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BOOK FOUR

TO ENTRUST IS SOMETIMES TO ABANDON

I. ONE MOTHER MEETS ANOTHER

THERE WAS, DURING the first quarter of the current century, in Montfermeil, near Paris, a kind of greasy spoon that no longer exists today. This greasy spoon was run by people by the name of Thénardier, husband and wife. It was located in the ruelle du Boulanger. Above the door was a board nailed flat against the wall. There was something painted on the board that looked like a man piggybacking another man wearing a general’s big gold epaulets with big silver stars; red splotches represented blood; the rest of the tableau was of smoke and probably represented a battle. At the bottom you could read the inscription: AU SERGENT DE WATERLOO.

There is nothing commoner than a wagon or a cart outside the door of an inn. But the vehicle, or to be more precise, the remnant of a vehicle, that was blocking the street in front of the Sergent de Waterloo, on a night in the spring of 1818, would certainly have attracted the attention of any passing painter by its sheer bulk.

It was the front-axle section of one of those log carriers used in lumber country to cart sawn timber and tree trunks. This section was composed of a swiveling front axle into which a heavy shaft was slotted, supported by two enormous wheels. The whole array was squat, overwhelming, deformed. You would have thought it was the mount of a giant cannon. Rust had coated the wheels, rims, hubs, axle, and shaft with a layer of mud—a hideous yellowish distemper not unlike the colour wash deliberately applied to cathedrals. The wood had disappeared under the mud and the iron under the rust. Underneath the axle a huge chain fit for a Goliath of the galleys hung like drapery. This chain made you think, not of the beams it was meant to haul, but of the mastodons and mammoths it could have harnessed; there was the whiff of the lockup about it, but of some colossal, superhuman lockup, and it looked as if it had yanked away some monster. Homer would have tied up Polyphemus with it, Shakespeare, Caliban.1 Why was this partial front axle of a log carrier where it was, sitting there in the street? First, to obstruct passage; then, to complete the rusting process. In the old social order there were a host of institutions that you stumbled across on your path out in the open air, which had no other reason for being there.

The middle part of the chain hung under the axle quite close to the ground, and where it curved, two little girls were sitting together that night as if on a swing, exquisitely entwined, one of them about two and a half years old, the other eighteen months, the smaller in the arms of the bigger. A cleverly knotted handkerchief prevented them from falling off. Some mother had spotted the gruesome chain and said to herself: Now, there’s a nice toy for the kids to play with!

To top it off, the two little girls were dressed gracefully and with some refinement and they were radiant; they were like two roses on a scrap heap, their eyes triumphant; their fresh cheeks blooming with laughter. One had chestnut hair, the other, brown. Their innocent faces shone in ravishment; perfume wafting from a flowering shrub nearby sent fragrant emanations out to passersby, but it seemed to come from the little girls. The one who was eighteen months old showed her lovely little bare tummy with the chaste indecency of the toddler. Above and around the two delicate heads, moulded in happiness and dipped in light, the gigantic front axle, black with rust, almost shocking, all tangled up with curved bits and vicious sharp corners, arched like the mouth of a lair. A few feet away, squatting on the doorstep outside the inn, the mother, a woman whose appearance was not particularly attractive but rather touching at that precise moment, was swinging the two little girls by means of a long string, watching over them anxiously at the same time for fear of some accident, with that expression, both animal and angelic, that is peculiar to motherhood; at each movement, the grisly chain let out a screeching noise that sounded like a cry of fury; the little girls squealed in ecstasy, the setting sun glowed over their joy, and nothing could be as enchanting as this caprice of chance that had turned a Titan’s chain into a swing for cherubim.

While rocking her two children, the mother tunelessly crooned a romantic ballad then all the rage:

You must, said a soldier …

Singing and watching her girls prevented her from hearing and seeing what was happening in the street.

Yet someone had approached her as she began the first lines of the ballad and suddenly she heard a voice say in her ear: “You have two pretty little girls there, Madame.” To the soft and beautiful Imogine,

replied the mother, continuing the song before turning round.

