





Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge
of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne. At
the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year
through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois. In
1823 there were at Montfermeil neither so many white houses nor so many
well-satisfied citizens: it was only a village in the forest. Some
pleasure-houses of the last century were to be met with there, to be
sure, which were recognizable by their grand air, their balconies in
twisted iron, and their long windows, whose tiny panes cast all sorts
of varying shades of green on the white of the closed shutters; but
Montfermeil was nonetheless a village. Retired cloth-merchants and
rusticating attorneys had not discovered it as yet; it was a peaceful
and charming place, which was not on the road to anywhere: there people
lived, and cheaply, that peasant rustic life which is so bounteous and
so easy; only, water was rare there, on account of the elevation of the
plateau.

It was necessary to fetch it from a considerable distance; the end of
the village towards Gagny drew its water from the magnificent ponds
which exist in the woods there. The other end, which surrounds the
church and which lies in the direction of Chelles, found drinking-water
only at a little spring half-way down the slope, near the road to
Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil.

Thus each household found it hard work to keep supplied with water. The
large houses, the aristocracy, of which the Thénardier tavern formed a
part, paid half a farthing a bucketful to a man who made a business of
it, and who earned about eight sous a day in his enterprise of
supplying Montfermeil with water; but this good man only worked until
seven o’clock in the evening in summer, and five in winter; and night
once come and the shutters on the ground floor once closed, he who had
no water to drink went to fetch it for himself or did without it.

This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the reader has
probably not forgotten,—little Cosette. It will be remembered that
Cosette was useful to the Thénardiers in two ways: they made the mother
pay them, and they made the child serve them. So when the mother ceased
to pay altogether, the reason for which we have read in preceding
chapters, the Thénardiers kept Cosette. She took the place of a servant
in their house. In this capacity she it was who ran to fetch water when
it was required. So the child, who was greatly terrified at the idea of
going to the spring at night, took great care that water should never
be lacking in the house.

Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil.
The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow
nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained
permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street
of the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection of
the same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square,
and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader will
perhaps remember, the Thénardiers’ hostelry was situated. These people
filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated to that tranquil
little district a noisy and joyous life. In order to play the part of a
faithful historian, we ought even to add that, among the curiosities
displayed in the square, there was a menagerie, in which frightful
clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence, exhibited to the
peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those horrible Brazilian
vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not possess until 1845, and
which have a tricolored cockade for an eye. I believe that naturalists
call this bird Caracara Polyborus; it belongs to the order of the
Apicides, and to the family of the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist
soldiers, who had retired to the village, went to see this creature
with great devotion. The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored
cockade was a unique phenomenon made by God expressly for their
menagerie.

On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters, and peddlers, were
seated at table, drinking and smoking around four or five candles in
the public room of Thénardier’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 kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed
tin. The female Thénardier 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 principal subjects
the Spanish war and M. le Duc d’Angoulême, 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 certain wheat, especially in Breton wheat. I
am not fond of grinding Breton wheat, any more than long-sawyers like
to saw beams with nails in them. You can judge of the bad dust that
makes in grinding. And then people complain of the flour. They are in
the wrong. The flour is no fault of ours.”


In a space between two windows a mower, who was seated at table with a
landed proprietor who was fixing on a price for some meadow work to be
performed in the spring, was saying:—

“It does no harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better. Dew is a good
thing, sir. It makes no difference with that grass. Your grass is young
and very hard to cut still. It’s terribly tender. It yields before the
iron.” Etc.

Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar of the kitchen
table near the chimney. She was in rags; her bare feet were thrust into
wooden shoes, and by the firelight she was engaged in knitting woollen
stockings destined for the young Thénardiers. A very young kitten was
playing about among the chairs. Laughter and chatter were audible in
the adjoining room, from two fresh children’s voices: it was Éponine
and Azelma.

In the chimney-corner a cat-o’-nine-tails was hanging on a nail.

At intervals the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere in the
house, rang through the noise of the dram-shop. It was a little boy who
had been born to the Thénardiers during one of the preceding
winters,—“she did not know why,” she said, “the result of the
cold,”—and who was a little more than three years old. The mother had
nursed him, but she did not love him. When the persistent clamor of the
brat became too annoying, “Your son is squalling,” Thénardier would
say; “do go and see what he wants.” “Bah!” the mother would reply, “he
bothers me.” And the neglected child continued to shriek in the dark.






So far in this book the Thénardiers have been viewed only in profile;
the moment has arrived for making the circuit of this couple, and
considering it under all its aspects.

Thénardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thénardier was
approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman; so
that there existed a balance of age between husband and wife.

Our readers have possibly preserved some recollection of this
Thénardier woman, ever since her first appearance,—tall, blond, red,
fat, angular, square, enormous, and agile; she belonged, as we have
said, to the race of those colossal wild women, who contort themselves
at fairs with paving-stones hanging from their hair. She did everything
about the house,—made the beds, did the washing, the cooking, and
everything else. Cosette was her only servant; a mouse in the service
of an elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice,—window
panes, furniture, and people. Her big face, dotted with red blotches,
presented the appearance of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was an
ideal market-porter dressed in woman’s clothes. She swore splendidly;
she boasted of being able to crack a nut with one blow of her fist.
Except for the romances which she had read, and which made the affected
lady peep through the ogress at times, in a very queer way, the idea
would never have occurred to any one to say of her, “That is a woman.”
This Thénardier female was like the product of a wench engrafted on a
fishwife. When one heard her speak, one said, “That is a gendarme”;
when one saw her drink, one said, “That is a carter”; when one saw her
handle Cosette, one said, “That is the hangman.” One of her teeth
projected when her face was in repose.

Thénardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, feeble man, who had
a sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy. His cunning began here;
he smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite to
everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing. He
had the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters. He
greatly resembled the portraits of the Abbé Delille. His coquetry
consisted in drinking with the carters. No one had ever succeeded in
rendering him drunk. He smoked a big pipe. He wore a blouse, and under
his blouse an old black coat. He made pretensions to literature and to
materialism. There were certain names which he often pronounced to
support whatever things he might be saying,—Voltaire, Raynal, Parny,
and, singularly enough, Saint Augustine. He declared that he had “a
system.” In addition, he was a great swindler. A _filousophe_
[philosophe], a scientific thief. The species does exist. It will be
remembered that he pretended to have served in the army; he was in the
habit of relating with exuberance, how, being a sergeant in the 6th or
the 9th light something or other, at Waterloo, he had alone, and in the
presence of a squadron of death-dealing hussars, covered with his body
and saved from death, in the midst of the grape-shot, “a general, who
had been dangerously wounded.” Thence arose for his wall the flaring
sign, and for his inn the name which it bore in the neighborhood, of
“the cabaret of the Sergeant of Waterloo.” He was a liberal, a classic,
and a Bonapartist. He had subscribed for the Champ d’Asile. It was said
in the village that he had studied for the priesthood.

We believe that he had simply studied in Holland for an inn-keeper.
This rascal of composite order was, in all probability, some Fleming
from Lille, in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris, a Belgian at Brussels,
being comfortably astride of both frontiers. As for his prowess at
Waterloo, the reader is already acquainted with that. It will be
perceived that he exaggerated it a trifle. Ebb and flow, wandering,
adventure, was the leven of his existence; a tattered conscience
entails a fragmentary life, and, apparently at the stormy epoch of June
18, 1815, Thénardier belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers of
which we have spoken, beating about the country, selling to some,
stealing from others, and travelling like a family man, with wife and
children, in a rickety cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with
an instinct for always attaching himself to the victorious army. This
campaign ended, and having, as he said, “some quibus,” he had come to
Montfermeil and set up an inn there.

This _quibus_, composed of purses and watches, of gold rings and silver
crosses, gathered in harvest-time in furrows sown with corpses, did not
amount to a large total, and did not carry this sutler turned
eating-house-keeper very far.

Thénardier had that peculiar rectilinear something about his gestures
which, accompanied by an oath, recalls the barracks, and by a sign of
the cross, the seminary. He was a fine talker. He allowed it to be
thought that he was an educated man. Nevertheless, the schoolmaster had
noticed that he pronounced improperly.12

He composed the travellers’ tariff card in a superior manner, but
practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it.
Thénardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever. He did not
disdain his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them. This
giantess was jealous. It seemed to her that that thin and yellow little
man must be an object coveted by all.

Thénardier, who was, above all, an astute and well-balanced man, was a
scamp of a temperate sort. This is the worst species; hypocrisy enters
into it.

It is not that Thénardier was not, on occasion, capable of wrath to
quite the same degree as his wife; but this was very rare, and at such
times, since he was enraged with the human race in general, as he bore
within him a deep furnace of hatred. And since he was one of those
people who are continually avenging their wrongs, who accuse everything
that passes before them of everything which has befallen them, and who
are always ready to cast upon the first person who comes to hand, as a
legitimate grievance, the sum total of the deceptions, the
bankruptcies, and the calamities of their lives,—when all this leaven
was stirred up in him and boiled forth from his mouth and eyes, he was
terrible. Woe to the person who came under his wrath at such a time!

In addition to his other qualities, Thénardier was attentive and
penetrating, silent or talkative, according to circumstances, and
always highly intelligent. He had something of the look of sailors, who
are accustomed to screw up their eyes to gaze through marine glasses.
Thénardier was a statesman.

Every newcomer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame
Thénardier, “There is the master of the house.” A mistake. She was not
even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress. She
worked; he created. He directed everything by a sort of invisible and
constant magnetic action. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a
sign; the mastodon obeyed. Thénardier was a sort of special and
sovereign being in Madame Thénardier’s eyes, though she did not
thoroughly realize it. She was possessed of virtues after her own kind;
if she had ever had a disagreement as to any detail with “Monsieur
Thénardier,”—which was an inadmissible hypothesis, by the way,—she
would not have blamed her husband in public on any subject whatever.
She would never have committed “before strangers” that mistake so often
committed by women, and which is called in parliamentary language,
“exposing the crown.” Although their concord had only evil as its
result, there was contemplation in Madame Thénardier’s submission to
her husband. That mountain of noise and of flesh moved under the little
finger of that frail despot. Viewed on its dwarfed and grotesque side,
this was that grand and universal thing, the adoration of mind by
matter; for certain ugly features have a cause in the very depths of
eternal beauty. There was an unknown quantity about Thénardier; hence
the absolute empire of the man over that woman. At certain moments she
beheld him like a lighted candle; at others she felt him like a claw.

This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her
children, and who did not fear any one except her husband. She was a
mother because she was mammiferous. But her maternity stopped short
with her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys. The
man had but one thought,—how to enrich himself.

He did not succeed in this. A theatre worthy of this great talent was
lacking. Thénardier was ruining himself at Montfermeil, if ruin is
possible to zero; in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees this penniless
scamp would have become a millionaire; but an inn-keeper must browse
where fate has hitched him.

It will be understood that the word _inn-keeper_ is here employed in a
restricted sense, and does not extend to an entire class.

In this same year, 1823, Thénardier was burdened with about fifteen
hundred francs’ worth of petty debts, and this rendered him anxious.

Whatever may have been the obstinate injustice of destiny in this case,
Thénardier was one of those men who understand best, with the most
profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing which is a virtue
among barbarous peoples and an object of merchandise among civilized
peoples,—hospitality. Besides, he was an admirable poacher, and quoted
for his skill in shooting. He had a certain cold and tranquil laugh,
which was particularly dangerous.

His theories as a landlord sometimes burst forth in lightning flashes.
He had professional aphorisms, which he inserted into his wife’s mind.
“The duty of the inn-keeper,” he said to her one day, violently, and in
a low voice, “is to sell to the first comer, stews, repose, light,
fire, dirty sheets, a servant, lice, and a smile; to stop passers-by,
to empty small purses, and to honestly lighten heavy ones; to shelter
travelling families respectfully: to shave the man, to pluck the woman,
to pick the child clean; to quote the window open, the window shut, the
chimney-corner, the armchair, the chair, the ottoman, the stool, the
feather-bed, the mattress and the truss of straw; to know how much the
shadow uses up the mirror, and to put a price on it; and, by five
hundred thousand devils, to make the traveller pay for everything, even
for the flies which his dog eats!”


