Bab Bab 40 · THE LARK

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