A woman stood a few feet away from her. This woman, too, had a child, which she was carrying in her arms.

She was also carrying a rather big overnight bag that looked extremely heavy.

This woman’s child was one of the most divine creatures you could ever hope to see, a little girl two or three years old. She was more than a match for the other two little girls for the stylishness of her outfit; she had a fine linen bonnet trimmed with Valenciennes lace and a little chemise with ribbons. Her pleated skirt was hitched up, showing her chubby, firm little white legs. She was wonderfully rosy and in fine fettle and so beautiful she made you want to bite the apples of her cheeks. Nothing could be said of her eyes, except that they were probably very big and that they had magnificent eyelashes, for she was sleeping.

She was sleeping that sleep of absolute trust peculiar to her age. Mothers’ arms are made for tenderness; children sleep deeply in them.

As for the mother, she looked poor and sad. She had the look of the urban working woman reverting to being a peasant. She was young. Was she beautiful? Maybe, but in that getup it was hard to tell. A single strand of her blond hair, which looked as though it would be very thick, had escaped the extremely severe peasant’s headdress that clamped her hair in, ugly, tight, narrow, and tied under the chin. Laughter reveals lovely teeth if you have them, but she did not laugh. Her eyes looked as though they hadn’t been dry in a long while. She was pale; she seemed extremely listless and somewhat sick; she looked at her child asleep in her arms with the special look of a mother who has breast-fed her baby herself. A big blue handkerchief of the kind invalids use to blow their noses was tied like a shawl around her waist and largely concealed it. She had brown hands, dotted all over with freckles, the index finger calloused and jagged from sewing needles, a brown cloak of rough wool, a cotton dress, and heavy shoes. It was Fantine.

It was Fantine. Barely recognizable. Yet, if you looked closely, you could see she still had her beauty. A sad line, which looked like the beginnings of irony, marred her right cheek. As for her finery, that airy toilette of muslin and ribbons put together so gaily, with such whimsy and poetry, full of tinkling baubles and the scent of lilacs—it had evaporated like the lovely sparkling frosts that you can mistake for diamonds in the sun and that melt, leaving only the black branches behind.

Ten months had passed since “the great practical joke.”

What had happened in those ten months? We can well imagine.

After abandonment came general embarrassment. Fantine had immediately lost sight of Favourite, Zéphine, and Dahlia—the bond, broken on the men’s side, came undone on the women’s. You would have truly amazed them, a fortnight later, if you’d said they’d ever been friends; they no longer had any reason to be. Fantine was left on her own. The father of her child was gone—alas! such splits are irrevocable—and she found herself absolutely alone, minus the habit of working and plus the acquired taste for pleasure. Encouraged by her liaison with Tholomyès to look down on the menial work she knew how to do, she had neglected any opportunities for employment, and they had soon slipped away. Nothing to fall back on. Fantine could not write, could scarcely read; as a child, she had only been taught to sign her name; she had paid a public letter-writer to write one letter to Tholomyès, then a second and a third. Tholomyès did not answer any of them. One day, Fantine had overheard some old crones in the street saying as they eyed her daughter: “Does anyone take these brats to heart? You wash your hands of brats like that!” So then she thought of Tholomyès, who had washed his hands of his own child and did not take this innocent being to heart; and her heart hardened toward that man. But what could she do about it? She did not know who to turn to anymore. She had sinned, but as you know, she was fundamentally decent and virtuous. She felt vaguely that she was on the brink of tumbling into destitution, of sliding down skid row. She had the courage she needed, and bore up bravely. The idea occurred to her to go back to her native village, to Montreuil-sur-mer. There, someone would perhaps remember her and give her work. Yes, but she would have to hide the evidence of her sin. And she had a clouded glimpse of another possible separation, even more painful than the first. Her heart ached, but she made her decision. Fantine, as we will see, was fiercely courageous in the face of life.

