Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the thirty-eighth chapter of Les Miserables.

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>> Speaker A: Take a look, in the book and let's see

what we can find.

Take it chapter by chapter.

>> Speaker B: One fight M at a time.

>> Brie Carlisle: So.

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>> Brie Carlisle: Welcome.

>> Brie Carlisle: To bite at a time books where we read you your favorite

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>> Brie Carlisle: Values today well be

continuing.

Les Miserable by Victor Hugo

chapter two first sketch

of two unprepossessing figures.

The mouse which had been caught

was a pitiful specimen, but the cat

rejoices even over a lean mouse.

Who were these thenardiers? Let

us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the

sketch later on. These beings

belonged to that bastard class, composed of coarse people

who have been successful, and of intelligent

people who have descended in the scale which is

between the class called middle and the class

dominated as inferior, and which

combines some of the defects of the second with nearly all

the vices of the first, without possessing the

generous impulse of the working man, nor the honest

order of the bourgeois. They were of those

dwarfed natures, which, if a dull fire, chances

to warm them up easily become

monstrous. There was in the woman a

substratum of the brute, and in the man the

material for a blackguard. Both were

susceptible in the highest degree of the sort of

hideous progress which is accomplished in the direction of

evil. There exist crab like

souls which are continually retreating towards the

darkness, retrograding in life rather than

advancing, employing experience to

augment their deformity, growing incessantly

worse and becoming more and more impregnated

with an ever augmenting blackness.

This man and woman possessed such

souls. Thenardier in particular

was troublesome for a physiognomist.

One can only look at some men to distrust them,

for one feels that they are dark in both directions,

they are uneasy in the rear and threatening in the front.

Theres something of the unknown about them.

One can no more answer for what they have done than for what

they will do. The shadow which they bear in

their glance denounces them from merely

hearing them utter a word or seeing them make a

gesture, one obtains a glimpse of somber

secrets in their past and of somber mysteries in their

future. This

thenardier, if he himself was to be

believed, had been a soldier, a

sergeant. He said he had probably been

through the campaign of 1815 and had

even conducted himself with tolerable valor. It would

seem we shall see later on how

much truth there was in this. The sign of his

hostelry was an allusion to one of his feats of

arms. He had painted it himself, for

he knew how to do a little of everything, and

badly. It was at the epoch

when the ancient classical romance, which,

after having been clelly, was no longer anything

but Loriska, still noble, but ever

more and more vulgar. Having fallen from

Mademoiselle de Scuderi to Madame Bernard

Malarme, and from Madame de

Lafayette to Madame Barthelme, Hadot

was setting the loving hearts of the portress of Paris

aflame and even ravaging the suburbs.

To some extent, Madame Thenardier was

just intelligent enough to read this sort of books.

She lived on them. In them she drowned.

What brain she possessed. This had given

her, when very young and even a little

later, a sort of pensive attitude towards her

husband, a scamp of a certain depth,

a ruffian, lettered to the extent of the grammar,

coarse and fine at one and the same time,

but so far as sentimentalism was

concerned, given to the perusal of Pigault

Lebrun, and in what concerns the sex, as he said in his

jargon, a downright unmitigated

lout. His wife was twelve or 15 years

younger than he was later on, when her

hair, arranged in a romantically drooping

fashion, began to grow grey, when the megara began

to be developed from the pamela, the female

thenardier was nothing but a coarse, vicious woman

who had dabbled in stupid romances.

Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity.

The result was that her eldest daughter was named

Aponine, as, for the younger. The poor little thing

came near, being called Gulnare. I know not

to what diversion affected by a romance of

Ducre Duminel she owed the fact that she

merely bore the name of Azelma. However,

we will remark, by the way, everything was

not ridiculous and superficial in that curious epic to which we

are alluding, and which may be designated as the

anarchy of baptismal names. By the side

of this romantic element which we have just indicated, there

is a social symptom. It is not

rare for the neet herds boy nowadays to bear the name of

Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and

for the viscount, if there are still any

viscounts, to be called Thomas, Pierre, or

Jacques. This

displacement, which places the

elegant name on the plebeian and the rustic name on the

aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of

equality. The irresistible penetration of

the new inspiration is there, as everywhere else.

Beneath this apparent discord, theres a great and

profound the French Revolution.

Thank you for joining Byte at a timebooks today. while we read a bite

of one of your favorite classics. Again, my

name is Bree Carlisle, and I hope you come back

tomorrow for the next bite of le

Miserable.

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>> Speaker A: Take a look and let's

see what we can find.

>> Speaker B: Take it chapter by chapter.

>> Speaker A: One.