Part II: Cosette



Part II: Cosette

This section of the book starts with a very detailed account of the Battle of Waterloo, fought between Napoleon and the British general Wellington in June of 1815, one hundred days after Napoleon had escaped from the island of Elba. At the end of the battle, this scene occurs, which will impact events in the rest of the book:

The battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as mysterious for those who won it as for the man who lost it. For Napoleon, it was pure panic…Waterloo is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and Wellington—they aren’t enemies, they are opposites. Never has God, who likes an antithesis, produced a more striking contrast or a more extraordinary confrontation... On the whole, we have to say, Waterloo was more of a massacre than a battle. Of all the pitched battles, Waterloo is the one with the smallest front in relation to the number of combatants. Napoleon, two miles, Wellington, a mile and a half; seventy-two thousand combatants on each side. The carnage stems from such density…It was the end of a dictatorship. And with it, a whole European system fell apart.

Let’s go back—it is a requirement of this book---to that fatal field of battle. On June 15, 1815, there was a full moon…When the lasst cannonball had been fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean remained deserted. The English occupied the French camp, it being the usual observance of victory to sleep in the bed of the vanquished…Wellington went into the village of Waterloo to draft his report to Lord Bathurst. If ever the sic vos non vobis (an allusion to Virgil’s satire of a plagiarist “Thus you do not for yourself”—one who takes undeserved credit), it surely is to the village of Waterloo. Waterloo did not do a thing and it was two miles from the action. Mont-Saint-Jean was shelled, Hougoumont was set on fire, Papelotte was set on fire, Planchenoit was set on fire, La Haie-Sainte was stormed, La Belle-Alliance saw the two victors embrace; yet these names are scarcely known and Waterloo, which played no role in the battle, takes all the credit for it….

On the night of June 18-19, they stripped the dead clean. Wellington was firm, and the order was to put to death anyone caught in the act; but plunder is tenacious. The marauders flew off to one corner of the battlefield while they were being shot in another. The moonlight was sinister on that particular plain. Around midnight, a man was prowling or, rather, creeping along the sunken Ohain road…He was dressed in a smock that looked a bit like a greatcoat, he was both anxious and audacious, he crept forward but kept looking around behind him as he went. What was this man? The night probably knew more about him than the day. He didn’t have any kind of bag, but obviously had big pockets under his greatcoat. Now and again, he stopped, studied the plain around him as though to see if he were being observed, suddenly crouched down, poked around something quiet and motionless on the ground, then stood up again and scuttled away. His slithering, his bearing, his mysterious darting movements caused him to resemble those crepuscular specters that haunt ruins and that old Norman legends call Alleurs—goers…

The cutting made by the sunken road was filled up with horses and riders all inextricably jumbled. Horrific entanglement. The embankment was no more; dead bodies made the road level with the plain right to the very edge, like a perfectly measured bushel of barley. A pile of dead men on top, a river of blood on the bottom; that is what the road was like on the night of June 18, 1815. The blood ran right up to the Nivelles road and welled up there in a huge pool in front of the felled trees that blocked the road at a spot still marked today. It is, as you will recall, at the opposite spot, going toward the Genappe road, that the cuirassiers collapsed. The density of corpses was in proportion to the depth of the sunken road. Round about the halfway mark, at the spot where it becomes a plain, where Delord’s division had passed, the layer of dead men thinned out a bit.

This is a picture of the sunken road of Ohain where the final battle of Waterloo took place. According to Hugo, Napoleon’s cavalry did not know that the road was there and fell into the valley, filling it with dead horses and men, as described above. There is some dispute as to whether or not this road existed or figured into the battle.

The night prowler the read has just caught a glimpse of was headed that way. He was ferreting through that vast grave. He looked around. We don’t know what hideous review of the dead he passed. He was walking with his feet in the blood. All of a sudden, he stopped in his tracks.

A few feet in front of him, in the sunken road, at the spot where the mound of dead ended, from underneath this heap of men and horses, an open hand emerged lit up by the moon. The hand had something on its finger that shone; it was a golden ring. The man bent down, stayed crouching a moment, and when he stood up again, there was no more ring on the hand. He didn’t exactly stand up again; he stayed in a half-crouching position like that of a scared wildcat, turning his back on the head of dead, scrutinizing the skyline, on his knees, the whole top part of his body being supported by his two index fingers on the ground, his head peering over the rim of the sunken road. The four pays of the jackal are just right for certain purposes. When he had set his course, he stood up.

