Thenardiers are despicable. They are evil, but the thing is, they are not even that good at doing evil. What’s the point, then, to create such characters? Surely, the intention is not just to warn us that the evil exists. On their evil nature, Hugo wrote:
“They were among those dwarfish natures, which, if they happen to be heated by some sullen fire, easily become monstrous. The woman was at heart a brute, the
man a blackguard, both in the highest degree capable of that hideous sort of progression that can be made toward evil. There are souls that, crablike, crawl continually toward darkness, going backward in life rather than advancing, using their experience to increase their deformity, growing continually worse, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying viciousness. That was the case with this man and this woman. “
I think the message is for us to practice forgiveness. Among many things Hugo wrote into the last words of Jean Valjean, there is only one sentence on Thenardiers:
“Those Thénardiers were wicked. We must forgive them.”
First of all, their skullduggeries did inadvertently save the main characters a few times. Think about Marius’s father, Marius and Jean Valjean in the sewage, and how Marius came to know that it is Jean Valjean who saved him.
Second, two of their children, Eponine and Gavroche, both died at the barricade, and both evoke our sympathy.
Lastly, one has to admit that in the book as well in the musical, they are a bit comical, and in that sense, not without some likability.
“The duty of the innkeeper,” he said to her one day, emphatically, and in a low voice, “is to sell the first comer food, rest, light, fire, dirty linen, servants, fleas, and smiles; to stop travelers, empty small purses, and honestly lighten large ones; to receive families who are traveling, with respect: fleece the man, pluck the woman, and pick over the child; to charge for the open window, closed window, chimney corner, sofa, chair, stool, bench, featherbed, mattress, and straw bed; to know how much the reflection wears the mirror down and to tax that; and, by five hundred thousand devils, to make the traveler pay for everything, including the flies his dog eats!”
