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-balanced 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 human race in general, as he bore within him a deep furnace of hatred.
And since he was one of those people who are continually 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 attentive and penetrating, silent or talkative, according to circumstances, and always highly intelligent.
He had something 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 catching sight of Madame Thenardier, "There is the master of the house." A mistake.
She was not even the mistress.
The husband 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 virtues 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 parliamentary language, "exposing the crown." Although their concord had only evil as its result, there was contemplation in Madame Thenardier's submission to her husband. That mountain of noise and of flesh moved under the little finger of that frail despot.
Viewed on its dwarfed and grotesque side, this was that grand and universal thing, the adoration of mind by matter; for certain ugly features have a cause in the very depths of eternal beauty.
There was an unknown quantity about Thenardier; hence the absolute empire of the man over that woman.
At certain moments she beheld him like a lighted candle; at others she felt him like a claw.
This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her children, and who did not fear any one except her husband. She was a mother because she was mammiferous.
But her maternity stopped short with her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys.
The man had but one thought,--how to enrich himself.