718 Les Miserables
and who is ready to retrace his steps.
‘I ought to have taken my gun,’ said he to himself.
Thenardier was one of those double natures which some-
times pass through our midst without our being aware of
the fact, and who disappear without our finding them out,
because destiny has only exhibited one side of them. It is the
fate of many men to live thus half submerged. In a calm and
even situation, Thenardier possessed all that is required to
make—we will not say to be— what people have agreed to
call an honest trader, a good bourgeois. At the same time
certain circumstances being given, certain shocks arriv-
ing to bring his under-nature to the surface, he had all the
requisites for a blackguard. He was a shopkeeper in whom
there was some taint of the monster. Satan must have oc-
casionally crouched down in some corner of the hovel in
which Thenardier dwelt, and have fallen a-dreaming in the
presence of this hideous masterpiece.
After a momentary hesitation:—
‘Bah!’ he thought; ‘they will have time to make their es-
cape.’
And he pursued his road, walking rapidly straight ahead,
and with almost an air of certainty, with the sagacity of a
fox scenting a covey of partridges.
In truth, when he had passed the ponds and had tra-
versed in an oblique direction the large clearing which lies
on the right of the Avenue de Bellevue, and reached that turf
alley which nearly makes the circuit of the hill, and covers
the arch of the ancient aqueduct of the Abbey of Chelles, he
caught sight, over the top of the brushwood, of the hat on