product of a wench engrafted on a fishwife.
When one heard her speak, one said, "That is a gendarme"; when one saw her drink, one said, "That is a carter"; when one saw her handle Cosette, one said, "That is the hangman." One of her teeth projected when her face was in repose.
Thenardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, feeble man, who had a sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy.
His cunning began here; he smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite to everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing. He had the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters. He greatly resembled the portraits of the Abbe Delille. His coquetry consisted in drinking with the carters.
No one had ever succeeded in rendering him drunk.
He smoked a big pipe. He wore a blouse, and under his blouse an old black coat.
He made pretensions to literature and to materialism.
There were certain names which he often pronounced to support whatever things he might be saying,--Voltaire, Raynal, Parny, and, singularly enough, Saint Augustine.
He declared that he had "a system."
In addition, he was a great swindler.
A filousophe [philosophe], a scientific thief. The species does exist.
It will be remembered that he pretended to have served in the army; he was in the habit of relating with exuberance, how, being a sergeant in the 6th or the 9th light something or other, at Waterloo, he had alone, and in the presence of a squadron of death-dealing hussars, covered with his body and saved from death, in the midst of the grape-shot, "a general, who had been dangerously wounded."