Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 639
dier’s hostelry. This room resembled all drinking-shop
rooms,—tables, pewter jugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers; but
little light and a great deal of noise. The date of the year
1823 was indicated, nevertheless, by two objects which were
then fashionable in the bourgeois class: to wit, a kaleido-
scope and a lamp of ribbed tin. The female Thenardier was
attending to the supper, which was roasting in front of a
clear fire; her husband was drinking with his customers and
talking politics.
Besides political conversations which had for their prin-
cipal subjects the Spanish war and M. le Duc d’Angouleme,
strictly local parentheses, like the following, were audible
amid the uproar:—
‘About Nanterre and Suresnes the vines have flourished
greatly. When ten pieces were reckoned on there have been
twelve. They have yielded a great deal of juice under the
press.’ ‘But the grapes cannot be ripe?’ ‘In those parts the
grapes should not be ripe; the wine turns oily as soon as
spring comes.’ ‘Then it is very thin wine?’ ‘There are wines
poorer even than these. The grapes must be gathered while
green.’ Etc.
Or a miller would call out:—
‘Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in
them a quantity of small seed which we cannot sift out, and
which we are obliged to send through the mill-stones; there
are tares, fennel, vetches, hempseed, fox-tail, and a host of
other weeds, not to mention pebbles, which abound in cer-
tain wheat, especially in Breton wheat. I am not fond of
grinding Breton wheat, any more than long-sawyers like to