Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
Thenardier cast upon Marius the sovereign glance of a conquered man who lays his hand once more upon the victory, and who has just regained, in one instant, all the ground which he has lost. But the smile returned instantly. The inferior's triumph in the presence of his superior must be wheedling. Thenardier contented himself with saying to Marius: "Monsieur le Baron, we are on the wrong track."
Thenardier had been in solitary confinement in one of these cages since the night of the 3d of February. No one was ever able to discover how, and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring, and secreting a bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues, with which a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs, or Sleep-compellers, rendered famous.
Then, her mind still running on her romance, she resumed humming between her teeth: "It must be so; I am a knight, And I am off to Palestine." This Madame Thenardier was a sandy-complexioned woman, thin and angular the type of the soldier's wife in all its unpleasantness; and what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal of romances.
He sent them three hundred francs, telling them to pay themselves from that sum, and to fetch the child instantly to M. sur M., where her sick mother required her presence. This dazzled Thenardier. "The devil!" said the man to his wife; "don't let's allow the child to go. This lark is going to turn into a milch cow. I see through it. Some ninny has taken a fancy to the mother."
And Marius, ignorant of the real scene in the battle field of Waterloo, was not aware of the peculiar detail, that his father, so far as Thenardier was concerned was in the strange position of being indebted to the latter for his life, without being indebted to him for any gratitude. None of the various agents whom Marius employed succeeded in discovering any trace of Thenardier.
"But prove it!" Thenardier drew from his pocket a large envelope of gray paper, which seemed to contain sheets folded in different sizes. "I have my papers," he said calmly. And he added: "Monsieur le Baron, in your interests I desired to know Jean Valjean thoroughly. I say that Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine are one and the same man, and I say that Javert had no other assassin than Javert.
M. Leblanc had written the whole of this. Thenardier resumed: "Ah! erase 'come with confidence'; that might lead her to suppose that everything was not as it should be, and that distrust is possible." M. Leblanc erased the three words. "Now," pursued Thenardier, "sign it. What's your name?" The prisoner laid down the pen and demanded: "For whom is this letter?"
Thenardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt which he used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order to preserve it from the rats," as he said. As Thenardier was kept in sight, no objection had been made to this spike. Still, it was remembered afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: "It would be better to let him have only a wooden spike."
When I caught sight of your little ones, so pretty, so clean, and so happy, it overwhelmed me. I said: 'Here is a good mother. That is just the thing; that will make three sisters. And then, it will not be long before I return. Will you keep my child for me?" "I must see about it," replied the Thenardier. "I will give you six francs a month."
I think that he has recently been keeping a little inn, in a village in the neighborhood of Paris, at Chelles or Montfermeil. If my son meets him, he will do all the good he can to Thenardier." Marius took this paper and preserved it, not out of duty to his father, but because of that vague respect for death which is always imperious in the heart of man. Nothing remained of the colonel.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking