So the monk's widow was good for something. But Madeleine has heard nothing of all this. He almost never enters the women's workroom. At its head he has placed an elderly spinster, whom the priest provided, and he has full confidence in this superintendent: a truly respectable person, firm, equitable, upright, full of the charity which consists in giving, but not having in the same degree that charity which consists in understanding and in forgiving. Madeleine relies wholly on her. The best men are often obliged to delegate their authority. It is with this full power, and the conviction that she is doing right, that the superintendent has instituted the suit, judged, condemned, and executed Fantine. As for the fifty francs, she has given them from a fund Madeleine entrusted to her for the workwomen, and of which she renders no account.
Fantine tries to obtain a situation as a servant. She goes from house to house. No one will have her. She cannot leave town. The second-hand dealer, to whom she is in debt for her furniture, says: If you leave, I will have you arrested as a thief. The householder, whom she owes for her rent, says: You are young and pretty; you can pay. She divides the fifty francs between them, returns three-quarters of the goods, keeps only necessaries, and finds herself without work, without a trade, with nothing but her bed, and still about fifty francs in debt. She begins to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison and earns twelve sous a day. Her daughter costs her ten. It is at this point that she begins to pay the Thénardiers irregularly. An old woman who lights her candle at night teaches her the art of living in misery. Back of living on little, there is the living on nothing. These are two chambers; the first is dark, the second is black. Fantine learns how to live without fire in winter, how to give up a bird, how to make a coverlet of a petticoat and a petticoat of a coverlet, how to take her meals by the light of the opposite window. She says to a neighbour that by sleeping five hours and sewing the rest she will nearly earn her bread, and that when one is sad, one eats less.
The old woman is a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who knows how to write just enough to sign herself Marguerite, and who believes in God, which is science. At first Fantine is so ashamed that she does not dare go out. In the street she divines that people turn round and point; every one stares and no one greets her. An unfortunate woman is utterly bare beneath the sarcasm of a small town. In Paris no one knows you, and that obscurity is a garment. She would have liked to go. Impossible. She accustoms herself to disrepute as she has accustomed herself to indigence. After two or three months she shakes off her shame and begins to go about as though there were nothing the matter. It is all the same to me, she says. She bears her head well up, with a bitter smile, and is conscious that she is becoming brazen-faced. Madame Victurnien sometimes sees her passing, from her window, notices the distress of that creature who, thanks to her, has been put back in her proper place, and congratulates herself. The happiness of the evil-minded is black. Excess of toil wears Fantine out. The little dry cough increases. She says to Marguerite, Just feel how hot my hands are. Nevertheless, when she combs her beautiful hair in the morning with an old broken comb, and it flows about her like floss silk, she experiences a moment of happy coquetry.
Coming Up in Chapter 49
She has been dismissed toward the end of winter. Summer passes. Winter comes again. Short days, less work, no warmth, no light. Her creditors harass her. The Thénardiers write that Cosette is entirely naked in that cold, and that her mother must send at least ten francs.
