She has been dismissed toward the end of winter. Summer passes. Winter comes again. Short days, less work. Winter: no warmth, no light, no noonday, the evening joining the morning. The sky is a vent-hole. The whole day is a cavern. Winter changes the water of heaven and the heart of man into a stone. Her creditors harass her. The Thénardiers, not promptly paid, write letters whose contents drive her to despair and whose carriage ruins her. One day they write that little Cosette is entirely naked in that cold, that she needs a woollen skirt, and that her mother must send at least ten francs. Fantine crushes the letter in her hands all day. That evening she goes into a barber's shop at the corner, pulls out her comb, and her admirable golden hair falls to her knees. How much will you give me for it? Ten francs. Cut it off. She buys a knitted petticoat and sends it to the Thénardiers. The petticoat makes them furious. It was the money they wanted. They give it to Éponine. The poor Lark continues to shiver. Fantine thinks: My child is no longer cold. I have clothed her with my hair. She puts on little round caps which conceal her shorn head, and in which she is still pretty.
Dark thoughts take her. She has long shared the town's veneration for Father Madeleine; by repeating that it was he who discharged her, she comes to hate him also, and most of all. She takes a lover, the first who offers, a miserable scamp she does not love, out of bravado; he beats her and abandons her. She adores her child. The lower she descends, the more radiant that little angel shines at the bottom of her heart. Then a letter: Cosette is ill with a miliary fever; expensive drugs; forty francs before the week is out, or the little one will be dead. She bursts out laughing. Forty francs! Where do they think I am to get them? On the square a quack dentist in red is offering full sets of teeth. He spies the lovely, laughing girl: if you want to sell me your palettes, I will give you a gold napoleon apiece. The palettes are the two upper front teeth. She flees, stopping her ears. That evening, he says, at the inn of the Tillac d'Argent. She tells Marguerite. Two napoleons. That makes forty francs. Yes, says Fantine; that makes forty francs. She goes back to the staircase and reads the letter again. What is a miliary fever? Does it require many drugs? Do people die of it? They may, says Marguerite. That evening she is seen turning toward the Rue de Paris, where the inns are. The next morning Marguerite finds her seated on the bed, pale and frozen. She has not lain down. The candle has burned all night. Fantine has grown ten years older since the preceding night. Nothing, she says. Quite the contrary. My child will not die of that frightful malady, for lack of succour. I am content. She points to two napoleons glittering on the table. She smiles. It is a bloody smile. A reddish saliva soils the corners of her lips, and she has a black hole in her mouth. The two teeth have been extracted. She sends the forty francs to Montfermeil. After all it was a ruse. Cosette was not ill.
Fantine throws her mirror out of the window. She has long since left the second-floor cell for an attic with only a latch, next the roof, whose angle knocks you on the head. She has no longer a bed; a rag she calls her coverlet, a mattress on the floor, a seatless chair. A little rosebush has dried up, forgotten, in one corner. She has lost her shame; she loses her coquetry. She goes out with dirty caps. She no longer mends her linen. As the heels wear out, she drags her stockings down into her shoes. She sews seventeen hours a day; a prison contractor suddenly makes prices fall; nine sous. Her creditors are more pitiless than ever. She feels that she is being hunted, and something of the wild beast develops in her. About the same time Thénardier writes that he has waited with too much amiability and that he must have a hundred francs at once; otherwise he will turn little Cosette out of doors, convalescent from her heavy illness, into the cold, and she may die if she chooses. A hundred francs, thinks Fantine. But in what trade can one earn a hundred sous a day? Come, she says. Let us sell what is left. The unfortunate girl becomes a woman of the town.