This man and this woman were ruse and rage wedded—a hideous and
terrible team.

While the husband pondered and combined, Madame Thénardier thought not
of absent creditors, took no heed of yesterday nor of to-morrow, and
lived in a fit of anger, all in a minute.

Such were these two beings. Cosette was between them, subjected to
their double pressure, like a creature who is at the same time being
ground up in a mill and pulled to pieces with pincers. The man and the
woman each had a different method: Cosette was overwhelmed with
blows—this was the woman’s; she went barefooted in winter—that was the
man’s doing.

Cosette ran upstairs and down, washed, swept, rubbed, dusted, ran,
fluttered about, panted, moved heavy articles, and weak as she was, did
the coarse work. There was no mercy for her; a fierce mistress and
venomous master. The Thénardier hostelry was like a spider’s web, in
which Cosette had been caught, and where she lay trembling. The ideal
of oppression was realized by this sinister household. It was something
like the fly serving the spiders.

The poor child passively held her peace.

What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted
God, find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life, very small and in
the midst of men all naked!






Four new travellers had arrived.

Cosette was meditating sadly; for, although she was only eight years
old, she had already suffered so much that she reflected with the
lugubrious air of an old woman. Her eye was black in consequence of a
blow from Madame Thénardier’s fist, which caused the latter to remark
from time to time, “How ugly she is with her fist-blow on her eye!”


Cosette was thinking that it was dark, very dark, that the pitchers and
caraffes in the chambers of the travellers who had arrived must have
been filled and that there was no more water in the cistern.

She was somewhat reassured because no one in the Thénardier
establishment drank much water. Thirsty people were never lacking
there; but their thirst was of the sort which applies to the jug rather
than to the pitcher. Any one who had asked for a glass of water among
all those glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to all these
men. But there came a moment when the child trembled; Madame Thénardier
raised the cover of a stew-pan which was boiling on the stove, then
seized a glass and briskly approached the cistern. She turned the
faucet; the child had raised her head and was following all the woman’s
movements. A thin stream of water trickled from the faucet, and half
filled the glass. “Well,” said she, “there is no more water!” A
momentary silence ensued. The child did not breathe.

“Bah!” resumed Madame Thénardier, examining the half-filled glass,
“this will be enough.”


Cosette applied herself to her work once more, but for a quarter of an
hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big snow-flake.

She counted the minutes that passed in this manner, and wished it were
the next morning.

From time to time one of the drinkers looked into the street, and
exclaimed, “It’s as black as an oven!” or, “One must needs be a cat to
go about the streets without a lantern at this hour!” And Cosette
trembled.

All at once one of the pedlers who lodged in the hostelry entered, and
said in a harsh voice:—

“My horse has not been watered.”


“Yes, it has,” said Madame Thénardier.

“I tell you that it has not,” retorted the pedler.

Cosette had emerged from under the table.

“Oh, yes, sir!” said she, “the horse has had a drink; he drank out of a
bucket, a whole bucketful, and it was I who took the water to him, and
I spoke to him.”


It was not true; Cosette lied.

“There’s a brat as big as my fist who tells lies as big as the house,”
exclaimed the pedler. “I tell you that he has not been watered, you
little jade! He has a way of blowing when he has had no water, which I
know well.”


Cosette persisted, and added in a voice rendered hoarse with anguish,
and which was hardly audible:—

“And he drank heartily.”


“Come,” said the pedler, in a rage, “this won’t do at all, let my horse
be watered, and let that be the end of it!”


Cosette crept under the table again.

“In truth, that is fair!” said Madame Thénardier, “if the beast has not
been watered, it must be.”


Then glancing about her:—

“Well, now! Where’s that other beast?”


She bent down and discovered Cosette cowering at the other end of the
table, almost under the drinkers’ feet.

“Are you coming?” shrieked Madame Thénardier.

Cosette crawled out of the sort of hole in which she had hidden
herself. The Thénardier resumed:—

“Mademoiselle Dog-lack-name, go and water that horse.”


“But, Madame,” said Cosette, feebly, “there is no water.”


The Thénardier threw the street door wide open:—

“Well, go and get some, then!”


Cosette dropped her head, and went for an empty bucket which stood near
the chimney-corner.

This bucket was bigger than she was, and the child could have set down
in it at her ease.

The Thénardier returned to her stove, and tasted what was in the
stewpan, with a wooden spoon, grumbling the while:—

“There’s plenty in the spring. There never was such a malicious
creature as that. I think I should have done better to strain my
onions.”


Then she rummaged in a drawer which contained sous, pepper, and
shallots.

“See here, Mam’selle Toad,” she added, “on your way back, you will get
a big loaf from the baker. Here’s a fifteen-sou piece.”


Cosette had a little pocket on one side of her apron; she took the coin
without saying a word, and put it in that pocket.

Then she stood motionless, bucket in hand, the open door before her.
She seemed to be waiting for some one to come to her rescue.

“Get along with you!” screamed the Thénardier.

Cosette went out. The door closed behind her.






The line of open-air booths starting at the church, extended, as the
reader will remember, as far as the hostelry of the Thénardiers. These
booths were all illuminated, because the citizens would soon pass on
their way to the midnight mass, with candles burning in paper funnels,
which, as the schoolmaster, then seated at the table at the
Thénardiers’ observed, produced “a magical effect.” In compensation,
not a star was visible in the sky.

The last of these stalls, established precisely opposite the
Thénardiers’ door, was a toy-shop all glittering with tinsel, glass,
and magnificent objects of tin. In the first row, and far forwards, the
merchant had placed on a background of white napkins, an immense doll,
nearly two feet high, who was dressed in a robe of pink crepe, with
gold wheat-ears on her head, which had real hair and enamel eyes. All
that day, this marvel had been displayed to the wonderment of all
passers-by under ten years of age, without a mother being found in
Montfermeil sufficiently rich or sufficiently extravagant to give it to
her child. Éponine and Azelma had passed hours in contemplating it, and
Cosette herself had ventured to cast a glance at it, on the sly, it is
true.

At the moment when Cosette emerged, bucket in hand, melancholy and
overcome as she was, she could not refrain from lifting her eyes to
that wonderful doll, towards _the lady_, as she called it. The poor
child paused in amazement. She had not yet beheld that doll close to.
The whole shop seemed a palace to her: the doll was not a doll; it was
a vision. It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, which appeared in a
sort of chimerical halo to that unhappy little being so profoundly
engulfed in gloomy and chilly misery. With the sad and innocent
sagacity of childhood, Cosette measured the abyss which separated her
from that doll. She said to herself that one must be a queen, or at
least a princess, to have a “thing” like that. She gazed at that
beautiful pink dress, that beautiful smooth hair, and she thought, “How
happy that doll must be!” She could not take her eyes from that
fantastic stall. The more she looked, the more dazzled she grew. She
thought she was gazing at paradise. There were other dolls behind the
large one, which seemed to her to be fairies and genii. The merchant,
who was pacing back and forth in front of his shop, produced on her
somewhat the effect of being the Eternal Father.

In this adoration she forgot everything, even the errand with which she
was charged.

All at once the Thénardier’s coarse voice recalled her to reality:
“What, you silly jade! you have not gone? Wait! I’ll give it to you! I
want to know what you are doing there! Get along, you little monster!”


The Thénardier had cast a glance into the street, and had caught sight
of Cosette in her ecstasy.

Cosette fled, dragging her pail, and taking the longest strides of
which she was capable.






As the Thénardier hostelry was in that part of the village which is
near the church, it was to the spring in the forest in the direction of
Chelles that Cosette was obliged to go for her water.

She did not glance at the display of a single other merchant. So long
as she was in Boulanger Lane and in the neighborhood of the church, the
lighted stalls illuminated the road; but soon the last light from the
last stall vanished. The poor child found herself in the dark. She
plunged into it. Only, as a certain emotion overcame her, she made as
much motion as possible with the handle of the bucket as she walked
along. This made a noise which afforded her company.

The further she went, the denser the darkness became. There was no one
in the streets. However, she did encounter a woman, who turned around
on seeing her, and stood still, muttering between her teeth: “Where can
that child be going? Is it a werewolf child?” Then the woman recognized
Cosette. “Well,” said she, “it’s the Lark!”


In this manner Cosette traversed the labyrinth of tortuous and deserted
streets which terminate in the village of Montfermeil on the side of
Chelles. So long as she had the houses or even the walls only on both
sides of her path, she proceeded with tolerable boldness. From time to
time she caught the flicker of a candle through the crack of a
shutter—this was light and life; there were people there, and it
reassured her. But in proportion as she advanced, her pace slackened
mechanically, as it were. When she had passed the corner of the last
house, Cosette paused. It had been hard to advance further than the
last stall; it became impossible to proceed further than the last
house. She set her bucket on the ground, thrust her hand into her hair,
and began slowly to scratch her head,—a gesture peculiar to children
when terrified and undecided what to do. It was no longer Montfermeil;
it was the open fields. Black and desert space was before her. She
gazed in despair at that darkness, where there was no longer any one,
where there were beasts, where there were spectres, possibly. She took
a good look, and heard the beasts walking on the grass, and she
distinctly saw spectres moving in the trees. Then she seized her bucket
again; fear had lent her audacity. “Bah!” said she; “I will tell him
that there was no more water!” And she resolutely re-entered
Montfermeil.

Hardly had she gone a hundred paces when she paused and began to
scratch her head again. Now it was the Thénardier who appeared to her,
with her hideous, hyena mouth, and wrath flashing in her eyes. The
child cast a melancholy glance before her and behind her. What was she
to do? What was to become of her? Where was she to go? In front of her
was the spectre of the Thénardier; behind her all the phantoms of the
night and of the forest. It was before the Thénardier that she
recoiled. She resumed her path to the spring, and began to run. She
emerged from the village, she entered the forest at a run, no longer
looking at or listening to anything. She only paused in her course when
her breath failed her; but she did not halt in her advance. She went
straight before her in desperation.

As she ran she felt like crying.

The nocturnal quivering of the forest surrounded her completely.

She no longer thought, she no longer saw. The immensity of night was
facing this tiny creature. On the one hand, all shadow; on the other,
an atom.

It was only seven or eight minutes’ walk from the edge of the woods to
the spring. Cosette knew the way, through having gone over it many
times in daylight. Strange to say, she did not get lost. A remnant of
instinct guided her vaguely. But she did not turn her eyes either to
right or to left, for fear of seeing things in the branches and in the
brushwood. In this manner she reached the spring.

It was a narrow, natural basin, hollowed out by the water in a clayey
soil, about two feet deep, surrounded with moss and with those tall,
crimped grasses which are called Henry IV.’s frills, and paved with
several large stones. A brook ran out of it, with a tranquil little
noise.

Cosette did not take time to breathe. It was very dark, but she was in
the habit of coming to this spring. She felt with her left hand in the
dark for a young oak which leaned over the spring, and which usually
served to support her, found one of its branches, clung to it, bent
down, and plunged the bucket in the water. She was in a state of such
violent excitement that her strength was trebled. While thus bent over,
she did not notice that the pocket of her apron had emptied itself into
the spring. The fifteen-sou piece fell into the water. Cosette neither
saw nor heard it fall. She drew out the bucket nearly full, and set it
on the grass.

That done, she perceived that she was worn out with fatigue. She would
have liked to set out again at once, but the effort required to fill
the bucket had been such that she found it impossible to take a step.
She was forced to sit down. She dropped on the grass, and remained
crouching there.

She shut her eyes; then she opened them again, without knowing why, but
because she could not do otherwise. The agitated water in the bucket
beside her was describing circles which resembled tin serpents.

Overhead the sky was covered with vast black clouds, which were like
masses of smoke. The tragic mask of shadow seemed to bend vaguely over
the child.

Jupiter was setting in the depths.

