DURING THE first quarter of this century, in the village of Mont-fermeil not far from Paris, there existed a small tavern which has since disappeared. It was kept by a couple called Thénardier and was situated in the Ruelle du Boulanger. Nailed to the wall over the door was a board with a painted design depicting a soldier carrying another on his back, the latter clad in the starred and braided uniform of a general. Splashes of red paint represented blood, and the rest of the picture was filled with what was presumably the smoke of battle. Across the bottom ran the inscription: ‘The Sergeant of Waterloo’.
Nothing is more commonplace than a cart or wagon outside a tavern, but the vehicle, or remains of a vehicle, which was to be seen outside the Sergeant of Waterloo on a certain spring evening in 1818 must surely have attracted the notice of a passing painter by its massive proportions. It was the fore-part of one of those drags used by foresters for carrying sawn timbers and tree-trunks, consisting of a massive iron pivot with an axle-shaft and two very large wheels. The general effect, resembling the gun-carriage of an enormous cannon, was lumbering and shapeless. Wheels, hubs, and shaft were smothered in a thick coating of yellow mud not unlike the plaster sometimes daubed on cathedrals. The woodwork was hidden under mud and the metalwork under rust, and from the axle there hung in loops a great chain that could have served to secure a criminal Goliath. It might have been designed for the harnessing of mastodons rather than the transport of timber; and it had a look of prison about it, superhuman fetters that could have been struck off the limbs of some monster. Homer might have associated it with Polyphemus, Shakespeare with Caliban.
What was it doing there? It served no purpose except to block the street until it mouldered into dust. Our ancient social order is filled with similar encumbrances, surviving for no other reason.
The lower part of the looped chain hung close to the ground, and seated on it as though it were a swing, forming a pretty group, were two little girls, the elder, aged about two and a half, holding the younger, aged eighteen months, in her arms. A shawl had been carefully tied to prevent them falling. Some mother, seeing that unsightly chain, had thought, ‘What a nice toy for the children.’
The two children, who looked well cared-for, were clearly delighted with it. They were like roses on a scrap-heap, their eyes bright, their pink cheeks round with laughter. One was russet-haired, the other dark. The innocent faces shone with excitement, and the smaller of the two, with the chaste indecency of childhood, displayed a stretch of bare stomach. Above and around this picture of happiness loomed the piece of monstrous, mud-coated wreckage, its uncouth, twisted shape causing it to resemble the mouth of a cavern. The mother, a woman of no very attractive appearance but likeable at that moment, was seated a few yards away in the doorway of the tavern, swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept an eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood. With every movement the rusty links emitted a screech like a cry of protest; the children squealed with delight, the glow of sunset shone upon their rapture and nothing could have been more charming than this freak of chance that had turned an ugly monstrosity into a swing for cherubs.
While she swung the children, the mother was tunelessly singing a popular sentimental ditty of the moment. Her preoccupation with this, and with them, caused her to ignore what was going on in the street. But suddenly a voice spoke from close beside her.
‘You have two very pretty children, Madame.’
The mother broke off her song and looked round. A young woman was standing near her. She too had a child which she held in her arms. She also had with her a large travelling-bag which looked very heavy.
The child was the most enchanting creature imaginable, a little girl of between two and three, the prettiness of whose attire matched that of the innkeeper’s children. She wore a linen bonnet trimmed with Valenciennes lace, and a ribboned frock whose rumpled skirt disclosed a firm white dimpled thigh. She was apple-cheeked, pink, and healthy. Nothing could be seen of her closed eyes except that they were large with very long lashes. She was sleeping in her mother’s arms with the perfect confidence of her age.
The mother, who seemed poor and unhappy, had the look of a town worker reverting to her peasant state. She was young and perhaps pretty but the clothes she was wearing did not allow this to appear. A single lock of her seemingly abundant fair hair had escaped from beneath the tight, plain cap that she wore tied under her chin. A smile might have shown that she had fine teeth, but she did not smile; she looked indeed as though it were a long time since she had been dry-eyed. She was pale and evidently tired, and her gaze, as she glanced at her sleeping child, was one of intense solicitude. A large blue kerchief, like an invalid’s shawl, draped the upper part of her body, with beneath it a calico dress and thick shoes, and over all a cloak of coarse wool. Her hands were rough and freckled, one forefinger pricked and calloused. It was Fantine.
It was Fantine, but scarcely to be recognized, although a closer examination would have shown that she still retained her beauty. But now a line of sadness, like the beginning of cynicism, ran down her right cheek. The airy garments, the gauzes and muslins, the gaiety and music, all this had vanished like the sparkle of hoarfrost from a tree, leaving only the blackened branches behind.
Ten months had elapsed since the ‘merry prank’, and it is not hard to imagine what had happened in that time.
