Page 1356 - les-miserables

Sakoski boots, you have wadded great-coats, like archbish-
ops, you lodge on the first floor in houses that have porters,
you eat truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs the bunch
in the month of January, and green peas, you gorge your-
selves, and when you want to know whether it is cold, you
look in the papers to see what the engineer Chevalier’s ther-
mometer says about it. We, it is we who are thermometers.
We don’t need to go out and look on the quay at the corner
of the Tour de l’Horologe, to find out the number of degrees
of cold; we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the
ice forming round our hearts, and we say: ‘There is no God!’
And you come to our caverns, yes our caverns, for the pur-
pose of calling us villains! But we’ll devour you! But we’ll
devour you, poor little things! Just see here, Mister million-
naire: I have been a solid man, I have held a license, I have
been an elector, I am a bourgeois, that I am! And it’s quite
possible that you are not!’
Here Thenardier took a step towards the men who stood
near the door, and added with a shudder:—
‘When I think that he has dared to come here and talk to
me like a cobbler!’
Then addressing M. Leblanc with a fresh outburst of
frenzy:—
‘And listen to this also, Mister philanthropist! I’m not a
suspicious character, not a bit of it! I’m not a man whose
name nobody knows, and who comes and abducts children
from houses! I’m an old French soldier, I ought to have been
decorated! I was at Waterloo, so I was! And in the battle I
saved a general called the Comte of I don’t know what. He

1356 Les Miserables