The child stared with bewildered eyes at this great star, with which
she was unfamiliar, and which terrified her. The planet was, in fact,
very near the horizon and was traversing a dense layer of mist which
imparted to it a horrible ruddy hue. The mist, gloomily empurpled,
magnified the star. One would have called it a luminous wound.

A cold wind was blowing from the plain. The forest was dark, not a leaf
was moving; there were none of the vague, fresh gleams of summertide.
Great boughs uplifted themselves in frightful wise. Slender and
misshapen bushes whistled in the clearings. The tall grasses undulated
like eels under the north wind. The nettles seemed to twist long arms
furnished with claws in search of prey. Some bits of dry heather,
tossed by the breeze, flew rapidly by, and had the air of fleeing in
terror before something which was coming after. On all sides there were
lugubrious stretches.

The darkness was bewildering. Man requires light. Whoever buries
himself in the opposite of day feels his heart contract. When the eye
sees black, the heart sees trouble. In an eclipse in the night, in the
sooty opacity, there is anxiety even for the stoutest of hearts. No one
walks alone in the forest at night without trembling. Shadows and
trees—two formidable densities. A chimerical reality appears in the
indistinct depths. The inconceivable is outlined a few paces distant
from you with a spectral clearness. One beholds floating, either in
space or in one’s own brain, one knows not what vague and intangible
thing, like the dreams of sleeping flowers. There are fierce attitudes
on the horizon. One inhales the effluvia of the great black void. One
is afraid to glance behind him, yet desirous of doing so. The cavities
of night, things grown haggard, taciturn profiles which vanish when one
advances, obscure dishevelments, irritated tufts, livid pools, the
lugubrious reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of
silence, unknown but possible beings, bendings of mysterious branches,
alarming torsos of trees, long handfuls of quivering plants,—against
all this one has no protection. There is no hardihood which does not
shudder and which does not feel the vicinity of anguish. One is
conscious of something hideous, as though one’s soul were becoming
amalgamated with the darkness. This penetration of the shadows is
indescribably sinister in the case of a child.

Forests are apocalypses, and the beating of the wings of a tiny soul
produces a sound of agony beneath their monstrous vault.

Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she
was seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer
terror alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more
terrible even than terror; she shivered. There are no words to express
the strangeness of that shiver which chilled her to the very bottom of
her heart; her eye grew wild; she thought she felt that she should not
be able to refrain from returning there at the same hour on the morrow.

Then, by a sort of instinct, she began to count aloud, one, two, three,
four, and so on up to ten, in order to escape from that singular state
which she did not understand, but which terrified her, and, when she
had finished, she began again; this restored her to a true perception
of the things about her. Her hands, which she had wet in drawing the
water, felt cold; she rose; her terror, a natural and unconquerable
terror, had returned: she had but one thought now,—to flee at full
speed through the forest, across the fields to the houses, to the
windows, to the lighted candles. Her glance fell upon the water which
stood before her; such was the fright which the Thénardier inspired in
her, that she dared not flee without that bucket of water: she seized
the handle with both hands; she could hardly lift the pail.

In this manner she advanced a dozen paces, but the bucket was full; it
was heavy; she was forced to set it on the ground once more. She took
breath for an instant, then lifted the handle of the bucket again, and
resumed her march, proceeding a little further this time, but again she
was obliged to pause. After some seconds of repose she set out again.
She walked bent forward, with drooping head, like an old woman; the
weight of the bucket strained and stiffened her thin arms. The iron
handle completed the benumbing and freezing of her wet and tiny hands;
she was forced to halt from time to time, and each time that she did
so, the cold water which splashed from the pail fell on her bare legs.
This took place in the depths of a forest, at night, in winter, far
from all human sight; she was a child of eight: no one but God saw that
sad thing at the moment.

And her mother, no doubt, alas!

For there are things that make the dead open their eyes in their
graves.

She panted with a sort of painful rattle; sobs contracted her throat,
but she dared not weep, so afraid was she of the Thénardier, even at a
distance: it was her custom to imagine the Thénardier always present.

However, she could not make much headway in that manner, and she went
on very slowly. In spite of diminishing the length of her stops, and of
walking as long as possible between them, she reflected with anguish
that it would take her more than an hour to return to Montfermeil in
this manner, and that the Thénardier would beat her. This anguish was
mingled with her terror at being alone in the woods at night; she was
worn out with fatigue, and had not yet emerged from the forest. On
arriving near an old chestnut-tree with which she was acquainted, made
a last halt, longer than the rest, in order that she might get well
rested; then she summoned up all her strength, picked up her bucket
again, and courageously resumed her march, but the poor little
desperate creature could not refrain from crying, “O my God! my God!”


At that moment she suddenly became conscious that her bucket no longer
weighed anything at all: a hand, which seemed to her enormous, had just
seized the handle, and lifted it vigorously. She raised her head. A
large black form, straight and erect, was walking beside her through
the darkness; it was a man who had come up behind her, and whose
approach she had not heard. This man, without uttering a word, had
seized the handle of the bucket which she was carrying.

There are instincts for all the encounters of life.

The child was not afraid.






On the afternoon of that same Christmas Day, 1823, a man had walked for
rather a long time in the most deserted part of the Boulevard de
l’Hôpital in Paris. This man had the air of a person who is seeking
lodgings, and he seemed to halt, by preference, at the most modest
houses on that dilapidated border of the faubourg Saint-Marceau.

We shall see further on that this man had, in fact, hired a chamber in
that isolated quarter.

This man, in his attire, as in all his person, realized the type of
what may be called the well-bred mendicant,—extreme wretchedness
combined with extreme cleanliness. This is a very rare mixture which
inspires intelligent hearts with that double respect which one feels
for the man who is very poor, and for the man who is very worthy. He
wore a very old and very well brushed round hat; a coarse coat, worn
perfectly threadbare, of an ochre yellow, a color that was not in the
least eccentric at that epoch; a large waistcoat with pockets of a
venerable cut; black breeches, worn gray at the knee, stockings of
black worsted; and thick shoes with copper buckles. He would have been
pronounced a preceptor in some good family, returned from the
emigration. He would have been taken for more than sixty years of age,
from his perfectly white hair, his wrinkled brow, his livid lips, and
his countenance, where everything breathed depression and weariness of
life. Judging from his firm tread, from the singular vigor which
stamped all his movements, he would have hardly been thought fifty. The
wrinkles on his brow were well placed, and would have disposed in his
favor any one who observed him attentively. His lip contracted with a
strange fold which seemed severe, and which was humble. There was in
the depth of his glance an indescribable melancholy serenity. In his
left hand he carried a little bundle tied up in a handkerchief; in his
right he leaned on a sort of a cudgel, cut from some hedge. This stick
had been carefully trimmed, and had an air that was not too
threatening; the most had been made of its knots, and it had received a
coral-like head, made from red wax: it was a cudgel, and it seemed to
be a cane.

There are but few passers-by on that boulevard, particularly in the
winter. The man seemed to avoid them rather than to seek them, but this
without any affectation.

At that epoch, King Louis XVIII. went nearly every day to
Choisy-le-Roi: it was one of his favorite excursions. Towards two
o’clock, almost invariably, the royal carriage and cavalcade was seen
to pass at full speed along the Boulevard de l’Hôpital.

This served in lieu of a watch or clock to the poor women of the
quarter who said, “It is two o’clock; there he is returning to the
Tuileries.”


And some rushed forward, and others drew up in line, for a passing king
always creates a tumult; besides, the appearance and disappearance of
Louis XVIII. produced a certain effect in the streets of Paris. It was
rapid but majestic. This impotent king had a taste for a fast gallop;
as he was not able to walk, he wished to run: that cripple would gladly
have had himself drawn by the lightning. He passed, pacific and severe,
in the midst of naked swords. His massive couch, all covered with
gilding, with great branches of lilies painted on the panels, thundered
noisily along. There was hardly time to cast a glance upon it. In the
rear angle on the right there was visible on tufted cushions of white
satin a large, firm, and ruddy face, a brow freshly powdered _à
l’oiseau royal_, a proud, hard, crafty eye, the smile of an educated
man, two great epaulets with bullion fringe floating over a bourgeois
coat, the Golden Fleece, the cross of Saint Louis, the cross of the
Legion of Honor, the silver plaque of the Saint-Esprit, a huge belly,
and a wide blue ribbon: it was the king. Outside of Paris, he held his
hat decked with white ostrich plumes on his knees enwrapped in high
English gaiters; when he re-entered the city, he put on his hat and
saluted rarely; he stared coldly at the people, and they returned it in
kind. When he appeared for the first time in the Saint-Marceau quarter,
the whole success which he produced is contained in this remark of an
inhabitant of the faubourg to his comrade, “That big fellow yonder is
the government.”


This infallible passage of the king at the same hour was, therefore,
the daily event of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital.

The promenader in the yellow coat evidently did not belong in the
quarter, and probably did not belong in Paris, for he was ignorant as
to this detail. When, at two o’clock, the royal carriage, surrounded by
a squadron of the body-guard all covered with silver lace, debouched on
the boulevard, after having made the turn of the Salpêtrière, he
appeared surprised and almost alarmed. There was no one but himself in
this cross-lane. He drew up hastily behind the corner of the wall of an
enclosure, though this did not prevent M. le Duc de Havré from spying
him out.

M. le Duc de Havré, as captain of the guard on duty that day, was
seated in the carriage, opposite the king. He said to his Majesty,
“Yonder is an evil-looking man.” Members of the police, who were
clearing the king’s route, took equal note of him: one of them received
an order to follow him. But the man plunged into the deserted little
streets of the faubourg, and as twilight was beginning to fall, the
agent lost trace of him, as is stated in a report addressed that same
evening to M. le Comte d’Anglès, Minister of State, Prefect of Police.

When the man in the yellow coat had thrown the agent off his track, he
redoubled his pace, not without turning round many a time to assure
himself that he was not being followed. At a quarter-past four, that is
to say, when night was fully come, he passed in front of the theatre of
the Porte Saint-Martin, where _The Two Convicts_ was being played that
day. This poster, illuminated by the theatre lanterns, struck him; for,
although he was walking rapidly, he halted to read it. An instant later
he was in the blind alley of La Planchette, and he entered the _Plat
d’Etain_ [the Pewter Platter], where the office of the coach for Lagny
was then situated. This coach set out at half-past four. The horses
were harnessed, and the travellers, summoned by the coachman, were
hastily climbing the lofty iron ladder of the vehicle.

The man inquired:—

“Have you a place?”


“Only one—beside me on the box,” said the coachman.

“I will take it.”


“Climb up.”


Nevertheless, before setting out, the coachman cast a glance at the
traveller’s shabby dress, at the diminutive size of his bundle, and
made him pay his fare.

“Are you going as far as Lagny?” demanded the coachman.

“Yes,” said the man.

The traveller paid to Lagny.

They started. When they had passed the barrier, the coachman tried to
enter into conversation, but the traveller only replied in
monosyllables. The coachman took to whistling and swearing at his
horses.

The coachman wrapped himself up in his cloak. It was cold. The man did
not appear to be thinking of that. Thus they passed Gournay and
Neuilly-sur-Marne.

Towards six o’clock in the evening they reached Chelles. The coachman
drew up in front of the carters’ inn installed in the ancient buildings
of the Royal Abbey, to give his horses a breathing spell.

“I get down here,” said the man.

He took his bundle and his cudgel and jumped down from the vehicle.

An instant later he had disappeared.

He did not enter the inn.

When the coach set out for Lagny a few minutes later, it did not
encounter him in the principal street of Chelles.

The coachman turned to the inside travellers.

“There,” said he, “is a man who does not belong here, for I do not know
him. He had not the air of owning a sou, but he does not consider
money; he pays to Lagny, and he goes only as far as Chelles. It is
night; all the houses are shut; he does not enter the inn, and he is
not to be found. So he has dived through the earth.”


The man had not plunged into the earth, but he had gone with great
strides through the dark, down the principal street of Chelles, then he
had turned to the right before reaching the church, into the crossroad
leading to Montfermeil, like a person who was acquainted with the
country and had been there before.

