Thursday
I’ve been listening to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables as I drive around (it’s 46 disks in all!) and have come across a character who, if he were an actual person alive today, would be a Trump supporter and possibly one of the Capitol Hill insurrectionists. I’ve encountered few literary villains more despicable than Thénardier, a failed innkeeper-turned-bandit who, in one revealing scene, attempts to extort thousands from Jean Valjean, whom he has just captured.
His rant to the bound Valjean is a toxic mixture of resentment, grievance, inflated self-regard, envy, and self-pity. Thénardier magnifies his military successes—he was actually a battlefield scavenger who saved an officer by accident at Waterloo—while regarding the financial success of others as a personal insult. Many of the Capitol Hill insurrectionists appear to have had their own ongoing rants, much of it voiced on social media.
Don’t worry if you can’t follow everything that Thénerdier is talking about, which would require too much plot summary. It’s enough to know that he thinks Valjean is a millionaire philanthropist and that none of his claims are true. Indeed, he exploited “the Lark” to such an appalling extent that Valjean had to rescue her from his clutches:
Parbleu! You made game of me in the past! You are the cause of all my misfortunes! For fifteen hundred francs you got a girl whom I had, and who certainly belonged to rich people, and who had already brought in a great deal of money, and from whom I might have extracted enough to live on all my life! A girl who would have made up to me for everything that I lost in that vile cook-shop, where there was nothing but one continual row, and where, like a fool, I ate up my last farthing! Oh! I wish all the wine folks drank in my house had been poison to those who drank it! …
Thénardier paused. He was out of breath. His little, narrow chest panted like a forge bellows. His eyes were full of the ignoble happiness of a feeble, cruel, and cowardly creature, which finds that it can, at last, harass what it has feared, and insult what it has flattered, the joy of a dwarf who should be able to set his heel on the head of Goliath, the joy of a jackal which is beginning to rend a sick bull, so nearly dead that he can no longer defend himself, but sufficiently alive to suffer still.
And further on, after Valjean says, “I see you are a villain”:
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 greatcoats, 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!’ And you come to our caverns, yes our caverns, for the purpose of calling us villains! But we’ll devour you! But we’ll devour you, poor little things! Just see here, Mister millionnaire: I have been a solid man, I have held a license, I have been an elector, I am a bourgeois, that I am! And it’s quite possible that you are not!”
Thénardier concludes his rant with his belief that he is entitled to Valjean’s fortune:
I am a soldier of Waterloo, by all the furies! And now that I have had the goodness to tell you all this, let’s have an end of it. I want money, I want a deal of money, I must have an enormous lot of money, or I’ll exterminate you, by the thunder of the good God!”
Valjean, like members of Congress, just barely escapes. Thénardier, meanwhile, ends up where many of the Capitol Hill insurrectionists are headed–which is to say, in the hands of the police.