In 1823 Montfermeil was a village in the woods, on the edge of a high plateau between Livry and Chelles. Being so high, it was short of water. The houses near the church had to go to a small spring on the slope beside the Chelles road for drinking water, about a fifteen-minute walk.
Households with a little money paid a water carrier one liard a bucket. The Thénardiers’ inn was one of them. But in winter the water carrier stopped work at five in the evening. After dark, a house that ran out had to fetch its own or do without.
That was what the child of the house, Cosette, feared most. Once her mother’s money stopped coming, the Thénardiers kept her on in place of a servant, and fetching water at night fell to her. So the child fretted constantly to make sure the house never ran dry.
The inn on Christmas Eve
That Christmas was mild and lively. Showmen from Paris had pitched their tents along the main street, and pedlars had set out their stalls from the church square all the way to Baker’s Lane, where the inn stood.
On Christmas Eve, carters and pedlars sat drinking by the light of a few candles in the inn’s ground-floor room. Thénardier drank with his guests and talked politics, and his wife kept an eye on the roast in front of the fire. Cosette was in her usual spot, on the crossbar under the kitchen table. In rags, bare feet in wooden clogs, she was knitting woollen stockings for the two daughters of the house.
In the next room the two daughters, Éponine and Azelma, were giggling. On a nail by the fireplace hung a whip of knotted leather thongs. Somewhere in the house a boy of three was crying, a son Madame Thénardier had borne a few winters back; she found him tiresome and did not go to see.
Thénardier was small and thin, with a sickly look, though his health was perfectly sound. He wore a constant smile, was polite to everyone, and boasted that at Waterloo, as a sergeant, he had saved a wounded general. That year he owed some fifteen hundred francs to creditors who were pressing him. His wife was a big, powerful woman who bragged that she could crack a walnut with her fist. She did all the work of the inn, and the only servant in the house was Cosette.
Cosette worked between the two of them, and was beaten. Even in winter she went barefoot.
Mademoiselle Dog-with-no-name
Four new guests had arrived that evening, and filling the jugs in their rooms had emptied the water butt. One of Cosette’s eyes was blackened from a blow of Madame Thénardier’s fist. Each time a drinker looked out of the window and said it was as dark as an oven, the child flinched.
Then a pedlar lodging at the inn comes in and complains that his horse has not been watered. Cosette comes out from under the table and insists it has, that she carried the water herself and even talked to the horse. It is a lie. The pedlar shouts that he knows how a horse breathes when it has not drunk.
Madame Thénardier finds the child crouched at the far end of the table. Mademoiselle Dog-with-no-name, go and water that horse. When the child says in a tiny voice that there is no water, Madame Thénardier flings the street door wide open. Then go and get some!
Cosette picks up the empty bucket from the corner of the hearth. It is big enough for her to sit inside. Madame Thénardier holds out a fifteen-sou coin. Bring back a big loaf from the baker’s on your way, Mademoiselle Toad. The child puts the coin in her apron pocket and stands a moment at the open door, as if waiting for someone to come and help, before she goes.
The lady in the stall
Directly across from the inn door stood the last of the row of stalls. At the front of a toy stall stood a doll nearly two feet tall, in a dress of pink crêpe, with real hair and shining enamel eyes. Children had crowded round it all day, but no mother in Montfermeil was rich enough to buy it.
Cosette, bucket in hand, stops dead in front of it. In her own mind she called the doll the lady. Only a queen, or at least a princess, could own a thing like that, she thinks, and she forgets her errand. Still not gone, you little monster? At the sound of that voice Cosette grabs the bucket and runs, taking the longest strides she can.
Past the last house
Where the light of the stalls gave out, the child was alone in the dark. She swung the bucket’s handle as she walked so that it clanked, and the noise kept her company. A woman she passed turned to wonder what child was out at this hour, then recognised her. Oh, it’s the Lark.
Round the corner of the last house there was nothing ahead but black fields. She set the bucket down and slowly scratched her head.
She could just say there had been no water, she thought, and she turned back toward the village. But before she had gone a hundred steps she stopped again. Ahead of her was Madame Thénardier’s face; behind her, all the ghosts of the night and the woods.
It was from Madame Thénardier that she backed away, and she ran for the woods.
The spring was a narrow hollow that the water had worn into the clay, about two feet deep. In the dark the child feels for the branch of the young oak she always holds, hangs from it and dips the bucket. While she is bent over, the fifteen sous slip from her apron pocket into the spring. She neither sees nor hears it go.
Once the bucket is full she cannot take another step, and she sinks down onto the grass. Low on the horizon a large star bleeds red through the mist; she does not know it is Jupiter, only that it frightens her.
