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_ Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge
of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne.
At the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year
through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois.
In 1823 there were at Montfermeil neither so many white houses nor
so many well-satisfied citizens: it was only a village in the forest.
Some pleasure-houses of the last century were to be met with there,
to be sure, which were recognizable by their grand air, their balconies
in twisted iron, and their long windows, whose tiny panes cast all
sorts of varying shades of green on the white of the closed shutters;
but Montfermeil was none the less a village. Retired cloth-merchants
and rusticating attorneys had not discovered it as yet; it was a
peaceful and charming place, which was not on the road to anywhere:
there people lived, and cheaply, that peasant rustic life which is
so bounteous and so easy; only, water was rare there, on account
of the elevation of the plateau.
It was necessary to fetch it from a considerable distance;
the end of the village towards Gagny drew its water from the
magnificent ponds which exist in the woods there. The other end,
which surrounds the church and which lies in the direction of Chelles,
found drinking-water only at a little spring half-way down the slope,
near the road to Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil.
Thus each household found it hard work to keep supplied with water.
The large houses, the aristocracy, of which the Thenardier tavern
formed a part, paid half a farthing a bucketful to a man who made a
business of it, and who earned about eight sous a day in his enterprise
of supplying Montfermeil with water; but this good man only worked
until seven o'clock in the evening in summer, and five in winter;
and night once come and the shutters on the ground floor once closed,
he who had no water to drink went to fetch it for himself or did
without it.
This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the reader
has probably not forgotten,--little Cosette. It will be remembered
that Cosette was useful to the Thenardiers in two ways:
they made the mother pay them, and they made the child serve them.
So when the mother ceased to pay altogether, the reason for which we
have read in preceding chapters, the Thenardiers kept Cosette.
She took the place of a servant in their house. In this capacity she
it was who ran to fetch water when it was required. So the child,
who was greatly terrified at the idea of going to the spring at night,
took great care that water should never be lacking in the house.
Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil.
The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow
nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained
permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street
of the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection
of the same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square,
and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader
will perhaps remember, the Thenardiers' hostelry was situated.
These people filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated
to that tranquil little district a noisy and joyous life. In order
to play the part of a faithful historian, we ought even to add that,
among the curiosities displayed in the square, there was a menagerie,
in which frightful clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence,
exhibited to the peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those
horrible Brazilian vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not
possess until 1845, and which have a tricolored cockade for an eye.
I believe that naturalists call this bird Caracara Polyborus;
it belongs to the order of the Apicides, and to the family of
the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist soldiers, who had retired
to the village, went to see this creature with great devotion.
The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored cockade was a unique
phenomenon made by God expressly for their menagerie.
On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters, and peddlers,
were seated at table, drinking and smoking around four or five
candles in the public room of Thenardier's hostelry. This room
resembled all drinking-shop rooms,--tables, pewter jugs, bottles,
drinkers, smokers; but little light and a great deal of noise.
The date of the year 1823 was indicated, nevertheless, by two
objects which were then fashionable in the bourgeois class: to wit,
a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed tin. The female Thenardier was
attending to the supper, which was roasting in front of a clear fire;
her husband was drinking with his customers and talking politics.
Besides political conversations which had for their principal subjects
the Spanish war and M. le Duc d'Angouleme, strictly local parentheses,
like the following, were audible amid the uproar:--
"About Nanterre and Suresnes the vines have flourished greatly.
When ten pieces were reckoned on there have been twelve.
They have yielded a great deal of juice under the press."
"But the grapes cannot be ripe?" "In those parts the grapes
should not be ripe; the wine turns oily as soon as spring comes."
"Then it is very thin wine?" "There are wines poorer even than these.
The grapes must be gathered while green." Etc.
Or a miller would call out:--
"Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in them
a quantity of small seed which we cannot sift out, and which we
are obliged to send through the mill-stones; there are tares,
fennel, vetches, hempseed, fox-tail, and a host of other weeds,
not to mention pebbles, which abound in certain wheat, especially in
Breton wheat. I am not fond of grinding Breton wheat, any more than
long-sawyers like to saw beams with nails in them. You can judge
of the bad dust that makes in grinding. And then people complain
of the flour. They are in the wrong. The flour is no fault of ours."
In a space between two windows a mower, who was seated at table
with a landed proprietor who was fixing on a price for some meadow
work to be performed in the spring, was saying:--
"It does no harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better.
Dew is a good thing, sir. It makes no difference with that grass.
Your grass is young and very hard to cut still. It's terribly tender.
It yields before the iron." Etc.
Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar of the kitchen
table near the chimney. She was in rags; her bare feet were thrust
into wooden shoes, and by the firelight she was engaged in knitting
woollen stockings destined for the young Thenardiers. A very young
kitten was playing about among the chairs. Laughter and chatter were
audible in the adjoining room, from two fresh children's voices:
it was Eponine and Azelma.
In the chimney-corner a cat-o'-nine-tails was hanging on a nail.
At intervals the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere
in the house, rang through the noise of the dram-shop. It was
a little boy who had been born to the Thenardiers during one
of the preceding winters,--"she did not know why," she said,
"the result of the cold,"--and who was a little more than three
years old. The mother had nursed him, but she did not love him.
When the persistent clamor of the brat became too annoying,
"Your son is squalling," Thenardier would say; "do go and see
what he wants." "Bah!" the mother would reply, "he bothers me."
And the neglected child continued to shriek in the dark. _
Read next: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK THIRD - ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN: CHAPTER II. Two Complete Portraits
Read previous: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK SECOND - THE SHIP ORION: CHAPTER III. The Ankle-Chain must have undergone a Certain Preparatory Manipulation to be thus broken with a Blow from a Hammer
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