Page 645 - les-miserables

come to Montfermeil and set up an inn there.
This quibus, composed of purses and watches, of gold
rings and silver crosses, gathered in harvest-time in furrows
sown with corpses, did not amount to a large total, and did
not carry this sutler turned eating-house-keeper very far.
Thenardier had that peculiar rectilinear something
about his gestures which, accompanied by an oath, recalls
the barracks, and by a sign of the cross, the seminary. He
was a fine talker. He allowed it to be thought that he was an
educated man. Nevertheless, the schoolmaster had noticed
that he pronounced improperly.[12]
[12] Literally ‘made cuirs”; i. e., pronounced a t or an s at
the end of words where the opposite letter should occur, or
used either one of them where neither exists.
He composed the travellers’ tariff card in a superior man-
ner, but practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical
errors in it. Thenardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and
clever. He did not disdain his servants, which caused his
wife to dispense with them. This giantess was jealous. It
seemed to her that that thin and yellow little man must be
an object coveted by all.
Thenardier, who was, above all, an astute and well-bal-
anced man, was a scamp of a temperate sort. This is the
worst species; hypocrisy enters into it.
It is not that Thenardier was not, on occasion, capable of
wrath to quite the same degree as his wife; but this was very
rare, and at such times, since he was enraged with the hu-
man race in general, as he bore within him a deep furnace of
hatred. And since he was one of those people who are con-

645