Les Miserables: Volume 1, Book 4 Summary & Analysis

Chapter 1 This section opens in Montfermeil, near Paris, at an inn kept by the Thenardier couple. Over the door is nailed a painting of a man carrying another on his back in front of a battle scene, with the inscription “At the Sign of Sergeant of Waterloo.” In front of the store, a fore-carriage of a massive, misshapen truck used to transport wooden planks is sunken into the ground and rusting away. There’s a rusted looped chain hanging from the truck, and on one evening in spring 1818 two small girls are playing and swinging in it. Their gaiety contrasts sharply with the foreboding dark truck above them. Their mother watches them carefully from a distance. Suddenly another woman carrying a baby and a carpet-bag approaches the mother to compliment her children. This woman’s child is beautiful, though the mother looks stricken by poverty.

It is Fantine—still beautiful despite her wretchedness. In the months after Tholomyes had left, Fantine had lost her girl friends and struggled to survive with a child, herself barely knowing how to read and write. People gossiped around her, and finally she decided to return to her native town of M.-sur-M. to work, though it would be necessary to conceal her sin. She sold all she had. Meanwhile, Tholomyes was on his way to becoming a wealthy, severe provincial lawyer.

Fantine had stopped before the vision of the two swinging girls and noticed how happy they seemed. The women begin to talk: Madame Thenardier, the other woman, is thin, angular, and masculine with a bit of a beard. Fantine says that her husband is dead and work in Paris had failed her, so she’s come to find work here. She sends her daughter, Cosette (a nickname from Euphrasie, her given name), to play with the other girls. Madame Thenardier remarks that they seem like sisters, which gives Fantine the confidence to ask if she’ll keep her daughter for six francs a month. From the inn, a man calls out that it will have to be seven, with six months paid out in advance. Fantine agrees, saying that she will soon return for her daughter.

After a night spent at the inn, Fantine leaves in the morning, weeping. Thenardier (the husband) congratulates his wife, saying that he lacked money to pay his debts, so this advance worked out well.

Chapter Two The Thenardiers, says the narrator, belong to the class of coarse but successful people, as well as others between “middle” and “inferior” classes, but with all the vices of both. Thenardier, the husband, has a particularly distrustful look about him. Madame Thenardier, for her part, loves reading tasteless romances, and named her children, Eponine and Azelma, after characters in them. However, the narrator notes that it is a result of the Revolution and ideals of equality that plebeians can now take on the names of great men.

Chapter The Thenardiers promptly use all Fantine’s money to pay off their debts, and then begin to consider Cosette as a charity case. After a year, Thenardier writes to demand 12 francs a month, assuring Fantine that the child is happy and well. While Madame loves her two children, she hates Cosette and is vicious towards her, and the two girls copy her. In town, people admire the Thenardiers for bringing up a poor child whom they believe was abandoned. Soon Thenardier realizes that the child is probably a bastard, and demands 15 francs a month.

At merely five years old, Cosette becomes the servant of the house and is made to clean the home and run all sorts of errands. She grows ugly because of misery, only retaining her beautiful eyes. The neighborhood calls her a “lark,” though she never sings. She is a small, shivering creature who is always awake and about before anyone else.