ustomed to screw up their eyes to gaze through marine glasses.
Thenardier was a statesman.

Every new-comer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame
Thenardier, "There is the master of the house." A mistake. She was not
even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress. She worked;
he created. He directed everything by a sort of invisible and constant
magnetic action. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a sign; the
mastodon obeyed. Thenardier was a sort of special and sovereign being in
Madame Thenardier's eyes, though she did not thoroughly realize it.
She was possessed of virtues after her own kind; if she had ever had a
disagreement as to any detail with "Monsieur Thenardier,"--which was
an inadmissible hypothesis, by the way,--she would not have blamed
her husband in public on any subject whatever. She would never have
committed "before strangers" that mistake so often committed by women,
and which is called in parliamentary language, "exposing the crown."
Although their concord had only evil as its result, there was
contemplation in Madame Thenardier's submission to her husband. That
mountain of noise and of flesh moved under the little finger of that
frail despot. Viewed on its dwarfed and grotesque side, this was that
grand and universal thing, the adoration of mind by matter; for certain
ugly features have a cause in the very depths of eternal beauty. There
was an unknown quantity about Thenardier; hence the absolute empire
of the man over that woman. At certain moments she beheld him like a
lighted candle; at others she felt him like a claw.

This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her
children, and who did not fear any one except her husband. She was a
mother because she was mammiferous. But her maternity stopped short with
her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys. The man had
but one thought,--how to enrich himself.

He did not succeed in this. A theatre worthy of this great talent was
lacking. Thenardier was ruining himself at Montfermeil, if ruin is
possible to zero; in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees this penniless scamp
would have become a millionaire; but an inn-keeper must browse where
fate has hitched him.

It will be understood that the word inn-keeper is here employed in a
restricted sense, and does not extend to an entire class.

In this same year, 1823, Thenardier was burdened with about fifteen
hundred francs' worth of pett