After heedlessness had come the reckoning. Fantine had at once lost touch with Favourite, Zéphine, and Dahlia. The bond broken by the men had been cast aside by the women, and they would have been surprised a fortnight later if anyone had reminded them that they had once been friends, since now their friendship served no purpose. Fantine was left in solitude. Being abandoned by the father of her child – and such partings, alas, are irrevocable – she was thrown entirely on her own resources, having lost the habit of work and gained an aptitude for pleasure. The liaison with Tholomyès had caused her to despise her former calling; she had neglected the employments that had once been open to her and now had lost them. Nothing else was offered. She could scarcely read and could not write, having been taught as a child only to sign her name. She paid a letter-writer to write to Tholomyès, three letters in all, but he did not answer. She heard the street gossips murmur as they looked at her child, ‘Does any man worry about these by-blows? They simply shrug their shoulders’ – and her heart was hardened towards Tholomyès. What was she to do now, where was she to turn? She had done wrong, but she was essentially modest and virtuous. Perceiving the depth of degradation that threatened her, she had the fortitude to resist it. She resolved to return to her native town, Montreuil-sur-mer, where someone who knew her might give her work. It meant that she would have to conceal the evidence of her wrong-doing, and confusedly she foresaw another separation, even more heartrending than the first. But she held to her resolution. Fantine, as we shall see, possessed great courage in the face of life.
She had already renounced all personal adornment, wearing the plainest clothes and reserving her silks and laces for her daughter, her one remaining vanity and one which she held sacred. She sold all her possessions, which produced two hundred francs, but only eighty remained after her debts were paid. And on a fine spring morning she left Paris, a girl of twenty-two with her baby on her back. Those who saw them pass may well have pitied them. The girl had nothing in the world except her child, the child nothing except her mother. Fantine had breast-fed her, and this had weakened her chest, causing her to cough a little.
We shall have no further occasion to mention Monsieur Félix Tholomyès. It is enough to say that twenty years later, under King Louis-Philippe, he had become an influential, rich, and portly provincial attorney, a prudent voter and stern magistrate; but always a man of pleasure.
In the early afternoon, having travelled a part of the way at the cost of a few sous in one of the small public conveyances which then operated on the outskirts of Paris, Fantine reached Montfermeil and presently found herself in the Ruelle du Boulanger. Passing the Thénardiers’ tavern, she had seen the two children on their improvised swing. There are sights which cast a spell, and for the young mother this was one of them. She stood gazing in enchantment, seeming to see in them the pointing finger of Providence itself. They were so evidently happy! Such was her delight that when the mother paused for breath between two lines of her song she could not refrain from murmuring:
‘You have two very pretty children.’
The fiercest animals are disarmed by a tribute to their young. The mother thanked her and invited her to sit on the bench by the door while she herself remained seated on the step.
‘My name is Thénardier,’ she said. ‘My husband and I keep this inn.’
This Madame Thénardier was robust, big-boned, and redheaded, a typical soldier’s woman with the roughness characteristic of her kind, yet, oddly, with a hint of sentiment, a kind of mannish simper which she owed to her fondness for popular fiction, those fustian romances which cater for the fantasy of shop girls and tavern-wenches. She was still young, not more than thirty. Had she been standing upright, instead of sitting crouched in the doorway, her height and general look of a fair-ground wrestler might have alarmed the stranger and so shaken her confidence as to prevent the events to be related from taking place. Destinies may be decided by the fact that a person is seated and not standing.
Fantine told her story, altering it slightly. She was a working woman whose husband had died, and since she could not find work in Paris she was on her way to look for it in her own part of the country. She had left Paris on foot that morning, had travelled part of the way in a country omnibus and had walked from Villemomble to Montfermeil. Her little girl had walked a part of the way but was still very small; in the end she had had to pick her up, and the poor love had fallen asleep.
As she spoke these words she gave her daughter a most loving kiss, waking her up. The child opened wide eyes as blue as her mother’s and gazing at the world saw what? – nothing and everything, with that intent, sometimes stem expression of small children which is among the marvels of their shining innocence, in contrast to our own sullied virtues. It is as though they know themselves to be angels and the rest of us only human. Then she laughed and, although her mother tried to restrain her, wriggled free with the irresistible vigour of a child who wants to be on the move. Seeing the other children on their swing she stopped short and put out her tongue in token of delight. Mme Thénardier lifted the little girls off the swing and said:
‘Now you can all play together.’
Friendly relations are soon established at that age. In a matter of minutes the three were busily digging holes in the ground, to their great satisfaction. The newcomer had a self-assured gaiety which reflected her mother’s devotion. She had found a scrap of wood to use as a spade and was energetically digging what might have been a mouse’s grave – even a gravedigger’s work is charming when done by a child.
The two women went on talking.
‘What’s your little girl’s name?’
‘Cosette.’
In fact, it was Euphrasie, but the mother had turned it into Cosette by the use of that touching alchemy of simple people which transforms Josef into Pepita and Françoise into Silette. It is a kind of linguistics which baffles the etymologist. We once knew a grandmother who contrived to turn Theodore into Gnon.
‘How old is she?’
‘Nearly three.’
The little girls were now grouped in a posture of dismay and excitement. Something had happened. They had uncovered a large worm and were at once frightened and ecstatic. Huddled together with their heads touching, they seemed to be enclosed in a halo.
‘It’s wonderful how quickly children get to know each other,’ said Mme Thénardier. ‘Look at them. They might all be sisters.’
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.
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.
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.