#lm 1.4.2

[les-mis-daily-doodles]

what a very normal family!!

[scuttleton]

LM 1.4.2

The skeevy vibes got worse immediately with the chapter title: First Sketch of Two Shady Characters

It was a very poor mouse that had been caught, but the cat is happy even with a scraggy mouse. Who were these Thénardiers? Let us say a few words about them right now. We will complete the sketch later.

A few words = at least one chapter of several pages long minimum

Complete the sketch later = also at least one chapter of several pages long minimum

These individuals belonged to that bastard class between the so-called middle class and the so-called lower class, which is made up of crass people who have come up in the world and clever people who have gone down, and combines some of the faults of the latter with nearly all the vices of the former without having the generous impulse of the working man or the law-abiding decency of the solid citizen.

Alright that probably says everything we need to set things u—

They were of that stunted nature that easily turns monstrous if some dark passion is by chance kindled in them. There was in the woman the essence of a bully and in the man the makings of a scoundrel. Both were most highly susceptible to the sort of hideous progress that occurs in the development of evil. There are souls like lobsters, continually retreating into the shadows, retrogressing rather than advancing through life, using experience to add to their monstrosity, becoming ever more wicked and ever more imbued with an intensifying foulness. This man and this woman were such souls.

Okay so they're actually Worse™, and that's probably enough to set up their chara—

[2 pages later]

[okay rewinding though I need to read those]

If he was to be believed, this fellow Thénardier had been a soldier, a sergeant, he said. He had probably taken part in the campaign of 1815, and had even acquitted himself quite bravely, it would seem. We shall see later what the truth of this was.

🤨 Now hold on. Now hold on a second. This skeevy guy is said to have saved Georges Pontmercy, BY Georges Pontmercy. He had to have like... Been there? Somehow? For Georges to even know his name...??? Oh boy.

for he knew how to do a little of everything, badly.

HAHA

Later, when her Romantically cascading hair began to turn grey, when out of Pamela emerged Megaera, the Thénardier woman was just a nasty fat woman with a taste for silly novels.

(spritzing Hugo with water) BAD HUGO. STOP THAT.

Éponine and Azelma... If I'm understanding this text right, it sounds like Hugo is saying that M Thénardier is so lost in her romance(?) novels or whatever that she named her kids something kind of over the top fictional? Like kids getting named Khaleesi or Anakin.

I personally think they're both nice names, but I am not French and not from the early 19th century. Though Éponine reminds me of Epona. Is there horse origins in that name? Azelma reminds me of a flower. Probably because Azalea.

Anyway, footnote says Éponine is inspired by the name Eponina, aka "a woman famed for her heroic devotion to her husband Julius Sabinus, a Gaul who led a rebellion against the Romans in AD 69." There was no actual note on the name Azelma though, just the author implied to have had to do with where Thénardier got the name, so if someone has a bit more background on the character or person Azelma was taken from, I'd be kinda curious.

So Cosette or Éponine... shall either of them be our Lanoire? I wonder... But I guess I'll find out one day.

1.4.3

Just being wicked is not enough to prosper.

Well yeah. There's a whole song about that.

The following month they were again in need of money. The woman took Cosette’s clothes to Paris and pawned them for sixty francs. Once that sum was spent, the Thénardiers came to regard the little girl as no more than a child they had taken in out of charity, and treated her accordingly. As she no longer had any clothes of her own they dressed her in the little Thénardier girls’ cast-off petticoats and chemises, that is to say, in rags. They fed her on everyone’s scraps – a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat. In fact the cat and the dog were her habitual dining companions. Cosette ate with them under the table, from a wooden bowl like theirs.

I'M????

Bro what the heck

At the end of the first six months the mother sent seven francs for the seventh month, and continued sending her payments quite punctually month by month. Before the year was over Thénardier said, ‘A fine favour she’s doing us! How does she expect us to manage on her seven francs?’ And he wrote demanding twelve francs. Led by them to believe that her child was happy ‘and doing well’, the mother submitted to the demand and sent the twelve francs.

Reloading the cannon. New target on the hit list.

