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!''