It is not enough to be wicked in order to prosper. The cook-shop is in a bad way. The traveller's fifty-seven francs let Thénardier honour his signature. The next month they need money again. The woman takes Cosette's outfit to Paris and pawns it for sixty francs. Once that sum is spent they grow accustomed to look on the little girl merely as a child they are caring for out of charity, and they treat her accordingly. They dress her in the cast-off rags of the Thénardier brats. They feed her on what all the rest have left, a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat. Cosette eats with them under the table, from a wooden bowl similar to theirs.
The mother, who has established herself at her native town, writes, or causes to be written, a letter every month, that she may have news of her child. The Thénardiers reply invariably: Cosette is doing wonderfully well. After six months the mother sends seven francs; then twelve when he writes to demand it; then fifteen when he learns the child is probably a bastard and threatens to fire her brat right into the middle of her secrets. She pays. Mother Thénardier loves her two daughters passionately, which causes her to hate the stranger. Little as is the space Cosette occupies, it seems taken from the air her daughters breathe. The stranger does the daughters the service of diverting the blows. Éponine and Azelma are vicious. Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size is smaller; that is all.
A year passes, then another. The village says the Thénardiers are good people, bringing up a poor child abandoned on their hands. They think the mother has forgotten her. Before she is even five, Cosette becomes the servant of the household: errands, courtyard, street, dishes, burdens. The mother has grown irregular in her payments. If she returned at the end of three years she would not have recognized her child. Pretty and rosy on arrival, Cosette is now thin and pale, with an uneasy look. Injustice has made her peevish, and misery has made her ugly. Nothing remains except her beautiful eyes, and they inspire pain. Not yet six, she sweeps the street before daylight with an enormous broom in her tiny red hands, a tear in her great eyes. She is called the Lark in the neighborhood: awake before anyone in the house or the village, always in the street or the fields before daybreak. Only the little lark never sang.
Coming Up in Chapter 40
And in the meantime, what has become of that mother who, according to Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child? After leaving Cosette she reaches her native town in 1818. The town has prospered. She has not.
