Page 638 - les-miserables

in the house.
Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at
Montfermeil. The beginning of the winter had been mild;
there had been neither snow nor frost up to that time. Some
mountebanks from Paris had obtained permission of the
mayor to erect their booths in the principal street of the vil-
lage, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection
of the same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the
Church Square, and even extended them into Boulanger
Alley, where, as the reader will perhaps remember, the Th-
enardiers’ hostelry was situated. These people filled the inns
and drinking-shops, and communicated to that tranquil
little district a noisy and joyous life. In order to play the part
of a faithful historian, we ought even to add that, among the
curiosities displayed in the square, there was a menagerie,
in which frightful clowns, clad in rags and coming no one
knew whence, exhibited to the peasants of Montfermeil in
1823 one of those horrible Brazilian vultures, such as our
Royal Museum did not possess until 1845, and which have a
tricolored cockade for an eye. I believe that naturalists call
this bird Caracara Polyborus; it belongs to the order of the
Apicides, and to the family of the vultures. Some good old
Bonapartist soldiers, who had retired to the village, went
to see this creature with great devotion. The mountebanks
gave out that the tricolored cockade was a unique phenom-
enon made by God expressly for their menagerie.
On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters,
and peddlers, were seated at table, drinking and smoking
around four or five candles in the public room of Thenar-

638 Les Miserables