At that instant, he nearly jumped out of his skin. He could feel someone grab him from behind. He wheeled around; the open hand had closed again, seizing the lapel of his greatcoat. An honest man would have taken fright. This man burst out laughing. “I’ll be damned,” he said, “it’s only the dead man. I’d prefer a ghost to a gendarme any day.” But the hand relaxed and released him. Effort is quickly exhausted in the grave.

“God!” the prowler went on. “Can this dead man be alive? Let’s have a closer look.” He bent down again, fumbled in the heap, removed whatever was in the way, took the hand, grabbed the arm, freed the head, pulled out the body, and a few seconds later dragged into the darkness of the sunken road a man who was inanimate---or at least senseless. It was a cuirassier, an officer, even and officer of some rank; a big gold epaulet poked out from beneath his cuirass; this officer no longer had a helmet. A furious cut of the sword had slashed his face and you could not see it for the blood. Yet it didn’t look like he had any broken limbs, and by a stroke of luck, if we may use such a term here, the bodied had arched above him in some way as to prevent him from being crushed. He had on his cuirass the silver cross of the Legion d’Honneur.

The prowler ripped the cross off and it disappeared into one of the gaping holes of his greatcoat. After that, he felt around in the officer’s fob pocket, felt a watch in it, and took it. Then he fumbled in the waistcoat, found a purse there and pocketed it. As he reached this phase in the assistance he was offering the dying man, the officer opened his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said feebly. The roughness of the man handling him, the freshness of the night, the fact of being able to breath freely, had brought him to his senses. The prowler did not answer. He raised his head. The sound of footfalls could be heard on the plain, probably some patrol approaching. The officer murmured, for there was still agony in his voice: “Who won the battle?”

“The English,” replied the prowler. The officer went on: “Look in my pockets. You’ll find a purse and a watch. Take them.” This had already been done. The prowler pretended to do what he was told and said: “There’s nothing there.”

“I’ve been robbed,” the officer went on. “I’m so sorry. You could have had them.” The tread of the patrol was becoming more and more distinct. “Someone’s coming,” said the prowler, making a move as though to go. The officer, painfully raising his arm, held him back. “You saved my life. Who are you?”

The prowler replied fast and low: “I was, like you, in the French army. I must leave you. If they catch me, they’ll shoot me. I’ve saved your life. Now you’re on your own.”

“What’s your rank?”

“Sergeant.”

“What’s your name?”

“Thenardier.”

“I won’t forget that name,” said the officer. “And you, remember mine. My name is Pontmercy.” (Hugo 288-300)

Eight years later, on Christmas Eve of 1823, an important scene happened at the Thenardiers’ Inn, which has great bearing on this story:

Cosette was in her usual spot, sitting on the crosspiece of the kitchen table next to the fireplace. She was in rags, her feet were bare in her clogs, and she was knitting woolen stockings intended for the little Thenardier girls by the light of the fire. A tiny kitten was playing under the chairs. Two fresh children’s voices could be heard laughing and babbling in a neighboring room; that was Eponine and Azelma.

In the corner of the fireplace, a leather strap hung from a nail.

At intervals, the cry of a very young child, who was somewhere in the house, broke through the ambient noise of the tavern. This was a little boy mother Thenardier had had a few winters back—“heaven knows why,” she said, “must have been the cold weather”—and who was now a little over three years old. The mother had fed him, but did not love him. When the little nipper’s fierce clamor got too much: “Your son’s squealing,” Thenardier would say. “Go and see what he wants, then” “Bah!” mother Thenardier would reply. “I’m sick to death of him.” And the abandoned little boy would go on crying in the dark.

