I read Victor Hugo's LES MISERABLES and thought I'd mention
the Th鮡rdiers. (That's an e with an acute accent--I hope it
comes out OK in your screen. I'll just use a regular e
now.)
The Thenardiers are introduced fairly early in the
novel--though in a book with 1200 pages, early is relative.
Fantine, a nice young woman who got herself pregnant, needs
someone to look after her baby. She wrongly belives Madame
Thenardier to be a nice woman and leaves Cosette with her.
Over the next few years she's driven to prostitution and even
sells her two front teeth to pay the Thenardiers to keep
Cosette in what she thinks is a life of comfort. The
Thenardiers use all the money themselves and use Cosette as a
servant, treating her horribly. By the time she's rescured by
Jean Valjean when she's eight, she's uneducated,
undernourished, and dressed in rags.
The Thenardiers return years later in Paris. They've had a
few sons, but got rid of them. Thenardier is part of the
Paris underworld and working as a con man (writing the 1820s
French equivalent of those e-mails you get from Nigerian
widows who just need a bit of help getting their millions to
safety). The two Thenardier daughters, who had been pampered
while Cosette starved, are now so poor they don't have shoes.
Thenardier pimps the older one. He runs into Jean Valjean,
recognizes him, and with the help of some tough hoods tries
to get money out of him, but Valjean's too tough and
smart.
I mention them because they fit into that proto-noir category
that we sometimes discuss. Hugo is a Romantic writer, which
is sort of the opposite of noir, but the Thenardiers are
nasty people, lowlifes, always short of money and doing
whatever they can to get it. Other characters in the book get
lofty speeches and grand sentiments, but the Thenardiers get
fairly terse writing with lots of short conversation. If
their story were told on its own, it'd be noir. Come to think
of it, that could make a good novel, especially if updated
and told in a modern way. "Fifty bucks. I was short fifty
bucks and I'd be in court the next day if I didn't find it
soon. Then I heard a woman outside talking to my wife,
wondering if we could take care of her daughter while she
worked. She had money--not enough so she didn't have to work,
but enough to keep me from jail for now. And we could always
use a servant, even a five-year-old."
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : www.miskatonic.org : www.frbr.org
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