CHAPTER II--FIRST SKETCH OF TWO UNPREPOSSESSING FIGURES

  The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the catrejoices even over a lean mouse.

  Who were these Thénardiers?

  Let us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the sketch lateron.

  These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse peoplewho have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descendedin the scale, which is between the class called "middle" and the classdenominated as "inferior," and which combines some of the defects of thesecond with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessingthe generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of thebourgeois.

  They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warmthem up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a substratumof the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both weresusceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progresswhich is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist crab-likesouls which are continually retreating towards the darkness,retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience toaugment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming moreand more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man andwoman possessed such souls.

  Thénardier, in particular, was troublesome for a physiognomist. One canonly look at some men to distrust them; for one feels that they aredark in both directions. They are uneasy in the rear and threateningin front. There is something of the unknown about them. One can no moreanswer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadowwhich they bear in their glance denounces them. From merely hearing themutter a word or seeing them make a gesture, one obtains a glimpse ofsombre secrets in their past and of sombre mysteries in their future.

  This Thénardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier--asergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815,and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. Weshall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of hishostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted ithimself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.

  It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, afterhaving been _Clélie_, was no longer anything but _Lodoïska_, stillnoble, but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoisellede Scudéri to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette toMadame Barthélemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the portressesof Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some extent. MadameThénardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort of books. Shelived on them. In them she drowned what brains she possessed. This hadgiven her, when very young, and even a little later, a sort of pensiveattitude towards her husband, a scamp of a certain depth, a ruffianlettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse and fine at one and thesame time, but, so far as sentimentalism was concerned, given to theperusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and "in what concerns the sex," as he saidin his jargon--a downright, unmitigated lout. His wife was twelve orfifteen years younger than he was. Later on, when her hair, arrangedin a romantically drooping fashion, began to grow gray, when the Magærabegan to be developed from the Pamela, the female Thénardier was nothingbut a coarse, vicious woman, who had dabbled in stupid romances. Now,one cannot read nonsense with impunity. The result was that her eldestdaughter was named Éponine; as for the younger, the poor little thingcame near being called Gulnare; I know not to what diversion, effectedby a romance of Ducray-Dumenil, she owed the fact that she merely borethe name of Azelma.

  However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous andsuperficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and whichmay be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names. By the side ofthis romantic element which we have just indicated there is the socialsymptom. It is not rare for the neatherd's boy nowadays to bear the nameof Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte--if there arestill any vicomtes--to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. Thisdisplacement, which places the "elegant" name on the plebeian and therustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of equality.The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there aseverywhere else. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and aprofound thing,--the French Revolution.