CHAPTER II
A SKETCH OF TWO UGLY FACES.
The captured mouse was very small, but the cat is pleased even witha thin mouse. Who were the Th?nardiers? We will say one word aboutthem for the present, and complete the sketch hereafter. These beingsbelonged to the bastard class, composed of coarse parvenus, and ofdegraded people of intellect, which stands between the classes calledthe middle and the lower, and combines some of the faults of the secondwith nearly all the vices of the first, though without possessing thegenerous impulse of the workingman or the honest regularity of thetradesman.
Theirs were those dwarf natures which easily become monstrous when anygloomy fire accidentally warms them. There was in the woman the basisof a witch, in the man the stuff for a beggar. Both were in the highestdegree susceptible of that sort of hideous progress which is made inthe direction of evil. There are crab-like souls which constantlyrecoil toward darkness, retrograde in life rather than advance, employexperience to augment their deformity, incessantly grow worse, and growmore and more covered with an increasing blackness. This man and thiswoman had souls of this sort.
Th?nardier was peculiarly troublesome to the physiognomist: there aresome men whom you need only look at to distrust them, for they arerestless behind and threatening in front. There is something of theunknown in them. We can no more answer for what they have done thanfor what they will do. The shadow they have in their glance denouncesthem. Merely by hearing them say a word or seeing them make a gesture,we get a glimpse of dark secrets in their past, dark mysteries intheir future. This Th?nardier, could he be believed, had been asoldier--sergeant, he said; he had probably gone through the campaignof 1815, and had even behaved rather bravely, as it seems. We shallsee presently how the matter really stood. The sign of his inn wasan allusion to one of his exploits, and he had painted it himself,for he could do a little of everything--badly. It was the epoch whenthe old classical romance--which after being _Cl?lie_, had now become_Lodoiska_, and though still noble, was daily growing more vulgar, andhad fallen from Mademoiselle de Scud?ri to Madame Bournon Malarme, andfrom Madame de Lafayette to Madame Barth?l?my Hadot--was inflamingthe loving soul of the porters' wives in Paris, and even extended itsravages into the suburbs. Madame Th?nardier was just intelligent enoughto read books of this nature, and lived on them. She thus drownedany brains she possessed, and, so long as she remained young and alittle beyond, it gave her a sort of pensive attitude by the side ofher husband, who was a scamp of some depth, an almost grammaticalruffian, coarse and delicate at the same time, but who, in matters ofsentimentalism, read Pigault Lebrun, and, in "all that concerned thesex," as he said in his jargon, was a correct and unadulterated booby.His wife was some twelve or fifteen years younger than he, and whenher romantically flowing locks began to grow gray, when the Meg?ra wasdisengaged from the Pamela, she was only a stout wicked woman, who hadbeen pampered with foolish romances. As such absurdities cannot be readwith impunity, the result was that her eldest daughter was christened?ponine; as for the younger, the poor girl was all but named Gulnare,and owed it to a fortunate diversion made by a romance of DucrayDuminil's, that she was only christened Azelma.
By the way, all is not ridiculous and superficial in the curious epochto which we are alluding, and which might be called the anarchy ofbaptismal names. By the side of the romantic element, which we havejust pointed out, there was the social symptom. It is not rare atthe present day for a drover's son to be called Arthur, Alfred, orAlphonse, and for the Viscount--if there are any Viscounts left--to becalled Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This displacement which gives the"elegant" name to the plebeian, and the rustic name to the aristocrat,is nothing else than an eddy of equality. The irresistible penetrationof the new breeze is visible in this as in everything else. Beneaththis apparent discord there is a grand and deep thing, the FrenchRevolution.