So far in this book we have seen the Thenardiers in profile; the moment has come to circle the couple and look at them from all sides. Thenardier had just turned fifty. Madame Thenardier was hitting her forties, which is the fifties for a women, so husband and wife were evenly matched in age…

The reader has, perhaps, retained some image of this Thenardier women, since she first appeared, tall, blond, ruddy, barrel-like, brawny, boxy, huge, and agile; she belonged, as we said, to that race of colossal wild women who arch their backs at fairs with cobblestones hanging from their hair. She did everything around the place, the beds, the rooms, the washing, the cooking, whatever, she ruled the roost and called all the shots. The only servant she had was Cosette, a mouse at the service of an elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice, the windows, the furniture, people. Her broad face, covered in freckles, looked like a strainer. She had a bit of a beard. She was the ideal butcher’s boy dressed up as a girl. She swore like a trooper, she boasted of being about to crack a nut with a single blow. If it hadn’t been for the novels she had read, which, at times, bizarrely brought out the snooty little prude beneath the ogress, the idea of calling her a woman would never have occurred to anyone. Mother Thenardier was like a damsel grafted onto a fishwife. To hear her speak, you’d say gendarme; to see her knock it back, you’d say a carter; to see the way she treated Cosette, you’d say a torturer. When she was resting, a tooth protruded from her mouth.

Old man Thenardier was a skinny little runt, pale, angular, bony, rickety, who looked sick but was as fit as a fiddle; his deceitfulness started there. He habitually smiled as a precaution and was polie with nearly everyone, even with the beggar to whom he would not give a whit. He had the eyes of a weasel and the mien of a man of letters. He looked a lot like the portraits of the abbe Delille. He liked to show off by drinking with the carters. No one had ever been able to get him drunk—he could drink anyone under the table. He smoked a great big pipe. He wore a smock and under the smock and old black outfit. He had pretensions to literature and to materialism as a philosophy…You will recall that he pretended he had served in the army; with a good deal of embellishment, he would tell how, at Waterloo, being a sergeant in a 6th or 9th Light something-or-other, he alone, against a squadron of Hussars of Death, had covered “a dangerously wounded general” with his body, saving him from grapeshot. When the blazing sign for his wall and, for his inn, throughout the region, the name of “the sergeant of Waterloo’s tavern.” He was liberal, traditional, and a Bonapartist…They reckoned in the village that he had once studied to be a priest. We believe that he had simply studied in Holland to be an innkeeper…Thenardier, above all a man of astuteness and balance, was a scoundrel of the mild-mannered kind. This breed is the worst, for in them hypocrisy joins in. It was not that Thenardier was not just as capable of rage as his wife on occasion; but this was very rare, and at those moments, since he resented the whole human race and contained inside him a furnace of hate, being one of those people who are always getting revenge, who blame anyone in the vicinity for anything that befalls them and are always ready to throw the sum of all the disappointments, failures, and calamities of their life at the first comer as a legitimate grievance---as all the leavening rose in him and foamed out of his mouth and into his eyes, he was truly ghastly. Woe to anyone who happened to be within arm’s reach then! …

That woman was a formidable creature who loved only her children and feared only her husband. She was a mother only because she was a mammal. Besides, her maternal feelings stopped at her girls, and, as we will see, did not extend to boys. As for the man, he had only one thought: how to get rich quick. He did not succeed…

Cosette was ugly. If she had been happy, she might have been pretty. We have already sketched that sad little figure. Cosette was thin and pale. She was nearly eight years old but you would have put her age at six. Her great big eyes, set deep in a sort of shadow, were almost lifeless because of all the crying they had done. The corners of her mouth had that curve of habitual anguish that you see in people on death row or the terminally ill. Her hands were, as her mother had guessed, “covered in chilblains.” The firelight that shone on her at that moment made her bones more prominent and her thinness alarmingly visible. As she was always shivering, she had gotten into the habit of pressing her knees together. All she had for clothes was an old rag that would have been pitiful in summer but that was truly horrifying in winter. All she had on was a bit of cotton riddled with holes; not a scrap of wool. Here and there you could see her skin, and everywhere you could make out black-and-blue bruises showing where mother Thenardier had thumped her. Her bare legs were red and rough. The hollow at her collarbone would have made you weep. The little girl’s whole person, the way she moved, her demeanor, the sound of her voice, the gasps between one word and the next, her eyes, her silence, her slightest gesture, expressed and translated in a single idea: fear…

Meanwhile, a door opened and in walked Eponine and Azelma. They really were two pretty little girls, more bourgeois than peasants, incredibly charming, one with very shiny auburn plaits, the other with long black plaits that fell down her back, both so lively, clean, plump, fresh, and healthy that it was a pleasure to lay eyes on them. They were warmly bundled up, but with such maternal art that the layers of material did not detract in any way from the stylishness of the arrangement…The two girls streamed light. What is more, they reigned supreme. In their outfits, in their gaiety, in the racket they made, there was supreme power. When they entered, mother Thenardier said to them in a scolding voice that was full of adoration: “Ah! So there you are, you two!”

