We shall have no further occasion to speak of M. Félix Tholomyès. Let us confine ourselves to saying, that, twenty years later, under King Louis Philippe, he was a great provincial lawyer, wealthy and influential, a wise elector, and a very severe juryman; he was still a man of pleasure. Towards the middle of the day, after having, from time to time, for the sake of resting herself, travelled, for three or four sous a league, in what was then known as the _Petites Voitures des Environs de Paris_, the “little suburban coach service,” Fantine found herself at Montfermeil, in the alley Boulanger. As she passed the Thénardier hostelry, the two little girls, blissful in the monster swing, had dazzled her in a manner, and she had halted in front of that vision of joy. Charms exist. These two little girls were a charm to this mother. She gazed at them in much emotion. The presence of angels is an announcement of Paradise. She thought that, above this inn, she beheld the mysterious HERE of Providence. These two little creatures were evidently happy. She gazed at them, she admired them, in such emotion that at the moment when their mother was recovering her breath between two couplets of her song, she could not refrain from addressing to her the remark which we have just read:— “You have two pretty children, Madame.” The most ferocious creatures are disarmed by caresses bestowed on their young. The mother raised her head and thanked her, and bade the wayfarer sit down on the bench at the door, she herself being seated on the threshold. The two women began to chat. “My name is Madame Thénardier,” said the mother of the two little girls. “We keep this inn.” Then, her mind still running on her romance, she resumed humming between her teeth:— “It must be so; I am a knight, And I am off to Palestine.” This Madame Thénardier was a sandy-complexioned woman, thin and angular—the type of the soldier’s wife in all its unpleasantness; and what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal of romances. She was a simpering, but masculine creature. Old romances produce that effect when rubbed against the imagination of cook-shop woman. She was still young; she was barely thirty. If this crouching woman had stood upright, her lofty stature and her frame of a perambulating colossus suitable for fairs, might have frightened the traveller at the outset, troubled her confidence, and disturbed what caused what we have to relate to vanish. A person who is seated instead of standing erect—destinies hang upon such a thing as that. The traveller told her story, with slight modifications.