Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the ninety-third 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. One

fight M at a time

so many adventures and

mountains we can climb

to give word for word, line by

line, one bite at a time.

>> Brie Carlisle: Welcome to bite at a time books where we read you your

favorite classics, one byte at a time. my name is

Bre Carlisle and I love to read and wanted to

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today well be continuing.

>> Brie Carlisle: Les miserables by Victor Hugo

Book third accomplishment of the

promise made to the dead woman

chapter one the water question at Mont

Fermier

Montfermeil is situated between livery

and Chelles, on the southern edge of that

lofty tableland which separates the

Orc from the Marne. At the present

day, it is a tolerably large town,

ornamented all the year through with plaster villas

and on Sundays with beaming bourgois.

In 1823, there were

at Mont Fermier neither so many white houses nor

so many well satisfied citizens. It

was only a village in the forest.

Some pleasure houses of the last century were to be met with

there, to be sure, which were recognizable by

their grand air, their balconies and twisted

ironization, and their long windows, whose

tiny panes cast all sorts of varying shades of

green on the white of the closed shutters.

mont Fermier was nonetheless a village.

Retired cloth merchants and rusticating attorneys

had not discovered it as yet. It was a

peaceful and charming place which was

not on the road to anywhere. There people

lived, and cheaply that peasant rustic

life which is so bounteous and so easy.

Only water was rare there. On account of the

elevation of the plateau, it was necessary

to fetch it from a considerable distance.

The end of the village towards Gagny drew its water from the

magnificent ponds which exist in the woods there.

The other end, which surrounds the

church and which lies in the direction of Chelles, found

drinking water only a little spring halfway down the

slope near the road to Chells, about a quarter of

an hour from Mont Fermiere. Thus

each household found it hard work to keep supplied with

water. The large houses,

the aristocracy, of which the thenardier tavern formed

a part, paid half a farthing, a bucketful, to a man

who made a business of it, and who earned about eight

sous a day in his enterprise of supplying Montfermeil with

water. But this good man

only worked until 07:00 in the evening in summer

and five in winter and night once

come, and the shutters on the ground floor once closed,

he who had no water to drink went to fetch it for

himself, or did without it.

This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the

reader has probably not forgotten. Little

Cosette. It will be remembered that

Cosette was useful to the thenardiers in two ways.

They made the mother pay them and they made the child

serve them. So when the mother ceased to pale

together, the reason for which we have read in

preceding chapters, the thenardiers kept

Cosette. she took the place of a servant in their house.

In this capacity she, it was who ran to

fetch water when it was required. So the

child, who was greatly terrified at the idea of going to the spring

at night, took great care that water should never

be lacking in the house.

Christmas of the year 1823 was

particularly brilliant. At Mont Fermier,

the beginning of the winter had been mild. There had

been neither snow, nor frost up to that time.

Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained permission of the mayor

to erect their booths in the principal street of the village,

and a band of itinerant merchants, under

protection of the same tolerance, had constructed

their stalls on the church square and even

extended them into Bollinger alley, where,

as, the reader will perhaps remember, St. Marier's

hostelry was situated. These people

filled the inns and drinking shops and communicated to

that tranquil little district a noisy and joyous

life. In order to play the part

of a faithful historian, we ought even to add, that

among the curiosities displayed in the square.

There was a menagerie in which frightful

clowns, clad in rags and coming,

no one knew whence, exhibited to the peasants of

Mont Fermier in 1823. One of those horrible

brazilian vultures, such as our Royal Museum

did not possess until 1845, which have

a tricoloured cockade for an eye. I believe

that naturalists call this bird caracara

polyboris. It belongs to the order of

the Apicites and to the family of the vultures.

Some good old bonapartist soldiers who had retired

to the village went to see this creature with great devotion.

Mountbanks gave out that the tricoloured cockade was

a unique phenomenon made by God expressly for their

menagerie. On Christmas Eve

itself, a number of men,

carters and peddlers were seated at

table drinking and smoking around four or five

candles in the public room of thenardiers hostelry.

This room resembled all drinking shop

tables, pewter jugs, bottles,

drinkers, smokers, but m little light

and a great deal of noise. The date of the year

1823 was indicated nevertheless

by two objects which were then fashionable

in the bourgois de Witt,

a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed tin.

The female thenardier was attending to the supper which was

roasting in front of a clear fire. Her husband

was drinking with his customers and talking

politics. Besides political

conversations which had for their principal subjects

the spanish war and Monsieur le duc

d'Anglemine, strictly local, parentheses,

like the following were audible amid the uproar

about Nantiere and surcenist. The vines have

flourished greatly. When ten pieces were reckoned on,

there have been twelve. They have yielded a great deal

of juice under the press, but the grapes cannot be

ripe in those parts. The grapes should not be ripe.

The wine turns oily as soon as spring comes,

and it is very thin wine. There are wines poorer

even in these. The grapes must be gathered, while

green, etcetera, or a

miller would call out. Are we responsible for what is in

the sacs? We find in them a quantity of small seed

which we cannot sift out, in which we are obliged to send

through the millstones. There are tares,

fennel, vetches, hemp seed, foxtail,

and a host of other weeds, not to mention

pebbles which abound in certain wheat, especially

in breton wheat. Im not fond of grinding

breton wheat any more than long sawyers like to saw beams

with nails in them. You can judge of the bad

dust that makes in grinding. And then people

complain of the flour theyre in the

wrong. The flour is no fault of

ours. In a space between two

windows, a mower who was seated at table with

a landed proprietor was fixing on a price for some meadow work to

be performed in the spring, was saying, it does no

harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better.

Dew is a good thing, sir. It makes no difference with

that grass. Your grass is young and very

hard to cut. Still, its terribly tender. It

yields before the iron. Etcetera,

Cosette was in her usual place, seated on

the crossbar of the kitchen table near the chimney.

She was in rags, her bare feet

were thrust into wooden shoes, and by the firelight

she was engaged in knitting woolen stockings destined for the

young fenardiers. A very young

kitten was playing about among the chairs.

Laughter and chatter were audible in the adjoining

room from two fresh childrens voices.

It was aponine and azelma. in the chimney corner, a cat

of nine tails was hanging on a nail.

At intervals, the cry of a very young child,

which was somewhere in the house, rang through the noise of the dram

shop. It was a little boy who had been

born to the thenardiers during one of the preceding

winters. She did not know why. She said,

the result of the cold and who was a little more

than three years old. The mother had nursed

him, but she did not love him when the

persistent clamor of the brat became too annoying. Your

son is squalling, thenardier would say. do go and see what

he wants. Bah, the mother would

reply. He bothers me. And the

neglected child continued to shriek in the dark.

Thank you for joining bite at a time books today while

we read a bite of one of your favorite classics.

Again, my name is Brie Carlisle and

I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite

of Le Miserable.

>> Brie Carlisle: Dont forget to sign up for our

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