In this chapter Hugo gives us a more complete view of who the Thenardiers were. He paints portraits of both of them, in all of their damnable details, and then ends the chapter with an explanation of where young Cosette found herself in relation to the two of them. Rather than trey and recap all of this, I’ll share a couple of quotes and then reflect a bit on Cosette’s position and it’s relationship to the themes of the novel as a whole.
As Hugo describes the Thenardiers to us he provides a couple of great summaries that I’ll quote below:
The formidable woman loved nothing but her children and feared no one but her husband. She was a mother because she was a female. But her mother-love was confined to her daughters; it did not, as we shall later see, extend to her son. As for the man, he had only one interest in life, Which was to get rich. In this he had failed.
They were an ugly and dreadful pair, the Thenardiers, a marriage of cunning and fury; but whereas the man calculated and manoeuvered, the woman gave no thought to absent creditors and cared nothing for yesterday or tomorrow, but lived vigorously and wholly in the moment.
So we have this couple, produced by the oppressive and broken society that Hugo has repeatedly turned our attention to, and they are uniquely united in their quest to extract whatever value they can from those they are able to prey on. The man is of a single mind - all of his conniving, scheming, plotting and planning is oriented toward the accumulation of wealth, and up until now, has been a bit of a failing enterprise. The woman is an angry and aggressive individual, only paying attention to the immediate and lacking affection for anyone and everything other than her daughters. Warped and twisted, these two who have suffered under the oppression of an extractive society have been honed into weapons designed to further exploit those they can lure into their grasp.
These are the pair that Fantine had trusted with the care of young Cosette. How could she have known that the same love and affection she witnessed from Mrs. Thenardier would be reserved only for her own daughters and would leave Cosette out in the cold, or even worse, make Cosette the convenient target for her wrath? How could she have known that Mr. Thenardier would treat Cosette as a tool that received minimal maintenance and was used to maximize the extraction of value? From a place of desperation Fantine had made what seemed to be the best choice available to her, a choice that put Cosette into the middle of a terribly oppressive situation. Hugo describes Cosette’s situation this way:
Cosette existed between the two of them, subject to pressure from either side like a creature that is at once ground between millstones and torn apart by pincers. Each had their own way of treating her. The blows she received came from the woman; the fact that she went barefoot in the winter came from the man. She ran upstairs and down, washed, swept, scrubbed and polished, drudged and gasped for breath, carried heavy burdens and performed arduous tasks, small though she was. There was no mercy to be expected from either mistress or master. The inn was a trap in which she was caught and held, her state of servitude the very pattern of oppression, herself the fly trembling in a spider’s web.
The child endured and said nothing; but what goes on in the souls of those helpless creatures, newly arrived from God, when they find themselves flung naked into the world of men?
That’s the question that awaits us. We see Cosette in this terrible position, her every experience of the world shaped by these twin forces of malevolence and darkness. What will become of her soul? What will happen to her? Will any spark of life be left? Is she fated to become like them herself? What hope of redemption and rescue does she have? These questions bring us back to all that we have seen so far for our characters. Fantine, Javert, Valjean, the Thenardiers themselves - all of these people live within the same corrosive, extractive and oppressive societal milieu and for each one of them the circumstances and responses have been different. Will Cosette meet mercy like Valjean and Fantine? Will she be twisted into a creature of harm like the Thenardiers? Will she set herself up as a guardian of society like Javert?
We have to keep reading to find out!