He followed this road rapidly. At the spot where it is intersected by
the ancient tree-bordered road which runs from Gagny to Lagny, he heard
people coming. He concealed himself precipitately in a ditch, and there
waited until the passers-by were at a distance. The precaution was
nearly superfluous, however; for, as we have already said, it was a
very dark December night. Not more than two or three stars were visible
in the sky.

It is at this point that the ascent of the hill begins. The man did not
return to the road to Montfermeil; he struck across the fields to the
right, and entered the forest with long strides.

Once in the forest he slackened his pace, and began a careful
examination of all the trees, advancing, step by step, as though
seeking and following a mysterious road known to himself alone. There
came a moment when he appeared to lose himself, and he paused in
indecision. At last he arrived, by dint of feeling his way inch by
inch, at a clearing where there was a great heap of whitish stones. He
stepped up briskly to these stones, and examined them attentively
through the mists of night, as though he were passing them in review. A
large tree, covered with those excrescences which are the warts of
vegetation, stood a few paces distant from the pile of stones. He went
up to this tree and passed his hand over the bark of the trunk, as
though seeking to recognize and count all the warts.

Opposite this tree, which was an ash, there was a chestnut-tree,
suffering from a peeling of the bark, to which a band of zinc had been
nailed by way of dressing. He raised himself on tiptoe and touched this
band of zinc.

Then he trod about for awhile on the ground comprised in the space
between the tree and the heap of stones, like a person who is trying to
assure himself that the soil has not recently been disturbed.

That done, he took his bearings, and resumed his march through the
forest.

It was the man who had just met Cosette.

As he walked through the thicket in the direction of Montfermeil, he
had espied that tiny shadow moving with a groan, depositing a burden on
the ground, then taking it up and setting out again. He drew near, and
perceived that it was a very young child, laden with an enormous bucket
of water. Then he approached the child, and silently grasped the handle
of the bucket.






Cosette, as we have said, was not frightened.

The man accosted her. He spoke in a voice that was grave and almost
bass.

“My child, what you are carrying is very heavy for you.”


Cosette raised her head and replied:—

“Yes, sir.”


“Give it to me,” said the man; “I will carry it for you.”


Cosette let go of the bucket-handle. The man walked along beside her.

“It really is very heavy,” he muttered between his teeth. Then he
added:—

“How old are you, little one?”


“Eight, sir.”


“And have you come from far like this?”


“From the spring in the forest.”


“Are you going far?”


“A good quarter of an hour’s walk from here.”


The man said nothing for a moment; then he remarked abruptly:—

“So you have no mother.”


“I don’t know,” answered the child.

Before the man had time to speak again, she added:—

“I don’t think so. Other people have mothers. I have none.”


And after a silence she went on:—

“I think that I never had any.”


The man halted; he set the bucket on the ground, bent down and placed
both hands on the child’s shoulders, making an effort to look at her
and to see her face in the dark.

Cosette’s thin and sickly face was vaguely outlined by the livid light
in the sky.

“What is your name?” said the man.

“Cosette.”


The man seemed to have received an electric shock. He looked at her
once more; then he removed his hands from Cosette’s shoulders, seized
the bucket, and set out again.

After a moment he inquired:—

“Where do you live, little one?”


“At Montfermeil, if you know where that is.”


“That is where we are going?”


“Yes, sir.”


He paused; then began again:—

“Who sent you at such an hour to get water in the forest?”


“It was Madame Thénardier.”


The man resumed, in a voice which he strove to render indifferent, but
in which there was, nevertheless, a singular tremor:—

“What does your Madame Thénardier do?”


“She is my mistress,” said the child. “She keeps the inn.”


“The inn?” said the man. “Well, I am going to lodge there to-night.
Show me the way.”


“We are on the way there,” said the child.

The man walked tolerably fast. Cosette followed him without difficulty.
She no longer felt any fatigue. From time to time she raised her eyes
towards the man, with a sort of tranquillity and an indescribable
confidence. She had never been taught to turn to Providence and to
pray; nevertheless, she felt within her something which resembled hope
and joy, and which mounted towards heaven.

Several minutes elapsed. The man resumed:—

“Is there no servant in Madame Thénardier’s house?”


“No, sir.”


“Are you alone there?”


“Yes, sir.”


Another pause ensued. Cosette lifted up her voice:—

“That is to say, there are two little girls.”


“What little girls?”


“Ponine and Zelma.”


This was the way the child simplified the romantic names so dear to the
female Thénardier.

“Who are Ponine and Zelma?”


“They are Madame Thénardier’s young ladies; her daughters, as you would
say.”


“And what do those girls do?”


“Oh!” said the child, “they have beautiful dolls; things with gold in
them, all full of affairs. They play; they amuse themselves.”


“All day long?”


“Yes, sir.”


“And you?”


“I? I work.”


“All day long?”


The child raised her great eyes, in which hung a tear, which was not
visible because of the darkness, and replied gently:—

“Yes, sir.”


After an interval of silence she went on:—

“Sometimes, when I have finished my work and they let me, I amuse
myself, too.”


“How do you amuse yourself?”


“In the best way I can. They let me alone; but I have not many
playthings. Ponine and Zelma will not let me play with their dolls. I
have only a little lead sword, no longer than that.”


The child held up her tiny finger.

“And it will not cut?”


“Yes, sir,” said the child; “it cuts salad and the heads of flies.”


They reached the village. Cosette guided the stranger through the
streets. They passed the bakeshop, but Cosette did not think of the
bread which she had been ordered to fetch. The man had ceased to ply
her with questions, and now preserved a gloomy silence.

When they had left the church behind them, the man, on perceiving all
the open-air booths, asked Cosette:—

“So there is a fair going on here?”


“No, sir; it is Christmas.”


As they approached the tavern, Cosette timidly touched his arm:—

“Monsieur?”


“What, my child?”


“We are quite near the house.”


“Well?”


“Will you let me take my bucket now?”


“Why?”


“If Madame sees that some one has carried it for me, she will beat me.”


The man handed her the bucket. An instant later they were at the tavern
door.




MAN WHO MAY BE A RICH MAN


Cosette could not refrain from casting a sidelong glance at the big
doll, which was still displayed at the toy-merchant’s; then she
knocked. The door opened. The Thénardier appeared with a candle in her
hand.

“Ah! so it’s you, you little wretch! good mercy, but you’ve taken your
time! The hussy has been amusing herself!”


“Madame,” said Cosette, trembling all over, “here’s a gentleman who
wants a lodging.”


The Thénardier speedily replaced her gruff air by her amiable grimace,
a change of aspect common to tavern-keepers, and eagerly sought the
newcomer with her eyes.

“This is the gentleman?” said she.

“Yes, Madame,” replied the man, raising his hand to his hat.

Wealthy travellers are not so polite. This gesture, and an inspection
of the stranger’s costume and baggage, which the Thénardier passed in
review with one glance, caused the amiable grimace to vanish, and the
gruff mien to reappear. She resumed dryly:—

“Enter, my good man.”


The “good man” entered. The Thénardier cast a second glance at him,
paid particular attention to his frock-coat, which was absolutely
threadbare, and to his hat, which was a little battered, and, tossing
her head, wrinkling her nose, and screwing up her eyes, she consulted
her husband, who was still drinking with the carters. The husband
replied by that imperceptible movement of the forefinger, which, backed
up by an inflation of the lips, signifies in such cases: A regular
beggar. Thereupon, the Thénardier exclaimed:—

“Ah! see here, my good man; I am very sorry, but I have no room left.”


“Put me where you like,” said the man; “in the attic, in the stable. I
will pay as though I occupied a room.”


“Forty sous.”


“Forty sous; agreed.”


“Very well, then!”


“Forty sous!” said a carter, in a low tone, to the Thénardier woman;
“why, the charge is only twenty sous!”


“It is forty in his case,” retorted the Thénardier, in the same tone.
“I don’t lodge poor folks for less.”


“That’s true,” added her husband, gently; “it ruins a house to have
such people in it.”


In the meantime, the man, laying his bundle and his cudgel on a bench,
had seated himself at a table, on which Cosette made haste to place a
bottle of wine and a glass. The merchant who had demanded the bucket of
water took it to his horse himself. Cosette resumed her place under the
kitchen table, and her knitting.

The man, who had barely moistened his lips in the wine which he had
poured out for himself, observed the child with peculiar attention.

Cosette was ugly. If she had been happy, she might have been pretty. We
have already given a sketch of that sombre little figure. Cosette was
thin and pale; she was nearly eight years old, but she seemed to be
hardly six. Her large eyes, sunken in a sort of shadow, were almost put
out with weeping. The corners of her mouth had that curve of habitual
anguish which is seen in condemned persons and desperately sick people.
Her hands were, as her mother had divined, “ruined with chilblains.”
The fire which illuminated her at that moment brought into relief all
the angles of her bones, and rendered her thinness frightfully
apparent. As she was always shivering, she had acquired the habit of
pressing her knees one against the other. Her entire clothing was but a
rag which would have inspired pity in summer, and which inspired horror
in winter. All she had on was hole-ridden linen, not a scrap of
woollen. Her skin was visible here and there and everywhere black and
blue spots could be descried, which marked the places where the
Thénardier woman had touched her. Her naked legs were thin and red. The
hollows in her neck were enough to make one weep. This child’s whole
person, her mien, her attitude, the sound of her voice, the intervals
which she allowed to elapse between one word and the next, her glance,
her silence, her slightest gesture, expressed and betrayed one sole
idea,—fear.

Fear was diffused all over her; she was covered with it, so to speak;
fear drew her elbows close to her hips, withdrew her heels under her
petticoat, made her occupy as little space as possible, allowed her
only the breath that was absolutely necessary, and had become what
might be called the habit of her body, admitting of no possible
variation except an increase. In the depths of her eyes there was an
astonished nook where terror lurked.

Her fear was such, that on her arrival, wet as she was, Cosette did not
dare to approach the fire and dry herself, but sat silently down to her
work again.

The expression in the glance of that child of eight years was
habitually so gloomy, and at times so tragic, that it seemed at certain
moments as though she were on the verge of becoming an idiot or a
demon.

As we have stated, she had never known what it is to pray; she had
never set foot in a church. “Have I the time?” said the Thénardier.

The man in the yellow coat never took his eyes from Cosette.

All at once, the Thénardier exclaimed:—

“By the way, where’s that bread?”


Cosette, according to her custom whenever the Thénardier uplifted her
voice, emerged with great haste from beneath the table.

She had completely forgotten the bread. She had recourse to the
expedient of children who live in a constant state of fear. She lied.

“Madame, the baker’s shop was shut.”


“You should have knocked.”


“I did knock, Madame.”


“Well?”


“He did not open the door.”


“I’ll find out to-morrow whether that is true,” said the Thénardier;
“and if you are telling me a lie, I’ll lead you a pretty dance. In the
meantime, give me back my fifteen-sou piece.”


Cosette plunged her hand into the pocket of her apron, and turned
green. The fifteen-sou piece was not there.

“Ah, come now,” said Madame Thénardier, “did you hear me?”


Cosette turned her pocket inside out; there was nothing in it. What
could have become of that money? The unhappy little creature could not
find a word to say. She was petrified.

“Have you lost that fifteen-sou piece?” screamed the Thénardier,
hoarsely, “or do you want to rob me of it?”


At the same time, she stretched out her arm towards the
cat-o’-nine-tails which hung on a nail in the chimney-corner.

This formidable gesture restored to Cosette sufficient strength to
shriek:—

“Mercy, Madame, Madame! I will not do so any more!”


The Thénardier took down the whip.

In the meantime, the man in the yellow coat had been fumbling in the
fob of his waistcoat, without any one having noticed his movements.
Besides, the other travellers were drinking or playing cards, and were
not paying attention to anything.

Cosette contracted herself into a ball, with anguish, within the angle
of the chimney, endeavoring to gather up and conceal her poor half-nude
limbs. The Thénardier raised her arm.

“Pardon me, Madame,” said the man, “but just now I caught sight of
something which had fallen from this little one’s apron pocket, and
rolled aside. Perhaps this is it.”


