Page 1304 - les-miserables

her large, red, blonde face and stared at the ceiling with a
horrible expression. At that moment, she seemed to Marius
even more to be feared than her husband. She was a sow
with the look of a tigress.
‘What!’ she resumed, ‘that horrible, beautiful young
lady, who gazed at my daughters with an air of pity,—she
is that beggar brat! Oh! I should like to kick her stomach in
for her!’
She sprang off of the bed, and remained standing for
a moment, her hair in disorder, her nostrils dilating, her
mouth half open, her fists clenched and drawn back. Then
she fell back on the bed once more. The man paced to and
fro and paid no attention to his female.
After a silence lasting several minutes, he approached
the female Jondrette, and halted in front of her, with folded
arms, as he had done a moment before:—
‘And shall I tell you another thing?’
‘What is it?’ she asked.
He answered in a low, curt voice:—
‘My fortune is made.’
The woman stared at him with the look that signifies:
‘Is the person who is addressing me on the point of going
mad?’
He went on:—
‘Thunder! It was not so very long ago that I was a
parishioner of the parish of die-of-hunger-if-you-have-a-
fire,-die-of-cold-if-you-have-bread! I have had enough of
misery! my share and other people’s share! I am not joking
any longer, I don’t find it comic any more, I’ve had enough

1304 Les Miserables