Page 646 - les-miserables

tinually avenging their wrongs, who accuse everything that
passes before them of everything which has befallen them,
and who are always ready to cast upon the first person who
comes to hand, as a legitimate grievance, the sum total of
the deceptions, the bankruptcies, and the calamities of their
lives,—when all this leaven was stirred up in him and boiled
forth from his mouth and eyes, he was terrible. Woe to the
person who came under his wrath at such a time!
In addition to his other qualities, Thenardier was at-
tentive and penetrating, silent or talkative, according to
circumstances, and always highly intelligent. He had some-
thing of the look of sailors, who are accustomed to screw up
their eyes to gaze through marine glasses. Thenardier was
a statesman.
Every new-comer who entered the tavern said, on catch-
ing sight of Madame Thenardier, ‘There is the master of the
house.’ A mistake. She was not even the mistress. The hus-
band was both master and mistress. She worked; he created.
He directed everything by a sort of invisible and constant
magnetic action. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a
sign; the mastodon obeyed. Thenardier was a sort of special
and sovereign being in Madame Thenardier’s eyes, though
she did not thoroughly realize it. She was possessed of vir-
tues after her own kind; if she had ever had a disagreement
as to any detail with ‘Monsieur Thenardier,’—which was an
inadmissible hypothesis, by the way,—she would not have
blamed her husband in public on any subject whatever. She
would never have committed ‘before strangers’ that mistake
so often committed by women, and which is called in par-

646 Les Miserables