She counts aloud from one to ten, then starts again from one. Little by little things around her take their proper shapes, and she feels how cold her wet hands are.
She wants to run, but she dare not go back without the bucket. Gripping the handle in both hands, she manages a dozen steps and sets it down, then lifts it and goes a little further. Each time she stops, cold water slops over onto her bare legs. Her throat is tight, but she cannot cry. Even this far away, Madame Thénardier feels close.
She rests a long time by an old chestnut tree, and as she lifts the bucket again the words escape her at last. Oh God, oh God!
At that instant the bucket weighs nothing. A big hand has taken the handle and lifted it. A tall dark shape is walking beside her. The child was not afraid.
The passenger who got off at Chelles
The man was Jean Valjean. That afternoon he had been walking the streets on the edge of Paris, looking at cheap rooms. He wore a yellow-ochre coat worn to the threads and a battered round hat, his hair was snow white, and he carried a stick cut from a hedge. His face looked past sixty, but he walked with the firm step of a man barely fifty.
Around two o’clock the king’s carriage swept down the street, and he ducked behind the corner of a wall in alarm. That caught an eye, and a policeman was told to follow him, but as dusk fell he lost him in the side streets.
Towards evening he bought the last seat on the coach to Lagny. He paid the fare all the way to Lagny, then got off at Chelles around six and vanished. The driver said the earth must have swallowed him.
He cut across the fields into the woods. He touched, one after another, a heap of pale stones, an ash tree covered in knots and a chestnut with a band of zinc nailed round it. He trod the ground between them too, like someone checking that the soil had not been freshly turned. Walking on toward Montfermeil, he saw a small shadow labouring under a heavy load.
Questions on the forest path
When the man asks in a low voice how old she is, the child says eight. She fetches the water from the spring in the woods, she says. He is quiet for a long while, then asks abruptly.
Haven’t you got a mother?
I don’t know.
That is her answer, and before he can say anything she adds that she doesn’t think so; the others have one, but she hasn’t. A little later she says she thinks she never had one at all.
Jean Valjean sets the bucket down and puts his hands on her shoulders, trying to make out her face in the dark.
What’s your name?
Cosette.
He starts as if a current had gone through him. He lets go of her, picks up the bucket and walks on.
When he asks who sent her for water at this hour, the child says Madame Thénardier. The man tries to sound indifferent, but his voice shakes oddly. Hearing that she keeps an inn, he says he will lodge there tonight.
Ponine and Zelma play with lovely dolls all day, the child tells him. That was how she shortened Éponine and Azelma.
And you?
I work.
All day?
With tears in her eyes that the dark hides, she answers yes, monsieur. Her only toy is a little lead sword no longer than her little finger, she says, but it can still cut lettuce and the heads of flies.
As they reach the inn Cosette touches his arm timidly. Can I take the bucket back now? If Madame sees someone carried it for me, she’ll beat me. The man gives it back.
Forty sous and twenty
Madame Thénardier opens the door all smiles at the word guest, then sees his worn coat and dented hat and the smile goes. Her husband gives the faintest flick of a finger, which means: not a penny. When she says there is no room, the man says the attic or the stable will do, and he will pay the full price of a room.
Forty sous.
Very well.
One of the carters whispers that it is only twenty sous. Madame Thénardier answers that for him it is forty; she does not lodge paupers for less.
Jean Valjean barely wets his lips with his wine and watches the child under the table. Cosette was nearly eight but looked barely six. Her hands were cracked with chilblains, and through the holes in her thin cotton shift you could see blue and black bruises. Though she had come in soaked, she did not dare go near the fire.
What about the bread? Madame Thénardier suddenly asks.
Cosette, who had forgotten the bread entirely, lies that the baker’s was shut. But when she is told to hand back the fifteen sous, she turns out her pocket and the coin is gone. Madame Thénardier takes the whip down from beside the hearth, and the child begs to be forgiven.
Excuse me, madame. A moment ago I saw something drop out of this child’s pocket and roll away.
The man pretends to feel about on the floor and holds out a silver coin, and Madame Thénardier says yes, that’s it. It was not fifteen sous but a twenty-sou piece. She puts it in her own pocket.
Five francs for a pair of stockings
Éponine and Azelma come in, prettily dressed, and play with an old doll by the fire. When Cosette looks up from her knitting to watch, Madame Thénardier shouts that she will get a taste of the whip. With a smile that is almost timid, the man says: Madame, let her play.
If she eats, she works.
What is she knitting?
Stockings for my girls.
What will they be worth when they’re done?
Thirty sous, if not more.
Would you let me have them for five francs?
