It is not all in all sufficient to be wicked in order to prosper. The
cook-shop was in a bad way.
Thanks to the traveller’s fifty-seven francs, Thénardier had been able
to avoid a protest and to honor his signature. On the following month
they were again in need of money. The woman took Cosette’s outfit to
Paris, and pawned it at the pawnbroker’s for sixty francs. As soon as
that sum was spent, the Thénardiers grew accustomed to look on the
little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity;
and they treated her accordingly. As she had no longer any clothes,
they dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the
Thénardier brats; that is to say, in rags. They fed her on what all the
rest had left—a little better than the dog, a little worse than the
cat. Moreover, the cat and the dog were her habitual table-companions;
Cosette ate with them under the table, from a wooden bowl similar to
theirs.
The mother, who had established herself, as we shall see later on, at
M. sur M., wrote, or, more correctly, caused to be written, a letter
every month, that she might have news of her child. The Thénardiers
replied invariably, “Cosette is doing wonderfully well.”
At the expiration of the first six months the mother sent seven francs
for the seventh month, and continued her remittances with tolerable
regularity from month to month. The year was not completed when
Thénardier said: “A fine favor she is doing us, in sooth! What does she
expect us to do with her seven francs?” and he wrote to demand twelve
francs. The mother, whom they had persuaded into the belief that her
child was happy, “and was coming on well,” submitted, and forwarded the
twelve francs.
Certain natures cannot love on the one hand without hating on the
other. Mother Thénardier loved her two daughters passionately, which
caused her to hate the stranger.
It is sad to think that the love of a mother can possess villainous
aspects. Little as was the space occupied by Cosette, it seemed to her
as though it were taken from her own, and that that little child
diminished the air which her daughters breathed. This woman, like many
women of her sort, had a load of caresses and a burden of blows and
injuries to dispense each day. If she had not had Cosette, it is
certain that her daughters, idolized as they were, would have received
the whole of it; but the stranger did them the service to divert the
blows to herself. Her daughters received nothing but caresses. Cosette
could not make a motion which did not draw down upon her head a heavy
shower of violent blows and unmerited chastisement. The sweet, feeble
being, who should not have understood anything of this world or of God,
incessantly punished, scolded, ill-used, beaten, and seeing beside her
two little creatures like herself, who lived in a ray of dawn!
Madame Thénardier was vicious with Cosette. Éponine and Azelma were
vicious. Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size
is smaller; that is all.
A year passed; then another.
People in the village said:—
“Those Thénardiers are good people. They are not rich, and yet they are
bringing up a poor child who was abandoned on their hands!”
They thought that Cosette’s mother had forgotten her.
In the meanwhile, Thénardier, having learned, it is impossible to say
by what obscure means, that the child was probably a bastard, and that
the mother could not acknowledge it, exacted fifteen francs a month,
saying that “the creature” was growing and “eating,” and threatening to
send her away. “Let her not bother me,” he exclaimed, “or I’ll fire her
brat right into the middle of her secrets. I must have an increase.”
The mother paid the fifteen francs.
From year to year the child grew, and so did her wretchedness.
As long as Cosette was little, she was the scape-goat of the two other
children; as soon as she began to develop a little, that is to say,
before she was even five years old, she became the servant of the
household.
Five years old! the reader will say; that is not probable. Alas! it is
true. Social suffering begins at all ages. Have we not recently seen
the trial of a man named Dumollard, an orphan turned bandit, who, from
the age of five, as the official documents state, being alone in the
world, “worked for his living and stole”?
Cosette was made to run on errands, to sweep the rooms, the courtyard,
the street, to wash the dishes, to even carry burdens. The Thénardiers
considered themselves all the more authorized to behave in this manner,
since the mother, who was still at M. sur M., had become irregular in
her payments. Some months she was in arrears.
If this mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of these three
years, she would not have recognized her child. Cosette, so pretty and
rosy on her arrival in that house, was now thin and pale. She had an
indescribably uneasy look. “The sly creature,” said the Thénardiers.
Injustice had made her peevish, and misery had made her ugly. Nothing
remained to her except her beautiful eyes, which inspired pain,
because, large as they were, it seemed as though one beheld in them a
still larger amount of sadness.
It was a heart-breaking thing to see this poor child, not yet six years
old, shivering in the winter in her old rags of linen, full of holes,
sweeping the street before daylight, with an enormous broom in her tiny
red hands, and a tear in her great eyes.
[Illustration: Cossette Sweeping]
She was called the _Lark_ in the neighborhood. The populace, who are
fond of these figures of speech, had taken a fancy to bestow this name
on this trembling, frightened, and shivering little creature, no bigger
than a bird, who was awake every morning before any one else in the
house or the village, and was always in the street or the fields before
daybreak.
Only the little lark never sang.
BOOK FIFTH—THE DESCENT