Thénardier had something rectangular in his movements, which, when joined to an oath, recalls the barrack,--to the sign of the cross, the seminary. He was a clever speaker, and liked to be thought educated; but the schoolmaster noticed that he made mistakes. He drew up a traveller's bill in a masterly way, but practised eyes sometimes found orthographical errors in it. Thénardier was cunning, greedy, indolent, and skilful: he did not despise his servant-girls, and for that reason his wife no longer kept any. This giantess was jealous, and fancied that this little yellow man must be an object of universal covetousness. Thénardier above all, as a crafty and well-balanced man, was a villain of the temperate genus; and this breed is the worst, as hypocrisy is mixed up in them. It was not that Thénardier was not at times capable of passion, at least quite as much as his wife, but it was very rare, and at such moments,--as he owed a grudge to the whole human race, as he had within him a profound furnace of hatred, as he was one of those persons who avenge themselves perpetually, who accuse everybody who passes before them for what falls upon them, and who are ever ready to cast on the first-comer, as a legitimate charge, the whole of the annoyances, bankruptcies, and deceptions of their life,--when all this leaven was working in him and boiling in his mouth and eyes, he was fearful. Woe to the person who came under his fury at such times. In addition to his other qualities, Thénardier was attentive and penetrating, silent or chattering according to occasion, and always with great intelligence. He had the glance of sailors who are accustomed to wink when looking through a telescope. Thénardier was a statesman. Any new-comer, on entering the pot-house, said upon seeing the woman, "That is the master of the house." Mistake. She was not even the mistress, for her husband was both master and mistress. She did and he created, he directed everything by a species of invisible and continuous magnetic action; a word, sometimes a sign, from him was sufficient, and the mastodon obeyed. The husband was to his wife, though she did not know it, a species of peculiar and sovereign being. However much she might dissent from "Monsieur Thénardier,"--an inadmissible hypothesis,--she would have never proved him publicly in the wrong for any consideration. She would never have committed "in the presence of strangers" that fault which wives so often commit, and which is called, in parliamentary language, "exposing the crown." Although their agreement only resulted in evil, there was meditation in Madame Thénardier's submission to her husband. This mountain of noise and flesh moved under the little finger of this frail despot; seen from its dwarfish and grotesque aspect, it was the great universal thing,--adoration of matter for the mind. There was something strange in Thénardier, and hence came the absolute dominion of this man over this woman.