Despite the cold of the night and how scantily clothed Cosette was, mother Thenardier sent her to fetch water from the stream in the woods, a task that terrified her and exhausted her. This night, however, she received some help…

She could not make much headway the way she was going and her progress was painfully slow. It was no use trying to shorten the breaks and to walk as far as possible between them; it would take her more than an hour to get back to Montfermeil this way, and mother Thenardier would give her a belting. This anguish melded with the horror she felt and being alone in the woods at night. She was worn out with exhaustion and not yet out of the woods. Having reached and old chestnut tree she knew, she made one last stop longer than the others to have a proper rest, then she gathered all of her strength, grabbled the bucket and courageously set off walking again. But the poor little mite could not stop herself from crying out in her despair: “Oh, my God! My God!”

At that moment, she suddenly felt that the bucket no longer weighed a thing. A hand, which seemed to her enormous, had just seized the handle and lifted it vigorously. She raised her head. A big black shape, straight and tall, was walking beside her in the darkness. It was a man, who had come up behind her without her hearing him coming. This man, without saying a word, had grabbed hold of the handle of the bucket she was carrying. There are instincts for all life’s encounters. The little girl felt no fear…

This man was Jean Valjean, accidentally meeting Cosette in the woods. He carried the water back to the inn for her, stayed the night, and the next morning had this conversation with the Thenardiers:

“Madame,” he said, “do you do a brisk trade in this Montfermeil?”

“So-so, Monsieur,” replied mother Thenardier. She followed this up in an elegiac and lamenting tone: “Oh, Monsieur! Times are certainly hard! And then, we don’t get many well-heeled types out here! It’s all small fry, no-hopers, if you know what I mean. If only we got travelers rich and generous as Monsieur now and then! We’ve got so many outlays. Listen, that little thing eats us out of house and home.”

“What little thing?”

“The little girl, of course—you know! Cosette! The Lark, as we say around here!”

“Ah!” said the man.

She continued: “They’re a silly lot, they are, these peasants, with their nicknames! She looks more like a bat than a lark. You see, Monsieur, we don’t ask for charity, but we can’t give it, either. We earn nothing, and we have to fork out a fortune. There’s the license, the taxes, the doors and windows, duties! As Monsieur knows, the government demands an awful lot of money. And then I’ve got my own girls, haven’t I? I don’t need to feed someone else’s brat.”

The man replied in a voice he was forcing himself to make indifferent but in which there was a quiver: “What if he was taken off your hands?’

“Who? Cosette?”

“Yes.”

The woman’s violent read face lit up with a hideous flush. “Ah, Monsieur! My good Monsieur! Take her, keep her, take her away, cart her off, sprinkle her with sugar, stuff her with truffles, drink her, eat her, and may the Holy Blessed Virgin and all the saints in heaven bless you!”

“Agreed.”

“True? You’ll take her away?”

“I’ll take her away.”

“Right now?”

“Right now. Call the child.”

“Cosette!” yelled mother Thenardier…

“Go and get the little girl,” he said.

At that moment, old man Thenardier strode into the middle of the room and said: “Monsieur owes twenty-six sous.”

“Twenty-six sous!” cried the wife.

“Twenty sous for the room,” resumed Thenardier coldly, “and six sous for supper. As for the little girl, I need to talk that over a bit with Monsieur. Leave us, missus.”

Mother Thenardier had one of those radiant flushes that unexpected flashes of talent will spur in a person. She felt that the great actor was entering the stage, and wordlessly made herself scarce. As soon as they were alone, ole man Thenardier offered the traveler a chair. The traveler sat down; Thenardier remained standing and his face took on a peculiar expression of bonhomie and simplicity.

“Monsieur,” he said, “listen, I’ll tell you something. And that something is that I adore her myself, that child.”

The stranger stared at him. “What child?”

Thenardier continued: “It’s funny! You get so attached. What’s all that money for? Take your hundred-sou coins back. I adore that child.”

“Which one?” the stranger demanded.