She had already valiantly renounced finery, dressing in cotton and putting all her silks, all her glad rags, all her ribbons and lace on her daughter’s back—the sole vanity that remained to her, this one sacred. She sold everything she had, which gave her two hundred francs; her minor debts paid, all she had left was about eighty francs. At twenty-two years of age, on a fine spring morning, she left Paris, carrying her child on her back. Anyone who had seen them going past together would have taken pity on them. The woman had only that child in the whole wide world, and the child had only the mother. Fantine had breast-fed her baby herself; this had weakened her chest and she now had a bit of a cough.

We will have no further occasion to speak of Monsieur Félix Tholomyès. We will say here only that, twenty years later, under King Louis-Philippe,2 he was a fat provincial attorney, influential and rich, a shrewd voter and a most severe jurist; and still a man of pleasure.

Around noon, after having got some rest by travelling now and then in what were known at the time as the petites voitures, or little cabs, of the Paris region, Fantine found herself in Montfermeil, in the ruelle du Boulanger.

As she was passing Thénardier’s inn, the two little girls, so excited on their monster swing, had sort of dazzled her, and she had stopped in her tracks before this vision of joy.

There are such things as magic spells. Those two little girls cast theirs over this poor mother.

She stared at them, quite overcome. The presence of angels heralds paradise. She thought she could see, above the inn, the mysterious HERE of Providence. Those two little creatures were so obviously happy! She watched them, she admired them, so very moved that, the second their mother took a breath between two lines of her song, she couldn’t help herself from saying what we have just read: “You have two pretty little girls there, Madame.” The most ferocious beasts are disarmed by any tenderness shown to their young. The mother looked up at the stranger and thanked her, and invited her to take a seat on the bench by the door, while she remained squatting on the doorstep. The two women chatted.

“I’m Madame Thénardier,” said the mother of the two little girls. “We keep this inn.”

Then, still caught up in her ballad, she sang through clenched teeth:

You must, I am a knight,

And I’m leaving for Palestine.

This Madame Thénardier was a redhead, fleshy, yet bony; the soldier’s-wife type in all its ghastliness, and with an odd bent look acquired from devouring romantic novels. She was mannish, yet simpering. Old novels that play out in the imaginations of women running fleapit hotels have that effect. She was still young; had only just turned thirty. If the woman squatting had stood up, her height and her bearing, which were those of an ambulatory colossus fit for the fairground freak show, might very well have frightened off the traveller, derailed her confidence, and caused what we are about to relate to vanish into thin air. Whether a person sits or stands—fate hangs by threads like these.

The traveller told her tale, a slightly edited version: how she had been a working woman; how her husband had died; how she couldn’t find work in Paris and was now looking elsewhere, in her own part of the country; how she had left Paris, on foot, that very morning; how, since she was carrying her child, she had got tired and, having come across the Villemomble coach, had hopped on; how from Villemomble she had reached Montfermeil on foot; how her little girl had walked a bit, but not far, she was so little, and so she had had to carry her and her treasure had fallen asleep.

As she said this, she gave her daughter a passionate kiss that woke her up. The little girl opened her eyes, great big blue eyes like those of her mother, and looked at … what? Nothing, everything, with that grave and sometimes stern look little children have, which is one of the mysteries of their luminous innocence in the face of our waning virtues. You would think they knew they were angels and that we were mere human beings. Then the little girl began to laugh and, though her mother held her back, slid to the ground with the indomitable energy of a small being who wants to run. Suddenly she spotted the other two on their swing, stood stock-still and poked her tongue out, a sure sign of admiration.

Mother Thénardier unstrapped the children and took them down off the swing and said: “Go and play, the three of you.”

Children make friends easily at that age and after a minute or two the Thénardier girls were playing with the newcomer, digging holes in the ground to their immense delight.

The newcomer was a very gay little girl; the mother’s goodness was reflected in her gaiety; she had picked up a piece of wood, which she was using as a spade, and she was busily digging a ditch fit for a fly. What a gravedigger does becomes cheery when done by a child.

