowadays.” ’

  Azelma listened spellbound.

  The drinkers meanwhile had burst into song, and with Thénardier assisting and applauding were making the room shake with their uproar.

  Like birds building nests, so will children make dolls out of whatever comes to hand. While Éponine and Azelma were dressing the kitten, Cosette dressed her sword, and having done so rocked it in her arms and crooned a lullaby.

  A doll is among the most pressing needs as well as the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for it, adorn it, dress and undress it, give it lessons, scold it a little, put it to bed and sing it to sleep, pretend that the object is a living person – all the future of the woman resides in this. Dreaming and murmuring, tending, cossetting, sewing small garments, the child grows into girlhood, from girlhood into womanhood, from womanhood into wifehood, and the first baby is the successor of the last doll. A little girl without a doll is nearly as deprived and quite as unnatural as a woman without a child. So Cosette made her sword into a doll.

  Mme Thénardier went back to the stranger, the ‘yellow man’ as she now thought of him. Upon reflection she had decided that her husband might be right and that he might turn out to be rich. The rich have the strangest whims!

  She seated herself with her elbows on the table. ‘Monsieur –’ she began, and this form of address caused him to look up. Hitherto she had called him nothing but ‘my good man’ or ‘fellow’.

  ‘You see, monsieur,’ she went on in a sanctimonious tone that was even more objectionable than her hectoring manner, ‘I’ve nothing against the child being allowed to play, just for once, seeing that you’ve been so generous. But she has to work, you see, because she’s got nothing of her own.’

  ‘She’s not your child?’ the man said.

  ‘Oh dear no! Just a pauper child we took in out of charity, and stupid into the bargain, probably water on the brain, you’ve only got to look at the size of her head. We do the best we can for her, but we aren’t rich. We write letters, but there’s been no reply for six months. It looks as though her mother must be dead.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the man, and sat pondering.

  ‘Not that her mother amounted to much,’ added Mme Thénardier. ‘She abandoned the child.’

  Cosette’s eyes were intent upon her mistress, as though instinct had warned her that she was the subject of this conversation. She could not follow it entirely, being able to catch only a few words here and there. It came to an end when, upon the renewed insistence of his hostess, the ‘yellow man’, the millionaire, agreed to have something to eat.

  ‘What would you like, monsieur?’

  ‘Bread and cheese,’ he said.

  ‘So he’s nothing but a pauper after all,’ reflected Mme Thénardier.

  The merry-makers, now three parts drunk, again broke into their ribald singing with renewed enthusiasm. It was a tasteful affair having to do with the Virgin and the Infant Jesus. Mme Thénardier, after fetching the bread and cheese, went over to join in the laughter. Cosette, under the table, was now staring wide-eyed at the fire, clasping her semblance of a doll in her arms. As she rocked it to and fro she crooned in a low voice, ‘My mother’s dead! My mother’s dead! My mother’s dead!’

  But suddenly she broke off. She had noticed the Thénardier children’s doll lying on the floor where they had left it when they captured the kitten. It was only a yard or two away from the kitchen table. Putting down her own makeshift doll, she looked round the room. Mme Thénardier was now talking in an undertone to her husband, the customers were eating, drinking, or singing, and Éponine and Azelma were busy with the kitten. Nobody was watching her. With a last cautious look round, she crawled out on hands and knees, seized the doll and a moment later was again under the table, but with her back now turned to the fire, and crouching to conceal the fact that she had the doll in her arms. The delight of having a real doll to play with was a rarity amounting to rapture. Only the stranger, now eating his modest meal, had noticed anything.

  Cosette’s rapture lasted only a few minutes. With all her precautions she had failed to notice that one of the doll’s legs was sticking out so as to be visible from behi
nd her. Azelma suddenly caught sight of a pink foot shining in the firelight. She nudged her sister and the two little girls sat staring in outraged amazement. Cosette had dared to take their doll!

  Without letting go of the kitten, Éponine ran across to her mother and tugged at her skirt.

  ‘Now what is it?’ asked Mme Thénardier.

  ‘Look,’ said Éponine, and pointed to Cosette who, lost in the ecstasy of possession, was oblivious of all else.

  Mme Thénardier’s face assumed that particular expression, a mingling of the vile and the commonplace, which causes women of her kind to be known as harridans. Injured pride heightened her fury. Cosette had overstepped all bounds. She had dared to lay hands on what belonged to the daughters of the house. A Tsarina, seeing a peasant deck himself with the blue sash of her imperial son, could have appeared no more formidable.

  In a voice hoarse with fury she cried:

  ‘Cosette!’

  Cosette swung round, trembling as though the earth were shaking under her feet.

  ‘Cosette!’ repeated Mme Thénardier.

  Cosette laid the doll down with a gentle movement in which there was something like love as well as despair. Still looking at it, she clasped her hands and wrung them, a terrible thing to have to relate of a child. And then she did something that not all the cruel events of the day had forced her to do – not the errand in the woods, the heaviness of the bucket, the loss of the money, the sight of the strap or even the dire words Mme Thénardier had spoken about her mother. She burst into a flood of tears.

  The stranger, meanwhile, had got to his feet

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked Mme Thénardier.

  ‘Can’t you see?’ she answered, pointing to the corpus delicti now lying at Cosette’s feet.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The brat has had the impudence to take my children’s doll!’

  ‘But what of it?’ the stranger said. ‘Why shouldn’t she play with the doll?’

  ‘She handled it,’ pursued Mme Thénardier. ‘She touched it with her filthy hands!’