At the same time he bent down and seemed to be searching on the floor
for a moment.

“Exactly; here it is,” he went on, straightening himself up.

And he held out a silver coin to the Thénardier.

“Yes, that’s it,” said she.

It was not it, for it was a twenty-sou piece; but the Thénardier found
it to her advantage. She put the coin in her pocket, and confined
herself to casting a fierce glance at the child, accompanied with the
remark, “Don’t let this ever happen again!”


Cosette returned to what the Thénardier called “her kennel,” and her
large eyes, which were riveted on the traveller, began to take on an
expression such as they had never worn before. Thus far it was only an
innocent amazement, but a sort of stupefied confidence was mingled with
it.

“By the way, would you like some supper?” the Thénardier inquired of
the traveller.

He made no reply. He appeared to be absorbed in thought.

“What sort of a man is that?” she muttered between her teeth. “He’s
some frightfully poor wretch. He hasn’t a sou to pay for a supper. Will
he even pay me for his lodging? It’s very lucky, all the same, that it
did not occur to him to steal the money that was on the floor.”


In the meantime, a door had opened, and Éponine and Azelma entered.

They were two really pretty little girls, more bourgeois than peasant
in looks, and very charming; the one with shining chestnut tresses, the
other with long black braids hanging down her back, both vivacious,
neat, plump, rosy, and healthy, and a delight to the eye. They were
warmly clad, but with so much maternal art that the thickness of the
stuffs did not detract from the coquetry of arrangement. There was a
hint of winter, though the springtime was not wholly effaced. Light
emanated from these two little beings. Besides this, they were on the
throne. In their toilettes, in their gayety, in the noise which they
made, there was sovereignty. When they entered, the Thénardier said to
them in a grumbling tone which was full of adoration, “Ah! there you
are, you children!”


Then drawing them, one after the other to her knees, smoothing their
hair, tying their ribbons afresh, and then releasing them with that
gentle manner of shaking off which is peculiar to mothers, she
exclaimed, “What frights they are!”


They went and seated themselves in the chimney-corner. They had a doll,
which they turned over and over on their knees with all sorts of joyous
chatter. From time to time Cosette raised her eyes from her knitting,
and watched their play with a melancholy air.

Éponine and Azelma did not look at Cosette. She was the same as a dog
to them. These three little girls did not yet reckon up four and twenty
years between them, but they already represented the whole society of
man; envy on the one side, disdain on the other.

The doll of the Thénardier sisters was very much faded, very old, and
much broken; but it seemed nonetheless admirable to Cosette, who had
never had a doll in her life, _a real doll_, to make use of the
expression which all children will understand.

All at once, the Thénardier, who had been going back and forth in the
room, perceived that Cosette’s mind was distracted, and that, instead
of working, she was paying attention to the little ones at their play.

“Ah! I’ve caught you at it!” she cried. “So that’s the way you work!
I’ll make you work to the tune of the whip; that I will.”


The stranger turned to the Thénardier, without quitting his chair.

“Bah, Madame,” he said, with an almost timid air, “let her play!”


Such a wish expressed by a traveller who had eaten a slice of mutton
and had drunk a couple of bottles of wine with his supper, and who had
not the air of being frightfully poor, would have been equivalent to an
order. But that a man with such a hat should permit himself such a
desire, and that a man with such a coat should permit himself to have a
will, was something which Madame Thénardier did not intend to tolerate.
She retorted with acrimony:—

“She must work, since she eats. I don’t feed her to do nothing.”


“What is she making?” went on the stranger, in a gentle voice which
contrasted strangely with his beggarly garments and his porter’s
shoulders.

The Thénardier deigned to reply:—

“Stockings, if you please. Stockings for my little girls, who have
none, so to speak, and who are absolutely barefoot just now.”


The man looked at Cosette’s poor little red feet, and continued:—

“When will she have finished this pair of stockings?”


“She has at least three or four good days’ work on them still, the lazy
creature!”


“And how much will that pair of stockings be worth when she has
finished them?”


The Thénardier cast a glance of disdain on him.

“Thirty sous at least.”


“Will you sell them for five francs?” went on the man.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed a carter who was listening, with a loud
laugh; “five francs! the deuce, I should think so! five balls!”


Thénardier thought it time to strike in.

“Yes, sir; if such is your fancy, you will be allowed to have that pair
of stockings for five francs. We can refuse nothing to travellers.”


“You must pay on the spot,” said the Thénardier, in her curt and
peremptory fashion.

“I will buy that pair of stockings,” replied the man, “and,” he added,
drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and laying it on the table,
“I will pay for them.”


Then he turned to Cosette.

“Now I own your work; play, my child.”


The carter was so much touched by the five-franc piece, that he
abandoned his glass and hastened up.

“But it’s true!” he cried, examining it. “A real hind wheel! and not
counterfeit!”


Thénardier approached and silently put the coin in his pocket.

The Thénardier had no reply to make. She bit her lips, and her face
assumed an expression of hatred.

In the meantime, Cosette was trembling. She ventured to ask:—

“Is it true, Madame? May I play?”


“Play!” said the Thénardier, in a terrible voice.

“Thanks, Madame,” said Cosette.

And while her mouth thanked the Thénardier, her whole little soul
thanked the traveller.

Thénardier had resumed his drinking; his wife whispered in his ear:—

“Who can this yellow man be?”


“I have seen millionaires with coats like that,” replied Thénardier, in
a sovereign manner.

Cosette had dropped her knitting, but had not left her seat. Cosette
always moved as little as possible. She picked up some old rags and her
little lead sword from a box behind her.

Éponine and Azelma paid no attention to what was going on. They had
just executed a very important operation; they had just got hold of the
cat. They had thrown their doll on the ground, and Éponine, who was the
elder, was swathing the little cat, in spite of its mewing and its
contortions, in a quantity of clothes and red and blue scraps. While
performing this serious and difficult work she was saying to her sister
in that sweet and adorable language of children, whose grace, like the
splendor of the butterfly’s wing, vanishes when one essays to fix it
fast.

“You see, sister, this doll is more amusing than the other. She twists,
she cries, she is warm. See, sister, let us play with her. She shall be
my little girl. I will be a lady. I will come to see you, and you shall
look at her. Gradually, you will perceive her whiskers, and that will
surprise you. And then you will see her ears, and then you will see her
tail and it will amaze you. And you will say to me, ‘Ah! Mon Dieu!’ and
I will say to you: ‘Yes, Madame, it is my little girl. Little girls are
made like that just at present.’”


Azelma listened admiringly to Éponine.

In the meantime, the drinkers had begun to sing an obscene song, and to
laugh at it until the ceiling shook. Thénardier accompanied and
encouraged them.

As birds make nests out of everything, so children make a doll out of
anything which comes to hand. While Éponine and Azelma were bundling up
the cat, Cosette, on her side, had dressed up her sword. That done, she
laid it in her arms, and sang to it softly, to lull it to sleep.

The doll is one of the most imperious needs and, at the same time, one
of the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for, to
clothe, to deck, to dress, to undress, to redress, to teach, scold a
little, to rock, to dandle, to lull to sleep, to imagine that something
is some one,—therein lies the whole woman’s future. While dreaming and
chattering, making tiny outfits, and baby clothes, while sewing little
gowns, and corsages and bodices, the child grows into a young girl, the
young girl into a big girl, the big girl into a woman. The first child
is the continuation of the last doll.

A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as
impossible, as a woman without children.

So Cosette had made herself a doll out of the sword.

Madame Thénardier approached _the yellow man_; “My husband is right,”
she thought; “perhaps it is M. Laffitte; there are such queer rich
men!”


She came and set her elbows on the table.

“Monsieur,” said she. At this word, _Monsieur_, the man turned; up to
that time, the Thénardier had addressed him only as _brave homme_ or
_bonhomme_.

“You see, sir,” she pursued, assuming a sweetish air that was even more
repulsive to behold than her fierce mien, “I am willing that the child
should play; I do not oppose it, but it is good for once, because you
are generous. You see, she has nothing; she must needs work.”


“Then this child is not yours?” demanded the man.

“Oh! mon Dieu! no, sir! she is a little beggar whom we have taken in
through charity; a sort of imbecile child. She must have water on the
brain; she has a large head, as you see. We do what we can for her, for
we are not rich; we have written in vain to her native place, and have
received no reply these six months. It must be that her mother is
dead.”


“Ah!” said the man, and fell into his reverie once more.

“Her mother didn’t amount to much,” added the Thénardier; “she
abandoned her child.”


During the whole of this conversation Cosette, as though warned by some
instinct that she was under discussion, had not taken her eyes from the
Thénardier’s face; she listened vaguely; she caught a few words here
and there.

Meanwhile, the drinkers, all three-quarters intoxicated, were repeating
their unclean refrain with redoubled gayety; it was a highly spiced and
wanton song, in which the Virgin and the infant Jesus were introduced.
The Thénardier went off to take part in the shouts of laughter.
Cosette, from her post under the table, gazed at the fire, which was
reflected from her fixed eyes. She had begun to rock the sort of baby
which she had made, and, as she rocked it, she sang in a low voice, “My
mother is dead! my mother is dead! my mother is dead!”


On being urged afresh by the hostess, the yellow man, “the
millionaire,” consented at last to take supper.

“What does Monsieur wish?”


“Bread and cheese,” said the man.

“Decidedly, he is a beggar” thought Madame Thénardier.

The drunken men were still singing their song, and the child under the
table was singing hers.

All at once, Cosette paused; she had just turned round and caught sight
of the little Thénardiers’ doll, which they had abandoned for the cat
and had left on the floor a few paces from the kitchen table.

Then she dropped the swaddled sword, which only half met her needs, and
cast her eyes slowly round the room. Madame Thénardier was whispering
to her husband and counting over some money; Ponine and Zelma were
playing with the cat; the travellers were eating or drinking or
singing; not a glance was fixed on her. She had not a moment to lose;
she crept out from under the table on her hands and knees, made sure
once more that no one was watching her; then she slipped quickly up to
the doll and seized it. An instant later she was in her place again,
seated motionless, and only turned so as to cast a shadow on the doll
which she held in her arms. The happiness of playing with a doll was so
rare for her that it contained all the violence of voluptuousness.

No one had seen her, except the traveller, who was slowly devouring his
meagre supper.

This joy lasted about a quarter of an hour.

But with all the precautions that Cosette had taken she did not
perceive that one of the doll’s legs stuck out and that the fire on the
hearth lighted it up very vividly. That pink and shining foot,
projecting from the shadow, suddenly struck the eye of Azelma, who said
to Éponine, “Look! sister.”


The two little girls paused in stupefaction; Cosette had dared to take
their doll!

Éponine rose, and, without releasing the cat, she ran to her mother,
and began to tug at her skirt.

“Let me alone!” said her mother; “what do you want?”


“Mother,” said the child, “look there!”


And she pointed to Cosette.

Cosette, absorbed in the ecstasies of possession, no longer saw or
heard anything.

Madame Thénardier’s countenance assumed that peculiar expression which
is composed of the terrible mingled with the trifles of life, and which
has caused this style of woman to be named _Megaeras_.

On this occasion, wounded pride exasperated her wrath still further.
Cosette had overstepped all bounds; Cosette had laid violent hands on
the doll belonging to “these young ladies.” A czarina who should see a
muzhik trying on her imperial son’s blue ribbon would wear no other
face.

She shrieked in a voice rendered hoarse with indignation:—

“Cosette!”


Cosette started as though the earth had trembled beneath her; she
turned round.

“Cosette!” repeated the Thénardier.

Cosette took the doll and laid it gently on the floor with a sort of
veneration, mingled with despair; then, without taking her eyes from
it, she clasped her hands, and, what is terrible to relate of a child
of that age, she wrung them; then—not one of the emotions of the day,
neither the trip to the forest, nor the weight of the bucket of water,
nor the loss of the money, nor the sight of the whip, nor even the sad
words which she had heard Madame Thénardier utter had been able to
wring this from her—she wept; she burst out sobbing.

Meanwhile, the traveller had risen to his feet.