The two women went on chatting.

“What’s your kid’s name?”

“Cosette.”

For Cosette read Euphrasie.3 The little girl was called Euphrasie. But the mother had turned Euphrasie into Cosette through that sweet and gracious instinct of mothers and the common people, changing Josefa into Pepita and Françoise into Sillette. This is the kind of derivation that disturbs and disconcerts the whole science of etymology. We once knew a grandmother who managed to turn Théodore into Gnon.

“How old is she?”

“She’ll soon be three.”

“Same as my eldest.”

Meanwhile, the three little girls were huddled in positions of deep anxiety and bliss; an event had taken place, a fat worm had just come out of the ground and frightened them and now they were in ecstasy.

They had their gleaming heads together, touching; for all the world like three heads in the one halo.

“Kids!” cried mother Thénardier. “See how well they get on already! You’d swear they were three sisters!”

This, no doubt, was the cue the other mother had been waiting for. She grabbed Madame Thénardier’s hand, looked into her eyes, and said: “Would you keep my little girl for me?” Mother Thénardier gave one of those starts of surprise that express neither consent nor refusal.

Cosette’s mother continued: “You see, I can’t take my little girl back home. Work won’t allow it. If you have a child, you can’t get a job. They are so ridiculous where I come from. It’s the good Lord who’s guided me to your inn. When I saw your little girls so pretty and clean and happy, I was quite overcome. I thought: Now, there’s a good mother for you. That’s exactly it: They would be like three sisters. And then again, it won’t be long before I’m back. Would you look after my child?” “I’d have to see,” said mother Thénardier.

“I’d give you six francs a month.”

At this point a man’s voice boomed from the depths of the fleapit:

“Nothing less than seven francs. And six months up front.”

“Six times seven is forty-two,” said mother Thénardier.

“I’ll pay,” said the mother.

“And fifteen francs on top of that for initial expenses,” added the man’s voice.

“Total, fifty-seven francs,” said Madame Thénardier. And in the middle of her calculations she went on softly crooning:

You must, said a warrior.

“I’ll pay,” said the mother. “I’ve got eighty francs. I’ll have enough left over to get back home. If I walk. I’ll earn money down there and as soon as I have a bit, I’ll come back for my darling girl.” The man’s voice resumed: “Does the little one have a supply of clothes?”

“That’s my husband,” said mother Thénardier.

“Of course she has some clothes, poor little treasure. I knew it was your husband. And beautiful clothes, too! Lovely things. Dozens of everything; and silk frocks like a lady’s. They’re in my overnight bag, there.” “You’ll have to hand them over,” the man’s voice sounded again.

“Well, naturally I’ll hand them over!” said the mother. “Wouldn’t that be something if I left my daughter without a stitch!” The master’s face appeared.

“Right,” he said.

The deal was done. The young mother spent the night at the inn, handed over her money and left her little girl behind, buckled up her overnight bag, emptied of its bundle of clothes and now light, and set out the following morning, counting on returning soon. These sorts of partings are arranged so smoothly, but they are full of despair.

One of the Thénardiers’ neighbours met the young mother as she was setting out and he came back with the tale: “I’ve just seen a girl sobbing her heart out in the street.” When Cosette’s mother was out of the way, the husband said to his wife: “This will fix up that bill for a hundred and ten francs that’s due tomorrow. I was fifty francs short. You know, I would have had the bailiff on me and a caution. You’re not a bad mousetrap with your two little ones.” “I didn’t realize,” said the wife.

II. INITIAL SKETCH OF TWO SHADY CHARACTERS

THE MOUSE CAUGHT in the trap was pretty puny; but the cat rejoiced even over a meagre little mouse.

What were the Thénardiers?

We’ll just say one thing for the moment. We can finish the sketch later.

These creatures belonged to that mongrel class composed of commoners who have risen and intelligent people who have fallen, which lies somewhere between the class known as middle and the class known as lower, and which combines some of the defects of the second with almost all the vices of the first, without having the generous impulse of the worker or the honest respectability of the bourgeois.

