Once again the Thénardiers appear in our story, and we realize that they are and will remain an integral part of the novel. In contrast to Jean Valjean, who represents man rising from animality to sainthood, the Thénardiers are losing their humanity and becoming savage brutes. In describing them, Hugo uses the common realistic and naturalistic technique of presenting selected details of external appearance and letting these suggest the truth of the inner man. By the time he has finished painting Mme. Thénardier's stature, her energy, her great voice, her freckles, her beard, and her jutting tooth, we can see for ourselves that she is a monster, and Hugo does not need to tell us so.
With the innkeeper, Hugo extends his exploration somewhat beyond Thénardier's surface appearance. He adds details of manner, gesture, and speech that are characteristic of the man, and he even goes so far as to say that Thénardier is a hypocritical crook. None of these facts, however, goes beyond what a shrewd observer might deduce about the innkeeper on modest acquaintance, and Hugo is very careful never to take us "inside" Thénardier. "We believe," he says about the details of the man's past; it is a guess, not a statement; and he concludes, "There was some mystery in Thénardier." It is just this ambiguousness, in fact, that makes him so terrifying a personage.
As for Cosette, Hugo sums up the history of her last five years in terms of the most common and vivid of childhood experiences—fear of the dark. The intensity of her fear is so great, however, that we recognize without being told that it is the expression of a thousand other unexpressed real terrors. Her fear of the night is only the outward mark of the fear kindled in her by her total solitude and inhuman treatment.
There were many such abandoned children in nineteenth-century France, rejects of an industrialized society that no longer had any use for them. Fantine herself was an abandoned child, and like Cosette, her name meant only "little one"; but she was raised by the village to which she belonged because in an agricultural society a child can always earn its keep: tend sheep, feed chickens. In the nineteenth-century city, however, there was no way for a small child to help carry the family's economic burden, and it was often abandoned to allow the parents to work.
Cosette is fortunate that she is useful at the inn, for Mme. Thénardier has exactly the temperament of those infamous nineteenth-century baby-nurses who, when their payment for the care of an unwanted baby did not come, promptly tied the infant up in brown paper and dropped it in a river.
Hugo has compensations for Cosette, however. Her St. Nicholas may be only an old convict, but he comes with exactly the right fairytale gifts—the biggest doll in the world and a gold piece down the chimney. What is more, her Christmas miracle is to be a lasting one. It is one of the oldest stories in the world Hugo tells here, but it is always a satisfying one.
