Page 643 - les-miserables

pearance of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was an ideal
market-porter dressed in woman’s clothes. She swore splen-
didly; she boasted of being able to crack a nut with one blow
of her fist. Except for the romances which she had read, and
which made the affected lady peep through the ogress at
times, in a very queer way, the idea would never have oc-
curred to any one to say of her, ‘That is a woman.’ This
Thenardier female was like the product of a wench engraft-
ed on a fishwife. When one heard her speak, one said, ‘That
is a gendarme”; when one saw her drink, one said, ‘That is
a carter”; when one saw her handle Cosette, one said, ‘That
is the hangman.’ One of her teeth projected when her face
was in repose.
Thenardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, fee-
ble man, who had a sickly air and who was wonderfully
healthy. His cunning began here; he smiled habitually, by
way of precaution, and was almost polite to everybody, even
to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing. He had
the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters.
He greatly resembled the portraits of the Abbe Delille. His
coquetry consisted in drinking with the carters. No one had
ever succeeded in rendering him drunk. He smoked a big
pipe. He wore a blouse, and under his blouse an old black
coat. He made pretensions to literature and to material-
ism. There were certain names which he often pronounced
to support whatever things he might be saying,—Voltaire,
Raynal, Parny, and, singularly enough, Saint Augustine. He
declared that he had ‘a system.’ In addition, he was a great
swindler. A filousophe [philosophe], a scientific thief. The

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