sutlers of which we have spoken,
beating about the country, selling to some, stealing from others, and
travelling like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety
cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with an instinct for always
attaching himself to the victorious army. This campaign ended, and
having, as he said, "some quibus," he had come to Montfermeil and set up
an inn there.

This quibus, composed of purses and watches, of gold rings and silver
crosses, gathered in harvest-time in furrows sown with corpses, did
not amount to a large total, and did not carry this sutler turned
eating-house-keeper very far.

Thenardier had that peculiar rectilinear something about his gestures
which, accompanied by an oath, recalls the barracks, and by a sign
of the cross, the seminary. He was a fine talker. He allowed it to be
thought that he was an educated man. Nevertheless, the schoolmaster had
noticed that he pronounced improperly.[12]

He composed the travellers' tariff card in a superior manner, but
practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it.
Thenardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever. He did not disdain
his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them. This giantess
was jealous. 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
acc