They had those stunted runtlike natures that easily turn monstrous if something sinister happens to fire them up. The woman was basically a brute and the man had all the makings of a complete scoundrel. Both were in the highest degree capable of the kind of odious progress that aims for evil. There exist cramped souls that are always darting backward into the shadows, like crayfish, regressing in life rather than advancing, employing experience to aggravate their deformity, going from bad to worse and getting more encrusted with a deepening blackness. This man and this woman were among such people.

Old man Thénardier in particular was a challenge for the physiognomist. You only have to look at certain men to be wary of them; you can sense that they are foul, through and through. They are anxious after the event and menacing ahead of it. There is some unknown quantity in them. We can no more account for what they have done than for what they will do. The shifty black look in their eyes gives them away. You only have to hear them utter a word or see them make a move and you get a glimpse of the dark secrets in their past and the dark mysteries in their future.

This Thénardier, if you took him at his word, had been a soldier—a sergeant, he claimed; he had probably taken part in the campaign of 1815, and even acquitted himself quite bravely, so it would seem. We will see down the track what this really entailed. The sign for his tavern was an allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it himself, for he could turn his hand to anything—badly.

Those were the days when the early “classical” novel, which had started off as Clélie, had become nothing more than Lodoïska, ever aristocratic but increasingly vulgar, having tumbled from the lofty heights of Mademoiselle de Scudéri to the level of Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to Madame Barthélémy-Hadot,1 inflaming the loving hearts of the concierges of Paris and wreaking havoc even farther afield in the suburbs. Madame Thénardier was just smart enough to read that kind of book. She crammed herself full of them. She drowned what little brains she had in them. This had given her, while she was still very young, and even a bit later on, a sort of wondering attitude toward her husband, who was a dyed-in-the-wool rotter with a certain depth, a thug who knew his grammar, almost, a man both gross and refined at once, but who, when it came to sentimentalism, read Pigault-Lebrun2 and who, when it came to “anything to do with sex,” as he so quaintly put it, was a thorough and unmitigated lout. His wife was some twelve or fifteen years younger than he was. Later, when the novelistically sweeping hair began to go grey, when Megaera, the harridan, emerged from Pamela,3 mother Thénardier was nothing more than a nasty fat witch who had revelled in mind-numbing novels. Now, you don’t read rubbish with impunity. The result was that her elder daughter was named Éponine. As for the younger one, the poor little girl was nearly named Gulnare;4 owing to some happy diversion provided by a novel by Ducray-Duminil,5 she merely collected the name Azelma.

And yet, we might just say in passing, not everything was superficial and ridiculous in what we might term the anarchy of Christian names characteristic of that curious age to which we are here alluding. Apart from the influence of romantic novels just mentioned, it was also a social symptom. Today it is not rare for a little cowherd to be called Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, or for a vicomte—if vicomtes still exist—to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This displacement—switching the “elegant” name and the “plebeian” name around, turning the rustic aristocratic and the aristocrat rustic—is nothing more nor less than equality’s backwash. The winds of change blow there as irresistibly as everywhere else. Beneath the apparent contradiction lies something great and profound: the French Revolution.

III. THE LARK

BEING EVIL IS not enough for a person to prosper. The greasy spoon was doing badly.

Thanks to the traveller’s fifty-seven francs, Thénardier was able to avoid a caution1 and to honour his signature. The following month, they were short of money again; the woman took Cosette’s clothes to Paris and pawned them at the Mont-de-la-Piété, the pawnshop, for the sum of sixty francs. As soon as that sum was spent, the Thénardiers began seeing the little girl simply as a child they’d taken in out of charity and they treated her accordingly. Since she no longer had her own supply of clothes, they dressed her in the cast-off shirts and skirts of the little Thénardier girls, in other words, in rags. She was fed everyone else’s leftovers, which was a step up from the dog but a step down from the cat. The dog and the cat were habitual table companions; Cosette ate with them, under the table, from a wooden bowl just like theirs.