Certain natures are incapable of loving on the one hand without hating on the other. Madame Thénardier loved her two daughters passionately, which meant she hated the outsider. . . . Cosette could not make a single move that did not bring down on her a hailstorm of violent and undeserved punishments. Sweet defenceless creature, to whom this world and God must have been a complete mystery, incessantly punished, scolded, ill-used and beaten, seeing beside her two little creatures just like her who lived within the glow of a kindly light!

Madame Thénardier was cruel to Cosette. Éponine and Azelma were cruel. Children at that age are simply copies of their mother. They come in a smaller size, that is all.

Hoping they grow hoping they change hoping they improve 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

Meanwhile, having learned by who knows what obscure channels that the child was probably illegitimate and that the mother could not acknowledge her as her own, Thénardier demanded fifteen francs a month, saying ‘the creature’ was growing up and ‘ eating ’, and threatening to turn her out. ‘She’d better not give me any trouble!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll send her brat back to her and her little secrets will blow up in her face. I must have more.’

Die Faster.

before she was even five, she became the household servant.

LEAVE HER ALOOOONE

If this mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of those three years, she would not have recognized her child. So pretty and fresh when she first came to that house, Cosette was now thin and pale. She had an indefinably anxious look. ‘Sly,’ said the Thénardiers. Injustice had made her resentful and misery had made her ugly. All that was left of her prettiness were those lovely eyes that were pitiful to behold because, huge as they were, the sadness that was visible in them appeared so much the greater.

Stop....

It was a heart-breaking thing to see in winter, this poor child, not yet six years old, shivering in her tattered old rags of coarse cloth, sweeping the street before daylight with an enormous broom in her tiny red hands and a teardrop in those big eyes. Locally, they called her Alouette.* The common people, who like figurative images, had chosen to give this name to this tiny creature, no bigger than a bird, trembling, frightened and shivering, the first one awake every morning, in the house and in the village, always out on the street or in the fields before daybreak. Only, poor Alouette never sang. * ‘L’alouette’ is the morning bird ‘the lark’.

STOPPP

[lmchaptertitlebracket]

Round 2, Matchup 23: I.iv.2 vs II.v.10

Which chapter title do you prefer?

First Sketch of Two Shady Characters

In Which Is Explained How Javert Lost the Game

Voting ended onJun 9, 2025

[lesmisletters-daily]

First Sketch Of Two Unprepossessing Figures

Les Mis Letters reading club explores one chapter of Les Misérables every day. Join us on Discord, Substack - or share your thoughts right here on tumblr - today's tag is #lm 1.4.2

The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the cat rejoices even over a lean mouse.

Who were these Thénardiers?

Let us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the sketch later on.

These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended in the scale, which is between the class called “middle” and the class denominated as “inferior,” and which combines some of the defects of the second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the bourgeois.

They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warm them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a substratum of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both were susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness, retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and woman possessed such souls.

Thénardier, in particular, was troublesome for a physiognomist. One can only look at some men to distrust them; for one feels that they are dark in both directions. They are uneasy in the rear and threatening in front. There is something of the unknown about them. One can no more answer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadow which they bear in their glance denounces them. From merely hearing them utter a word or seeing them make a gesture, one obtains a glimpse of sombre secrets in their past and of sombre mysteries in their future.

This Thénardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier—a sergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815, and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. We shall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of his hostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it himself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.

It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after having been <i>Clélie</i>, was no longer anything but <i>Lodoïska</i>, still noble, but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle de Scudéri to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to Madame Barthélemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the portresses of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some extent. Madame Thénardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort of books. She lived on them. In them she drowned what brains she possessed. This had given her, when very young, and even a little later, a sort of pensive attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a certain depth, a ruffian lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse and fine at one and the same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was concerned, given to the perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and “in what concerns the sex,” as he said in his jargon—a downright, unmitigated lout. His wife was twelve or fifteen years younger than he was. Later on, when her hair, arranged in a romantically drooping fashion, began to grow gray, when the Megæra began to be developed from the Pamela, the female Thénardier was nothing but a coarse, vicious woman, who had dabbled in stupid romances. Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity. The result was that her eldest daughter was named Éponine; as for the younger, the poor little thing came near being called Gulnare; I know not to what diversion, effected by a romance of Ducray-Dumenil, she owed the fact that she merely bore the name of Azelma.