“Our little Cosette, of course! Aren’t you wanting to take her from us? Well, then, I’m telling you frankly, true as it is that you’re an honest man, I can’t allow it. She’d be breaking her promise to me, that little girl would. I first set eyes on it when it was just a tiny mite. It’s true that she costs us money, it’s true that she has her faults, it’s true that we aren’t rich, it’s true that I forked out over four hundred francs in medicine in one go once she was sick! But a person’s got to do something for the good Lord. It doesn’t have a mother or a father, I brought her up. My bread is her bread. In fact, I’m truly attached to her, that child. You understand, you get to feel real affection. I’m a bit of a sucker, myself, I don’t think about it, I love the little girl; my wife’s sharp but she loves her, too. You see, she’s like our child. I need to have it jabbering away about the place.”

The stranger went on staring at him. He continued.

“Pardon, sorry, Monsieur, but you don’t give your child to some passerby just like that. Eh? I’m not wrong, am I? Although, I can’t say you’re rich, you seem like a good sort of a fellow, what if it would make her happy? But we’d have to be sure about that. You get me? Suppose I do let her go and sacrifice myself, I’d like to know where she’s going, I wouldn’t want to lose sight of her, I’d want to know who she’s living with, so I could go and see her now and then, and for her to know that her good old foster father is there, that he’s watching over her. In the end, some things just can’t be done. I don’t even know your name. If you took her off, I’d be saying: ‘Well, then, what about the Lark? Where can she be?’ I’d have to see some miserable scrap of paper at least, a tiny speck of a passport, something!”

The stranger, without ceasing to look at him with that look that goes straight to the bottom of the conscience, so to speak, answered him in a grave and firm tone: “Monsieur Thenardier, you don’t need a passport to go five leagues from Paris. If I take Cosette, I will take her, and that’s that. You will not know my name, you will not know where I live, you will not know where she is, and my intention is that she never sees you again in her life. I break the rope she has tied around her foot, and she flies away, free. Does that suit you? Yes or no.”…

Old man Thenardier was one of those men who judge a situation at a glance. He gauged that this was the moment to get straight to the point. He behaved like the great captains at the decisive moment that they alone know how to recognize. He promptly unmasked his guns.

“Monsieur,” he said, “I must have fifteen hundred francs.”

The stranger took an old black leather wallet out of a side pocket, opened it, and took out three banknotes, which he placed on the table. Then he pressed his huge thumb down on the notes and said to the owner of the flophouse: “Get Cosette.”…

On her husband’s orders, she had gone in search of her. It was unheard-of, but for once she did not give her a slap or let fly some insult. “Cosette,” she said almost sweetly, “come quick.”

An instant later, Cosette stepped into the low room. The stranger took the bundle he had brought and untied it. This bundle contained a little woolen dress, a smock, a fustian vest, a petticoat, a fichu, woolen stockings, and proper shoes—a complete outfit for an eight-year-old girl. All of it was black.

“My child,” said the man, “take this and go get dressed quickly.”

Day was dawning when those inhabitants of Montfermeil who were starting to open their doors saw walking by on the road to Paris a shabbily dressed man hand in hand with a little girl all in mourning and carrying a big pink doll in her arms. They were heading to Livry. It was our man and Cosette. No one knew who the man was, and as Cosette was no longer in rags, many did not recognize her, either. Cosette was going away. Who with? She had no idea. Where? She did not know. All she understood was that she was leaving the Thenardier flophouse behind. No one had thought to say goodbye to her not had she thought to say goodbye to anyone. She was getting away from his hated and hateful house. Poor sweet little creature whose heart had till that moment only ever been crushed! Cosette walked gravely, opening wide her huge eyes and studying the sky. She had put her Louis in the pocket of her new smock. From time to time she bent over and took a peek at it, then she looked at the man. She felt a bit like she was walking along next to God. (Hugo 314-351)

Excerpts from this handout were taken from the unabridged version of LES MISERABLES, translated by Julie Rose:

Hugo, Victor. Les Miserables. New York: The Modern Library, 2009. Print.

The first picture of the Sunken Ohain Road in Waterloo was taken from:

“Walking Waterloo.” Blogspot. 24 May 2009. Web. 23 April 2013.

The second picture of the battle of Waterloo and the Sunken Road of Ohain was taken from:

“French Cuirassiers and the Giant Ravine.” Armchair General. 11 September 2011. Web. 23 April 2013.

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