“What is the matter?” he said to the Thénardier.

“Don’t you see?” said the Thénardier, pointing to the _corpus delicti_
which lay at Cosette’s feet.

“Well, what of it?” resumed the man.

“That beggar,” replied the Thénardier, “has permitted herself to touch
the children’s doll!”


“All this noise for that!” said the man; “well, what if she did play
with that doll?”


“She touched it with her dirty hands!” pursued the Thénardier, “with
her frightful hands!”


Here Cosette redoubled her sobs.

“Will you stop your noise?” screamed the Thénardier.

The man went straight to the street door, opened it, and stepped out.

As soon as he had gone, the Thénardier profited by his absence to give
Cosette a hearty kick under the table, which made the child utter loud
cries.

The door opened again, the man reappeared; he carried in both hands the
fabulous doll which we have mentioned, and which all the village brats
had been staring at ever since the morning, and he set it upright in
front of Cosette, saying:—

“Here; this is for you.”


It must be supposed that in the course of the hour and more which he
had spent there he had taken confused notice through his reverie of
that toy shop, lighted up by fire-pots and candles so splendidly that
it was visible like an illumination through the window of the
drinking-shop.

Cosette raised her eyes; she gazed at the man approaching her with that
doll as she might have gazed at the sun; she heard the unprecedented
words, “It is for you”; she stared at him; she stared at the doll; then
she slowly retreated, and hid herself at the extreme end, under the
table in a corner of the wall.

She no longer cried; she no longer wept; she had the appearance of no
longer daring to breathe.

The Thénardier, Éponine, and Azelma were like statues also; the very
drinkers had paused; a solemn silence reigned through the whole room.

Madame Thénardier, petrified and mute, recommenced her conjectures:
“Who is that old fellow? Is he a poor man? Is he a millionaire? Perhaps
he is both; that is to say, a thief.”


The face of the male Thénardier presented that expressive fold which
accentuates the human countenance whenever the dominant instinct
appears there in all its bestial force. The tavern-keeper stared
alternately at the doll and at the traveller; he seemed to be scenting
out the man, as he would have scented out a bag of money. This did not
last longer than the space of a flash of lightning. He stepped up to
his wife and said to her in a low voice:—

“That machine costs at least thirty francs. No nonsense. Down on your
belly before that man!”


Gross natures have this in common with _naïve_ natures, that they
possess no transition state.

“Well, Cosette,” said the Thénardier, in a voice that strove to be
sweet, and which was composed of the bitter honey of malicious women,
“aren’t you going to take your doll?”


Cosette ventured to emerge from her hole.

“The gentleman has given you a doll, my little Cosette,” said
Thénardier, with a caressing air. “Take it; it is yours.”


Cosette gazed at the marvellous doll in a sort of terror. Her face was
still flooded with tears, but her eyes began to fill, like the sky at
daybreak, with strange beams of joy. What she felt at that moment was a
little like what she would have felt if she had been abruptly told,
“Little one, you are the Queen of France.”


It seemed to her that if she touched that doll, lightning would dart
from it.

This was true, up to a certain point, for she said to herself that the
Thénardier would scold and beat her.

Nevertheless, the attraction carried the day. She ended by drawing near
and murmuring timidly as she turned towards Madame Thénardier:—

“May I, Madame?”


No words can render that air, at once despairing, terrified, and
ecstatic.

“Pardi!” cried the Thénardier, “it is yours. The gentleman has given it
to you.”


“Truly, sir?” said Cosette. “Is it true? Is the ‘lady’ mine?”


The stranger’s eyes seemed to be full of tears. He appeared to have
reached that point of emotion where a man does not speak for fear lest
he should weep. He nodded to Cosette, and placed the “lady’s” hand in
her tiny hand.

Cosette hastily withdrew her hand, as though that of the “lady”
scorched her, and began to stare at the floor. We are forced to add
that at that moment she stuck out her tongue immoderately. All at once
she wheeled round and seized the doll in a transport.

“I shall call her Catherine,” she said.

It was an odd moment when Cosette’s rags met and clasped the ribbons
and fresh pink muslins of the doll.

“Madame,” she resumed, “may I put her on a chair?”


“Yes, my child,” replied the Thénardier.

It was now the turn of Éponine and Azelma to gaze at Cosette with envy.

Cosette placed Catherine on a chair, then seated herself on the floor
in front of her, and remained motionless, without uttering a word, in
an attitude of contemplation.

“Play, Cosette,” said the stranger.

“Oh! I am playing,” returned the child.

This stranger, this unknown individual, who had the air of a visit
which Providence was making on Cosette, was the person whom the
Thénardier hated worse than any one in the world at that moment.
However, it was necessary to control herself. Habituated as she was to
dissimulation through endeavoring to copy her husband in all his
actions, these emotions were more than she could endure. She made haste
to send her daughters to bed, then she asked the man’s _permission_ to
send Cosette off also; “for she has worked hard all day,” she added
with a maternal air. Cosette went off to bed, carrying Catherine in her
arms.

From time to time the Thénardier went to the other end of the room
where her husband was, to _relieve her soul_, as she said. She
exchanged with her husband words which were all the more furious
because she dared not utter them aloud.

“Old beast! What has he got in his belly, to come and upset us in this
manner! To want that little monster to play! to give away forty-franc
dolls to a jade that I would sell for forty sous, so I would! A little
more and he will be saying _Your Majesty_ to her, as though to the
Duchesse de Berry! Is there any sense in it? Is he mad, then, that
mysterious old fellow?”


“Why! it is perfectly simple,” replied Thénardier, “if that amuses him!
It amuses you to have the little one work; it amuses him to have her
play. He’s all right. A traveller can do what he pleases when he pays
for it. If the old fellow is a philanthropist, what is that to you? If
he is an imbecile, it does not concern you. What are you worrying for,
so long as he has money?”


The language of a master, and the reasoning of an innkeeper, neither of
which admitted of any reply.

The man had placed his elbows on the table, and resumed his thoughtful
attitude. All the other travellers, both pedlers and carters, had
withdrawn a little, and had ceased singing. They were staring at him
from a distance, with a sort of respectful awe. This poorly dressed
man, who drew “hind-wheels” from his pocket with so much ease, and who
lavished gigantic dolls on dirty little brats in wooden shoes, was
certainly a magnificent fellow, and one to be feared.

Many hours passed. The midnight mass was over, the chimes had ceased,
the drinkers had taken their departure, the drinking-shop was closed,
the public room was deserted, the fire extinct, the stranger still
remained in the same place and the same attitude. From time to time he
changed the elbow on which he leaned. That was all; but he had not said
a word since Cosette had left the room.

The Thénardiers alone, out of politeness and curiosity, had remained in
the room.

“Is he going to pass the night in that fashion?” grumbled the
Thénardier. When two o’clock in the morning struck, she declared
herself vanquished, and said to her husband, “I’m going to bed. Do as
you like.” Her husband seated himself at a table in the corner, lighted
a candle, and began to read the _Courrier Français_.

A good hour passed thus. The worthy inn-keeper had perused the
_Courrier Français_ at least three times, from the date of the number
to the printer’s name. The stranger did not stir.

Thénardier fidgeted, coughed, spit, blew his nose, and creaked his
chair. Not a movement on the man’s part. “Is he asleep?” thought
Thénardier. The man was not asleep, but nothing could arouse him.

At last Thénardier took off his cap, stepped gently up to him, and
ventured to say:—

“Is not Monsieur going to his repose?”


_Not going to bed_ would have seemed to him excessive and familiar. _To
repose_ smacked of luxury and respect. These words possess the
mysterious and admirable property of swelling the bill on the following
day. A chamber where one _sleeps_ costs twenty sous; a chamber in which
one _reposes_ costs twenty francs.

“Well!” said the stranger, “you are right. Where is your stable?”


“Sir!” exclaimed Thénardier, with a smile, “I will conduct you, sir.”


He took the candle; the man picked up his bundle and cudgel, and
Thénardier conducted him to a chamber on the first floor, which was of
rare splendor, all furnished in mahogany, with a low bedstead,
curtained with red calico.

“What is this?” said the traveller.

“It is really our bridal chamber,” said the tavern-keeper. “My wife and
I occupy another. This is only entered three or four times a year.”


“I should have liked the stable quite as well,” said the man, abruptly.

Thénardier pretended not to hear this unamiable remark.

He lighted two perfectly fresh wax candles which figured on the
chimney-piece. A very good fire was flickering on the hearth.

On the chimney-piece, under a glass globe, stood a woman’s head-dress
in silver wire and orange flowers.

“And what is this?” resumed the stranger.

“That, sir,” said Thénardier, “is my wife’s wedding bonnet.”


The traveller surveyed the object with a glance which seemed to say,
“There really was a time, then, when that monster was a maiden?”


Thénardier lied, however. When he had leased this paltry building for
the purpose of converting it into a tavern, he had found this chamber
decorated in just this manner, and had purchased the furniture and
obtained the orange flowers at second hand, with the idea that this
would cast a graceful shadow on “his spouse,” and would result in what
the English call respectability for his house.

When the traveller turned round, the host had disappeared. Thénardier
had withdrawn discreetly, without venturing to wish him a good night,
as he did not wish to treat with disrespectful cordiality a man whom he
proposed to fleece royally the following morning.

The inn-keeper retired to his room. His wife was in bed, but she was
not asleep. When she heard her husband’s step she turned over and said
to him:—

“Do you know, I’m going to turn Cosette out of doors to-morrow.”


Thénardier replied coldly:—

“How you do go on!”


They exchanged no further words, and a few moments later their candle
was extinguished.

As for the traveller, he had deposited his cudgel and his bundle in a
corner. The landlord once gone, he threw himself into an armchair and
remained for some time buried in thought. Then he removed his shoes,
took one of the two candles, blew out the other, opened the door, and
quitted the room, gazing about him like a person who is in search of
something. He traversed a corridor and came upon a staircase. There he
heard a very faint and gentle sound like the breathing of a child. He
followed this sound, and came to a sort of triangular recess built
under the staircase, or rather formed by the staircase itself. This
recess was nothing else than the space under the steps. There, in the
midst of all sorts of old papers and potsherds, among dust and spiders’
webs, was a bed—if one can call by the name of bed a straw pallet so
full of holes as to display the straw, and a coverlet so tattered as to
show the pallet. No sheets. This was placed on the floor.

In this bed Cosette was sleeping.

The man approached and gazed down upon her.

Cosette was in a profound sleep; she was fully dressed. In the winter
she did not undress, in order that she might not be so cold.

Against her breast was pressed the doll, whose large eyes, wide open,
glittered in the dark. From time to time she gave vent to a deep sigh
as though she were on the point of waking, and she strained the doll
almost convulsively in her arms. Beside her bed there was only one of
her wooden shoes.

A door which stood open near Cosette’s pallet permitted a view of a
rather large, dark room. The stranger stepped into it. At the further
extremity, through a glass door, he saw two small, very white beds.
They belonged to Éponine and Azelma. Behind these beds, and half
hidden, stood an uncurtained wicker cradle, in which the little boy who
had cried all the evening lay asleep.

The stranger conjectured that this chamber connected with that of the
Thénardier pair. He was on the point of retreating when his eye fell
upon the fireplace—one of those vast tavern chimneys where there is
always so little fire when there is any fire at all, and which are so
cold to look at. There was no fire in this one, there was not even
ashes; but there was something which attracted the stranger’s gaze,
nevertheless. It was two tiny children’s shoes, coquettish in shape and
unequal in size. The traveller recalled the graceful and immemorial
custom in accordance with which children place their shoes in the
chimney on Christmas eve, there to await in the darkness some sparkling
gift from their good fairy. Éponine and Azelma had taken care not to
omit this, and each of them had set one of her shoes on the hearth.

The traveller bent over them.

The fairy, that is to say, their mother, had already paid her visit,
and in each he saw a brand-new and shining ten-sou piece.