However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous and superficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which may be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names. By the side of this romantic element which we have just indicated there is the social symptom. It is not rare for the neatherd’s boy nowadays to bear the name of Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte—if there are still any vicomtes—to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This displacement, which places the “elegant” name on the plebeian and the rustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of equality. The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there as everywhere else. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and a profound thing,—the French Revolution.

[cliozaur]

The initial introduction of the Thénardiers, for some reason, takes an unfortunate turn. They are dreadful people, especially M. Thénardier, who stands out as the worst, but not precisely for the reasons outlined in this chapter. "These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended in the scale, which is between the class called 'middle' and the class denominated as 'inferior.'" In Hugo’s eyes, this is a grave sin. And he expends a considerable amount of energy mocking Mme Thénardier for her reading taste. In this aspect, he aligns with moralizers of the eighteenth century who blamed women reading romances for various ills, one being that such women harbour unrealistic expectations of marriage, leaving them unprepared for the harsh realities of family life. Hugo also ridicules her for choosing what he deems pretentious names for her children. Personally, I find both names nice and wonder from which romance she took the name Éponine.

However, this description aptly captures the essence of this pair: “Both were susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress which is accomplished in the direction of evil.” I appreciate the concept of their backward progress or regression, not only in moral terms but also in economic terms. We first encounter them when they are relatively well-off, only to find them later at the bottom of society.

[pontmercii]

So. I'm in the chapter "First sketch of two unprepossessing figures" and this is the paragraph I found interesting:

These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended in the scale, which is between the class called “middle” and the class denominated as “inferior,” and which combines some of the defects of the second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the bourgeois.

What caught my eye was a note in my copy (I have an annotated copy of la Pléiade with 300 pages of notes). So apparently in Les Misères the text was slightly different :

"[The Thénardier belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended in the scale], which is between the people (peuple) and the bourgeoisie".

Why did he change the "people-bourgeoisie" to "middle class-inferior class"? I mean this change is most probably entirely insignificant, and it is probably explained by the fact that in Les Misères the rest of the chapter is not included at all. Soo yeah idk. I still prefer the old version because I feel it conveys the meaning a little bit better.

[pureanonofficial]

LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - First Sketch of Two Unprepossessing Figures, LM 1.4.2 (Les Miserables 1925)

This Thénardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier—a sergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815, and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. We shall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of his hostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it himself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.

[dolphin1812]

As much as I hate the Thenardiers, Hugo’s description of them is troubling, with his focus on the inherent qualities of classes and on physiognomy. On the one hand, the idea that they’re inherently suspicious appearance-wise stresses the extent to which Fantine is a poor judge of character. If their natures are so obvious to everyone else from a glance, then for her to trust them is even more surprising, and she must be really oblivious (and desperate) to do so. Of course, Hugo has some awareness about his discussion of class, noting that the lower class is “denominated” as inferior rather than saying it actually is. He also adds that most of the Thenardier’s faults are bourgeois ones, although I think that the overall use of class as character is still bad.

That being said, I have to admit that “crab-like souls” is a very funny mental image. I now imagine the Thenardiers’ consciences crab-walking away every time they do something bad.

Hugo’s description of Mme Thenardier in particular feels a bit classist and sexist with his condemnation of her love of romances. The humorous aspect (saddling her children with really dramatic names because these books have inspired her) does land, to an extent (although it seems unfair to criticize her for thinking of Eponine when Cosette’s name is Euphrasie). However, it’s not her fault that she doesn’t have enough of an education to read other books; it’s impressive that she can read at all. And even if that were not an issue, it’s understandable that she’d enjoy the escapist aspect of these stories when stuck in a marriage with M Thenardier, who doesn’t seem to fulfill any of her romantic expectations (and is, of course, a horrible person outside of that). 

It is kind of funny to end the chapter on the note that the range of plain and dramatic names is a symbol of the French Revolution, though. I was not expecting the Thenardiers to represent radical equality in any way, but I guess they do in this one respect.