1.F.4.3. 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, Thenardier 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 Thenardiers 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 Thenardier 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 Thenardiers 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 Thenardier 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 Thenardier 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 Thenardier was vicious with Cosette. Eponine
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 Thenardiers 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, Thenardier, 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 Thenardiers 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 Thenardiers.
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.
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.