The man straightened himself up, and was on the point of withdrawing,
when far in, in the darkest corner of the hearth, he caught sight of
another object. He looked at it, and recognized a wooden shoe, a
frightful shoe of the coarsest description, half dilapidated and all
covered with ashes and dried mud. It was Cosette’s sabot. Cosette, with
that touching trust of childhood, which can always be deceived yet
never discouraged, had placed her shoe on the hearth-stone also.

Hope in a child who has never known anything but despair is a sweet and
touching thing.

There was nothing in this wooden shoe.

The stranger fumbled in his waistcoat, bent over and placed a louis
d’or in Cosette’s shoe.

Then he regained his own chamber with the stealthy tread of a wolf.






On the following morning, two hours at least before day-break,
Thénardier, seated beside a candle in the public room of the tavern,
pen in hand, was making out the bill for the traveller with the yellow
coat.

His wife, standing beside him, and half bent over him, was following
him with her eyes. They exchanged not a word. On the one hand, there
was profound meditation, on the other, the religious admiration with
which one watches the birth and development of a marvel of the human
mind. A noise was audible in the house; it was the Lark sweeping the
stairs.

After the lapse of a good quarter of an hour, and some erasures,
Thénardier produced the following masterpiece:—

BILL OF THE GENTLEMAN IN No. 1.

Supper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     3 francs.
Chamber  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     10   ”
Candle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      5   ”
Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      4   ”
Service  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      1   ”
                                          ———
Total . . . . . .                        23 francs.


Service was written _servisse_.

“Twenty-three francs!” cried the woman, with an enthusiasm which was
mingled with some hesitation.

Like all great artists, Thénardier was dissatisfied.

“Peuh!” he exclaimed.

It was the accent of Castlereagh auditing France’s bill at the Congress
of Vienna.

“Monsieur Thénardier, you are right; he certainly owes that,” murmured
the wife, who was thinking of the doll bestowed on Cosette in the
presence of her daughters. “It is just, but it is too much. He will not
pay it.”


Thénardier laughed coldly, as usual, and said:—

“He will pay.”


This laugh was the supreme assertion of certainty and authority. That
which was asserted in this manner must needs be so. His wife did not
insist.

She set about arranging the table; her husband paced the room. A moment
later he added:—

“I owe full fifteen hundred francs!”


He went and seated himself in the chimney-corner, meditating, with his
feet among the warm ashes.

“Ah! by the way,” resumed his wife, “you don’t forget that I’m going to
turn Cosette out of doors to-day? The monster! She breaks my heart with
that doll of hers! I’d rather marry Louis XVIII. than keep her another
day in the house!”


Thénardier lighted his pipe, and replied between two puffs:—

“You will hand that bill to the man.”


Then he went out.

Hardly had he left the room when the traveller entered.

Thénardier instantly reappeared behind him and remained motionless in
the half-open door, visible only to his wife.

The yellow man carried his bundle and his cudgel in his hand.

“Up so early?” said Madame Thénardier; “is Monsieur leaving us
already?”


As she spoke thus, she was twisting the bill about in her hands with an
embarrassed air, and making creases in it with her nails. Her hard face
presented a shade which was not habitual with it,—timidity and
scruples.

To present such a bill to a man who had so completely the air “of a
poor wretch” seemed difficult to her.

The traveller appeared to be preoccupied and absent-minded. He
replied:—

“Yes, Madame, I am going.”


“So Monsieur has no business in Montfermeil?”


“No, I was passing through. That is all. What do I owe you, Madame,” he
added.

The Thénardier silently handed him the folded bill.

The man unfolded the paper and glanced at it; but his thoughts were
evidently elsewhere.

“Madame,” he resumed, “is business good here in Montfermeil?”


“So so, Monsieur,” replied the Thénardier, stupefied at not witnessing
another sort of explosion.

She continued, in a dreary and lamentable tone:—

“Oh! Monsieur, times are so hard! and then, we have so few bourgeois in
the neighborhood! All the people are poor, you see. If we had not, now
and then, some rich and generous travellers like Monsieur, we should
not get along at all. We have so many expenses. Just see, that child is
costing us our very eyes.”


“What child?”


“Why, the little one, you know! Cosette—the Lark, as she is called
hereabouts!”


“Ah!” said the man.

She went on:—

“How stupid these peasants are with their nicknames! She has more the
air of a bat than of a lark. You see, sir, we do not ask charity, and
we cannot bestow it. We earn nothing and we have to pay out a great
deal. The license, the imposts, the door and window tax, the
hundredths! Monsieur is aware that the government demands a terrible
deal of money. And then, I have my daughters. I have no need to bring
up other people’s children.”


The man resumed, in that voice which he strove to render indifferent,
and in which there lingered a tremor:—

“What if one were to rid you of her?”


“Who? Cosette?”


“Yes.”


The landlady’s red and violent face brightened up hideously.

“Ah! sir, my dear sir, take her, keep her, lead her off, carry her
away, sugar her, stuff her with truffles, drink her, eat her, and the
blessings of the good holy Virgin and of all the saints of paradise be
upon you!”


“Agreed.”


“Really! You will take her away?”


“I will take her away.”


“Immediately?”


“Immediately. Call the child.”


“Cosette!” screamed the Thénardier.

“In the meantime,” pursued the man, “I will pay you what I owe you. How
much is it?”


He cast a glance on the bill, and could not restrain a start of
surprise:—

“Twenty-three francs!”


He looked at the landlady, and repeated:—

“Twenty-three francs?”


There was in the enunciation of these words, thus repeated, an accent
between an exclamation and an interrogation point.

The Thénardier had had time to prepare herself for the shock. She
replied, with assurance:—

“Good gracious, yes, sir, it is twenty-three francs.”


The stranger laid five five-franc pieces on the table.

“Go and get the child,” said he.

At that moment Thénardier advanced to the middle of the room, and
said:—

“Monsieur owes twenty-six sous.”


“Twenty-six sous!” exclaimed his wife.

“Twenty sous for the chamber,” resumed Thénardier, coldly, “and six
sous for his supper. As for the child, I must discuss that matter a
little with the gentleman. Leave us, wife.”


Madame Thénardier was dazzled as with the shock caused by unexpected
lightning flashes of talent. She was conscious that a great actor was
making his entrance on the stage, uttered not a word in reply, and left
the room.

As soon as they were alone, Thénardier offered the traveller a chair.
The traveller seated himself; Thénardier remained standing, and his
face assumed a singular expression of good-fellowship and simplicity.

“Sir,” said he, “what I have to say to you is this, that I adore that
child.”


The stranger gazed intently at him.

“What child?”


Thénardier continued:—

“How strange it is, one grows attached. What money is that? Take back
your hundred-sou piece. I adore the child.”


“Whom do you mean?” demanded the stranger.

“Eh! our little Cosette! Are you not intending to take her away from
us? Well, I speak frankly; as true as you are an honest man, I will not
consent to it. I shall miss that child. I saw her first when she was a
tiny thing. It is true that she costs us money; it is true that she has
her faults; it is true that we are not rich; it is true that I have
paid out over four hundred francs for drugs for just one of her
illnesses! But one must do something for the good God’s sake. She has
neither father nor mother. I have brought her up. I have bread enough
for her and for myself. In truth, I think a great deal of that child.
You understand, one conceives an affection for a person; I am a good
sort of a beast, I am; I do not reason; I love that little girl; my
wife is quick-tempered, but she loves her also. You see, she is just
the same as our own child. I want to keep her to babble about the
house.”


The stranger kept his eye intently fixed on Thénardier. The latter
continued:—

“Excuse me, sir, but one does not give away one’s child to a passer-by,
like that. I am right, am I not? Still, I don’t say—you are rich; you
have the air of a very good man,—if it were for her happiness. But one
must find out that. You understand: suppose that I were to let her go
and to sacrifice myself, I should like to know what becomes of her; I
should not wish to lose sight of her; I should like to know with whom
she is living, so that I could go to see her from time to time; so that
she may know that her good foster-father is alive, that he is watching
over her. In short, there are things which are not possible. I do not
even know your name. If you were to take her away, I should say: ‘Well,
and the Lark, what has become of her?’ One must, at least, see some
petty scrap of paper, some trifle in the way of a passport, you know!”


The stranger, still surveying him with that gaze which penetrates, as
the saying goes, to the very depths of the conscience, replied in a
grave, firm voice:—

“Monsieur Thénardier, one does not require a passport to travel five
leagues from Paris. If I take Cosette away, I shall take her away, and
that is the end of the matter. You will not know my name, you will not
know my residence, you will not know where she is; and my intention is
that she shall never set eyes on you again so long as she lives. I
break the thread which binds her foot, and she departs. Does that suit
you? Yes or no?”


Since geniuses, like demons, recognize the presence of a superior God
by certain signs, Thénardier comprehended that he had to deal with a
very strong person. It was like an intuition; he comprehended it with
his clear and sagacious promptitude. While drinking with the carters,
smoking, and singing coarse songs on the preceding evening, he had
devoted the whole of the time to observing the stranger, watching him
like a cat, and studying him like a mathematician. He had watched him,
both on his own account, for the pleasure of the thing, and through
instinct, and had spied upon him as though he had been paid for so
doing. Not a movement, not a gesture, on the part of the man in the
yellow great-coat had escaped him. Even before the stranger had so
clearly manifested his interest in Cosette, Thénardier had divined his
purpose. He had caught the old man’s deep glances returning constantly
to the child. Who was this man? Why this interest? Why this hideous
costume, when he had so much money in his purse? Questions which he put
to himself without being able to solve them, and which irritated him.
He had pondered it all night long. He could not be Cosette’s father.
Was he her grandfather? Then why not make himself known at once? When
one has a right, one asserts it. This man evidently had no right over
Cosette. What was it, then? Thénardier lost himself in conjectures. He
caught glimpses of everything, but he saw nothing. Be that as it may,
on entering into conversation with the man, sure that there was some
secret in the case, that the latter had some interest in remaining in
the shadow, he felt himself strong; when he perceived from the
stranger’s clear and firm retort, that this mysterious personage was
mysterious in so simple a way, he became conscious that he was weak. He
had expected nothing of the sort. His conjectures were put to the rout.
He rallied his ideas. He weighed everything in the space of a second.
Thénardier was one of those men who take in a situation at a glance. He
decided that the moment had arrived for proceeding straightforward, and
quickly at that. He did as great leaders do at the decisive moment,
which they know that they alone recognize; he abruptly unmasked his
batteries.

“Sir,” said he, “I am in need of fifteen hundred francs.”


The stranger took from his side pocket an old pocketbook of black
leather, opened it, drew out three bank-bills, which he laid on the
table. Then he placed his large thumb on the notes and said to the
inn-keeper:—

“Go and fetch Cosette.”


While this was taking place, what had Cosette been doing?

On waking up, Cosette had run to get her shoe. In it she had found the
gold piece. It was not a Napoleon; it was one of those perfectly new
twenty-franc pieces of the Restoration, on whose effigy the little
Prussian queue had replaced the laurel wreath. Cosette was dazzled. Her
destiny began to intoxicate her. She did not know what a gold piece
was; she had never seen one; she hid it quickly in her pocket, as
though she had stolen it. Still, she felt that it really was hers; she
guessed whence her gift had come, but the joy which she experienced was
full of fear. She was happy; above all she was stupefied. Such
magnificent and beautiful things did not appear real. The doll
frightened her, the gold piece frightened her. She trembled vaguely in
the presence of this magnificence. The stranger alone did not frighten
her. On the contrary, he reassured her. Ever since the preceding
evening, amid all her amazement, even in her sleep, she had been
thinking in her little childish mind of that man who seemed to be so
poor and so sad, and who was so rich and so kind. Everything had
changed for her since she had met that good man in the forest. Cosette,
less happy than the most insignificant swallow of heaven, had never
known what it was to take refuge under a mother’s shadow and under a
wing. For the last five years, that is to say, as far back as her
memory ran, the poor child had shivered and trembled. She had always
been exposed completely naked to the sharp wind of adversity; now it
seemed to her she was clothed. Formerly her soul had seemed cold, now
it was warm. Cosette was no longer afraid of the Thénardier. She was no
longer alone; there was some one there.