A carter roars with laughter, and Thénardier quickly agrees. You’ll pay now, Madame Thénardier adds. The man lays a five-franc piece on the table and turns to Cosette.
“Maintenant ton travail est à moi. Joue, mon enfant.” Your work is mine now. Go and play, child. (Part 2, Book 3, Chapter 8)
Thénardier pockets the coin without a word, and his wife bites her lip. When the child asks, trembling, whether she may really play, Madame Thénardier tells her to play in a terrible voice.
The two girls drop their doll on the floor and wrap a kitten in rags to play with instead. Cosette wraps her little lead sword in a rag and rocks it to sleep in her arms.
After her husband says the man might be a millionaire, Madame Thénardier comes over to his table and, for the first time, calls him monsieur. The child isn’t ours. She’s a poor thing we took in out of pity, and a bit simple. We write to her home and haven’t had an answer in six months, so the mother must be dead. Not much of a mother anyway, leaving her child like that.
Under the table Cosette gazes at the fire and rocks her bundled sword. She sings softly. My mother’s dead, my mother’s dead, my mother’s dead.
Catherine
Then the child notices the doll the two girls have left lying on the floor. Making sure no one is looking, she crawls out, snatches it, and is back in her place in a moment. The only one who saw was the guest slowly eating his bread and cheese.
That joy lasts about a quarter of an hour. Azelma spots the doll’s pink foot sticking out of the shadow into the firelight, and Éponine calls her mother.
Cosette!
At that voice the child lays the doll down reverently. Then she wrings her hands and weeps. The child who had not cried in the woods or before the whip sobs aloud.
What is the matter?
This little beggar has touched my girls’ doll!
All this fuss over that?
She touched it with her dirty hands!
Without a word Jean Valjean opens the street door and goes out. In that moment Madame Thénardier gives the child a hard kick under the table.
The door opens again. The man comes in carrying the big doll from the stall in both hands and stands it in front of Cosette.
Here. This is for you.
The child looks at the man, then at the doll, then backs slowly away to hide in the deepest corner under the table. The room goes quiet.
Madame Thénardier wonders to herself. A beggar, or a millionaire? If both, then a thief.
Thénardier whispers to his wife: That thing cost thirty francs at least. Crawl on your belly in front of him.
My dear Cosette, the gentleman is giving you a doll. Take it, it’s yours.
Madame Thénardier tries for sweetness, but her voice comes out sour. The child creeps toward the doll as if thunder would break out if she touched it, and looks round at Madame Thénardier.
May I, madame?
Then she looks up at the man. Is it true, monsieur? Is the lady mine?
The man seems to have tears in his eyes, and only nods. When he puts the doll’s hand in hers, Cosette pulls her hand back as if burned, then at last flings her arms round the doll.
I’ll call her Catherine.
The empty clog
After the children had gone to bed, Madame Thénardier went over to her husband and grumbled under her breath that she could not make the old man out. A forty-franc doll, for a little wretch I’d let go for forty sous! Thénardier answered that a paying guest does as he likes.
Late in the night, midnight mass was over and so was the feast, but the guest still sat in the same place. Past three in the morning Thénardier suggested he might like to rest, and he asked where the stable was. Thénardier led him upstairs to the bridal chamber, with its mahogany furniture and red curtains. In their own room Madame Thénardier told her husband that tomorrow she would put Cosette out, and he said only that she was in a hurry.
The guest takes off his shoes and comes out carrying a candle. Under the stairs he hears a child breathing. On the bare floor, among old baskets and cobwebs, lies a straw mattress full of holes, with no sheet.
Cosette is asleep there in her clothes, holding Catherine tight. Beside her bed there is only one clog.
In the next room he notices the fireplace. On Christmas night children put their shoes in the hearth and wait for presents. In Éponine’s and Azelma’s pretty shoes lies a new ten-sou piece each. In the darkest corner of the hearth sits half a broken clog, caked with ash and dried mud. It is Cosette’s.
There was nothing in it.
Jean Valjean felt in his waistcoat pocket and dropped a twenty-franc gold piece into the clog. Then he crept back to his room.
Today, a child who asks whether she may
That night the child in this chapter asked leave more than once. Two of those times went like this.
Once was outside the inn, where the forest path ended. She asked the man whether she might carry the bucket again herself, because she would be beaten if Madame Thénardier saw that someone had carried it for her.
The other time was in front of the doll. It was the man who held it out, but the child turned first to Madame Thénardier and asked whether she might take it.
That night there were three shoes in the hearth, and one of them was a broken clog.
Have you ever been given a present and looked first at someone else’s face, not the giver’s, to see whether you might accept it?