Her mother, who, as we will later see, had settled in Montreuil-sur-mer, wrote, or to be more precise, got someone to write, every month in order to have news of her daughter. The Thénardiers invariably wrote back: Cosette is in perfect health.

When the first six months were up, the mother sent seven francs for the seventh month and continued to send funds from month to month with fairly constant regularity. The year was not yet out when Thénardier said: “A bloody lot of good that is! What does she expect us to do with her seven francs?” And he wrote to demand twelve francs. The mother, who had been persuaded that her little girl was happy and “coming along nicely,” buckled and sent the twelve francs.

Certain natures can only love someone when they hate someone else. Mother Thénardier loved her own two daughters with a passion, which meant she loathed the outsider. It’s sad to think that a mother’s love can have a vile side. However tiny the space Cosette took up in her home, it seemed to her that it was being taken from her own and that the little girl reduced the very air her own girls breathed. This woman, like many women of her ilk, had a set store of cuddles and a set store of wallops and foul language to dispense each day. If she hadn’t had Cosette, her own daughters, thoroughly idolized as they were, would certainly have received the lot, but the outsider did them the favour of diverting the wallops onto herself. The daughters got only the cuddles. Cosette did not make a move without causing a storm of violent and unmerited punishments to rain down upon her head. Sweet and fragile creature as she was, knowing nothing of this world or of God, she found herself endlessly punished, scolded, chastised, beaten, as she watched the two little creatures beside her, who were just like her, thrive in radiant sunlight.

Mother Thénardier being purely malevolent toward Cosette, Éponine and Azelma were malevolent, too. Children at that age are mere copies of their mothers. The format is smaller, that’s all.

A year went by, then another.

In the village they would say: “They’re good people, those Thénardiers. They don’t have much money and yet they’re bringing up a poor kid someone dumped on their doorstep!” It was thought that Cosette had been forgotten by her mother.

Yet old man Thénardier, having learned by some obscure means that the child was probably a bastard and that the mother was forced to disown her, demanded fifteen francs a month, saying that “the creature” was growing and “ate like a wild thing” and threatening to send her back. “She better not complain!” he cried. “I’ll shove her brat in her face and that’ll give the game away on her. I need more money.” The mother paid the fifteen francs.

From year to year the child grew, and her misery grew, too.

While Cosette was still tiny, she was the whipping boy, so to speak, of the other two girls; as soon as she began to grow, that is, even before she was five, she became the drudge for the entire household.

Five, you will say, that’s hardly likely. Alas, it’s true. Social oppression can begin at any age. Did we not see, recently, the trial of a man named Dumolard, an orphan-cum-crook, who, according to the official record, being all alone in the world, from the age of five “worked for a living and stole.” Cosette was made to run errands, sweep the rooms, the courtyard, the street, wash up, even carry loads. The Thénardiers felt all the more authorized to act in this way because the mother, who was still in Montreuil-sur-mer, had begun not to pay on time. She was some months behind.

If the mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of those three years, she would not have recognized her daughter. Cosette had been so pretty and so fresh when she arrived at the inn and now she was thin and pasty. There was a strangely anxious look about her. Sly! said the Thénardiers.

Injustice had made her sullen and misery had made her ugly. The only thing she still had were her beautiful eyes, and they were painful to look at because, being so big, they seemed to magnify the sadness she’d been dealt.

In winter it was a harrowing sight to see the poor child, who was not yet six, shivering in the scanty castoffs riddled with holes, sweeping the street before daybreak with an enormous broom in her little red hands and a tear in her great big eyes.

In those parts she was known as Alouette, the Lark. Ordinary people like metaphors and enjoyed calling by this name the tiny creature no bigger than a bird, trembling, frightened, and shivering, the first up every morning in the house and in the village, always on the street or in the fields before dawn.

Only, this poor Lark never sang.