y old buck! Ah! You don't
remember! You don't see who I am?"

"Excuse me, sir," said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent, which at
that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, "I see that you are
a villain!"

Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a
susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this word
"villain," the female Thenardier sprang from the bed, Thenardier grasped
his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands. "Don't you
stir!" he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc:--

"Villain! Yes, I know that you call us that, you rich gentlemen! Stop!
it's true that I became bankrupt, that I am in hiding, that I have no
bread, that I have not a single sou, that I am a villain! It's three
days since I have had anything to eat, so I'm a villain! Ah! you folks
warm your feet, you have Sakoski boots, you have wadded great-coats,
like archbishops, 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 yourselves, and when
you want to know whether it is cold, you look in the papers to see what
the engineer Chevalier's thermometer 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 purpose of calling us villains! But we'll devour
you! But we'll devour you, poor little things! Just see here, Mister
millionnaire: 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 told
me his name