She hastily set about her regular morning duties. That louis, which she
had about her, in the very apron pocket whence the fifteen-sou piece
had fallen on the night before, distracted her thoughts. She dared not
touch it, but she spent five minutes in gazing at it, with her tongue
hanging out, if the truth must be told. As she swept the staircase, she
paused, remained standing there motionless, forgetful of her broom and
of the entire universe, occupied in gazing at that star which was
blazing at the bottom of her pocket.

It was during one of these periods of contemplation that the Thénardier
joined her. She had gone in search of Cosette at her husband’s orders.
What was quite unprecedented, she neither struck her nor said an
insulting word to her.

“Cosette,” she said, almost gently, “come immediately.”


An instant later Cosette entered the public room.

The stranger took up the bundle which he had brought and untied it.
This bundle contained a little woollen gown, an apron, a fustian
bodice, a kerchief, a petticoat, woollen stockings, shoes—a complete
outfit for a girl of seven years. All was black.

“My child,” said the man, “take these, and go and dress yourself
quickly.”


Daylight was appearing when those of the inhabitants of Montfermeil who
had begun to open their doors beheld a poorly clad old man leading a
little girl dressed in mourning, and carrying a pink doll in her arms,
pass along the road to Paris. They were going in the direction of
Livry.

It was our man and Cosette.

No one knew the man; as Cosette was no longer in rags, many did not
recognize her. Cosette was going away. With whom? She did not know.
Whither? She knew not. All that she understood was that she was leaving
the Thénardier tavern behind her. No one had thought of bidding her
farewell, nor had she thought of taking leave of any one. She was
leaving that hated and hating house.

Poor, gentle creature, whose heart had been repressed up to that hour!

Cosette walked along gravely, with her large eyes wide open, and gazing
at the sky. She had put her louis in the pocket of her new apron. From
time to time, she bent down and glanced at it; then she looked at the
good man. She felt something as though she were beside the good God.






Madame Thénardier had allowed her husband to have his own way, as was
her wont. She had expected great results. When the man and Cosette had
taken their departure, Thénardier allowed a full quarter of an hour to
elapse; then he took her aside and showed her the fifteen hundred
francs.

“Is that all?” said she.

It was the first time since they had set up housekeeping that she had
dared to criticise one of the master’s acts.

The blow told.

“You are right, in sooth,” said he; “I am a fool. Give me my hat.”


He folded up the three bank-bills, thrust them into his pocket, and ran
out in all haste; but he made a mistake and turned to the right first.
Some neighbors, of whom he made inquiries, put him on the track again;
the Lark and the man had been seen going in the direction of Livry. He
followed these hints, walking with great strides, and talking to
himself the while:—

“That man is evidently a million dressed in yellow, and I am an animal.
First he gave twenty sous, then five francs, then fifty francs, then
fifteen hundred francs, all with equal readiness. He would have given
fifteen thousand francs. But I shall overtake him.”


And then, that bundle of clothes prepared beforehand for the child; all
that was singular; many mysteries lay concealed under it. One does not
let mysteries out of one’s hand when one has once grasped them. The
secrets of the wealthy are sponges of gold; one must know how to
subject them to pressure. All these thoughts whirled through his brain.
“I am an animal,” said he.

When one leaves Montfermeil and reaches the turn which the road takes
that runs to Livry, it can be seen stretching out before one to a great
distance across the plateau. On arriving there, he calculated that he
ought to be able to see the old man and the child. He looked as far as
his vision reached, and saw nothing. He made fresh inquiries, but he
had wasted time. Some passers-by informed him that the man and child of
whom he was in search had gone towards the forest in the direction of
Gagny. He hastened in that direction.

They were far in advance of him; but a child walks slowly, and he
walked fast; and then, he was well acquainted with the country.

All at once he paused and dealt himself a blow on his forehead like a
man who has forgotten some essential point and who is ready to retrace
his steps.

“I ought to have taken my gun,” said he to himself.

Thénardier was one of those double natures which sometimes 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, Thénardier 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 arriving 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
occasionally crouched down in some corner of the hovel in which
Thénardier 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 escape.”


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 traversed 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
which he had already erected so many conjectures; it was that man’s
hat. The brushwood was not high. Thénardier recognized the fact that
the man and Cosette were sitting there. The child could not be seen on
account of her small size, but the head of her doll was visible.

Thénardier was not mistaken. The man was sitting there, and letting
Cosette get somewhat rested. The inn-keeper walked round the brushwood
and presented himself abruptly to the eyes of those whom he was in
search of.

“Pardon, excuse me, sir,” he said, quite breathless, “but here are your
fifteen hundred francs.”


So saying, he handed the stranger the three bank-bills.

The man raised his eyes.

“What is the meaning of this?”


Thénardier replied respectfully:—

“It means, sir, that I shall take back Cosette.”


Cosette shuddered, and pressed close to the old man.

He replied, gazing to the very bottom of Thénardier’s eyes the while,
and enunciating every syllable distinctly:—

“You are go-ing to take back Co-sette?”


“Yes, sir, I am. I will tell you; I have considered the matter. In
fact, I have not the right to give her to you. I am an honest man, you
see; this child does not belong to me; she belongs to her mother. It
was her mother who confided her to me; I can only resign her to her
mother. You will say to me, ‘But her mother is dead.’ Good; in that
case I can only give the child up to the person who shall bring me a
writing, signed by her mother, to the effect that I am to hand the
child over to the person therein mentioned; that is clear.”


The man, without making any reply, fumbled in his pocket, and
Thénardier beheld the pocket-book of bank-bills make its appearance
once more.

The tavern-keeper shivered with joy.

“Good!” thought he; “let us hold firm; he is going to bribe me!”


Before opening the pocket-book, the traveller cast a glance about him:
the spot was absolutely deserted; there was not a soul either in the
woods or in the valley. The man opened his pocket-book once more and
drew from it, not the handful of bills which Thénardier expected, but a
simple little paper, which he unfolded and presented fully open to the
inn-keeper, saying:—

“You are right; read!”


Thénardier took the paper and read:—

“M. SUR M., March 25, 1823.

“MONSIEUR THÉNARDIER:—

You will deliver Cosette to this person.
You will be paid for all the little things.
I have the honor to salute you with respect,
FANTINE.”


“You know that signature?” resumed the man.

It certainly was Fantine’s signature; Thénardier recognized it.

There was no reply to make; he experienced two violent vexations, the
vexation of renouncing the bribery which he had hoped for, and the
vexation of being beaten; the man added:—

“You may keep this paper as your receipt.”


Thénardier retreated in tolerably good order.

“This signature is fairly well imitated,” he growled between his teeth;
“however, let it go!”


Then he essayed a desperate effort.

“It is well, sir,” he said, “since you are the person, but I must be
paid for all those little things. A great deal is owing to me.”


The man rose to his feet, filliping the dust from his threadbare
sleeve:—

“Monsieur Thénardier, in January last, the mother reckoned that she
owed you one hundred and twenty francs. In February, you sent her a
bill of five hundred francs; you received three hundred francs at the
end of February, and three hundred francs at the beginning of March.
Since then nine months have elapsed, at fifteen francs a month, the
price agreed upon, which makes one hundred and thirty-five francs. You
had received one hundred francs too much; that makes thirty-five still
owing you. I have just given you fifteen hundred francs.”


Thénardier’s sensations were those of the wolf at the moment when he
feels himself nipped and seized by the steel jaw of the trap.

“Who is this devil of a man?” he thought.

He did what the wolf does: he shook himself. Audacity had succeeded
with him once.

“Monsieur-I-don’t-know-your-name,” he said resolutely, and this time
casting aside all respectful ceremony, “I shall take back Cosette if
you do not give me a thousand crowns.”


The stranger said tranquilly:—

“Come, Cosette.”


He took Cosette by his left hand, and with his right he picked up his
cudgel, which was lying on the ground.

Thénardier noted the enormous size of the cudgel and the solitude of
the spot.

The man plunged into the forest with the child, leaving the inn-keeper
motionless and speechless.

While they were walking away, Thénardier scrutinized his huge
shoulders, which were a little rounded, and his great fists.

Then, bringing his eyes back to his own person, they fell upon his
feeble arms and his thin hands. “I really must have been exceedingly
stupid not to have thought to bring my gun,” he said to himself, “since
I was going hunting!”


However, the inn-keeper did not give up.

“I want to know where he is going,” said he, and he set out to follow
them at a distance. Two things were left on his hands, an irony in the
shape of the paper signed _Fantine_, and a consolation, the fifteen
hundred francs.

The man led Cosette off in the direction of Livry and Bondy. He walked
slowly, with drooping head, in an attitude of reflection and sadness.
The winter had thinned out the forest, so that Thénardier did not lose
them from sight, although he kept at a good distance. The man turned
round from time to time, and looked to see if he was being followed.
All at once he caught sight of Thénardier. He plunged suddenly into the
brushwood with Cosette, where they could both hide themselves. “The
deuce!” said Thénardier, and he redoubled his pace.

The thickness of the undergrowth forced him to draw nearer to them.
When the man had reached the densest part of the thicket, he wheeled
round. It was in vain that Thénardier sought to conceal himself in the
branches; he could not prevent the man seeing him. The man cast upon
him an uneasy glance, then elevated his head and continued his course.
The inn-keeper set out again in pursuit. Thus they continued for two or
three hundred paces. All at once the man turned round once more; he saw
the inn-keeper. This time he gazed at him with so sombre an air that
Thénardier decided that it was “useless” to proceed further. Thénardier
retraced his steps.






Jean Valjean was not dead.

When he fell into the sea, or rather, when he threw himself into it, he
was not ironed, as we have seen. He swam under water until he reached a
vessel at anchor, to which a boat was moored. He found means of hiding
himself in this boat until night. At night he swam off again, and
reached the shore a little way from Cape Brun. There, as he did not
lack money, he procured clothing. A small country-house in the
neighborhood of Balaguier was at that time the dressing-room of escaped
convicts,—a lucrative specialty. Then Jean Valjean, like all the sorry
fugitives who are seeking to evade the vigilance of the law and social
fatality, pursued an obscure and undulating itinerary. He found his
first refuge at Pradeaux, near Beausset. Then he directed his course
towards Grand-Villard, near Briançon, in the Hautes-Alpes. It was a
fumbling and uneasy flight,—a mole’s track, whose branchings are
untraceable. Later on, some trace of his passage into Ain, in the
territory of Civrieux, was discovered; in the Pyrenees, at Accons; at
the spot called Grange-de-Doumec, near the market of Chavailles, and in
the environs of Perigueux at Brunies, canton of La Chapelle-Gonaguet.
He reached Paris. We have just seen him at Montfermeil.

His first care on arriving in Paris had been to buy mourning clothes
for a little girl of from seven to eight years of age; then to procure
a lodging. That done, he had betaken himself to Montfermeil. It will be
remembered that already, during his preceding escape, he had made a
mysterious trip thither, or somewhere in that neighborhood, of which
the law had gathered an inkling.

However, he was thought to be dead, and this still further increased
the obscurity which had gathered about him. At Paris, one of the
journals which chronicled the fact fell into his hands. He felt
reassured and almost at peace, as though he had really been dead.

On the evening of the day when Jean Valjean rescued Cosette from the
claws of the Thénardiers, he returned to Paris. He re-entered it at
nightfall, with the child, by way of the Barrier Monceaux. There he
entered a cabriolet, which took him to the esplanade of the
Observatoire. There he got out, paid the coachman, took Cosette by the
hand, and together they directed their steps through the
darkness,—through the deserted streets which adjoin the Ourcine and the
Glacière, towards the Boulevard de l’Hôpital.

The day had been strange and filled with emotions for Cosette. They had
eaten some bread and cheese purchased in isolated taverns, behind
hedges; they had changed carriages frequently; they had travelled short
distances on foot. She made no complaint, but she was weary, and Jean
Valjean perceived it by the way she dragged more and more on his hand
as she walked. He took her on his back. Cosette, without letting go of
Catherine, laid her head on Jean Valjean’s shoulder, and there fell
asleep.




