10
FURTHER SUCCESS OF THE GOSSIPS
SHE HAD BEEN discharged towards the end of winter; summer passed away, but winter returned. Short days, less work. In winter there is no heat, no light, no noon, evening touches morning, there is fog, and mist, the window is frosted, and you cannot see clearly. The sky is but the mouth of a cave. The whole day is the cave. The sun has the appearance of a pauper. Frightful season! Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man. Her creditors harassed her.
Fantine earned too little. Her debts had increased. The Thénardiers being poorly paid, were constantly writing letters to her, the contents of which disheartened her, while the postage was ruining her. One day they wrote to her that her little Cosette was entirely destitute of clothing for the cold weather, that she needed a woollen skirt, and that her mother must send at least ten francs for that. She received the letter and crushed it in her hand for a whole day. In the evening she went into a barber’s shop at the corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her beautiful fair hair fell below her waist.
“What beautiful hair!” exclaimed the barber.
“How much will you give me for it?” said she.
“Ten francs.”
“Cut it off.”
She bought a knit skirt and sent it to the Thénardiers.
This skirt made the Thénardiers furious. It was the money that they wanted. They gave the skirt to Eponine. The poor lark still shivered.
Fantine thought: “My child is no longer cold, I have clothed her with my hair.” She put on a little round cap which concealed her shorn head, and with that she was still pretty.
A gloomy work was going on in Fantine’s heart.
When she saw that she could no longer dress her hair, she began to look with hatred on all around her. She had long shared in the universal veneration for Father Madeleine; nevertheless by dint of repeating to herself that it was he who had turned her away, and that he was the cause of her misfortunes, she came to hate him also, and especially. When she passed the factory at the hours in which the labourers were at the door, she forced herself to laugh and sing.
An old working-woman who saw her once singing and laughing in this way, said: “There is a girl who will come to a bad end.”
She took a lover, the first comer, a man whom she did not love, through bravado, and with rage in her heart. He was a wretch, a kind of mendicant musician, a lazy ragamuffin, who beat her, and who left her, as she had taken him, with disgust.
She worshipped her child.
The lower she sank, the more all became gloomy around her, the more the sweet little angel shone out in the bottom of her heart. She would say: “When I am rich, I shall have my Cosette with me,” and she laughed. The cough did not leave her, and she had night sweats.
One day she received from the Thénardiers a letter in these words: “Cosette is sick of an epidemic disease. A miliary fever they call it. The drugs necessary are dear. It is ruining us, and we can no longer pay for them. Unless you send us forty francs within a week the little one will die.”
She burst out laughing, and said to her old neighbour:
“Oh! they are nice! forty francs! think of that! that is two Napoleons! Where do they think I can get them? How stupid these peasants are.”
She went, however, to the staircase, near a dormer window, and read the letter again.
Then she went down stairs and out of doors, running and jumping, still laughing.
Somebody who met her said to her: “What is the matter with you, that you are so gay?”
She answered: “A stupid joke that some country people have just written me. They ask for forty francs; the louts!”
As she passed through the square, she saw many people gathered about an odd-looking carriage on the top of which stood a man in red clothes, declaiming. He was a juggler and a traveling dentist, and was offering to the public complete sets of teeth, opiates, powders, and elixirs.
Fantine joined the crowd and began to laugh with the rest at this harangue, in which were mingled slang for the rabble and jargon for the better sort. The puller of teeth saw this beautiful girl laughing, and suddenly called out: “You have pretty teeth, you girl who are laughing there. If you will sell me your two incisors, I will give you a gold Napoleon for each of them.”
“What is that? What are my incisors?” asked Fantine.
“The incisors,” resumed the professor of dentistry, “are the front teeth, the two upper ones.”
“How horrible!” cried Fantine.
“Two Napoleons!” grumbled a toothless old hag who stood by. “How lucky she is!”
Fantine fled away and stopped her ears not to hear the shrill voice of the man who called after her: “Consider, my beauty! two Napoleons! how much good they will do you! If you have the courage for it, come this evening to the inn of the Tillac d‘Argent; you will find me there.”
Fantine returned home; she was raving, and told the story to her good neighbour Marguerite: “Do you understand that? isn’t he an abominable man? Why do they let such people go about the country? Pull out my two front teeth! why, I should be horrible! The hair is bad enough, but the teeth! Oh! what a monster of a man! I would rather throw myself from the sixth story, head first, to the pavement! He told me that he would be this evening at the Tillac d‘Argent.”
“And what was it he offered you?” asked Marguerite.
“Two Napoleons.”
“That is forty francs.”
“Yes,” said Fantine, “that makes forty francs.”
She became thoughtful and went about her work. In a quarter of an hour she left her sewing and went to the stairs to read again the Thénardiers’ letter.
On her return she said to Marguerite, who was at work near her:
“What does this mean, a miliary fever? Do you know?”
“Yes,” answered the old woman, “it is a disease.”
“Then it needs a good many drugs?”
“Yes; terrible drugs.”
“How does it come upon you?”
“It is a disease that comes in a moment.”
“Does it attack children?”
“Children especially.”
“Do people die of it?”
“Very often,” said Marguerite.
Fantine withdrew and went once more to read over the letter on the stairs.
In the evening she went out, and took the direction of the Rue de Paris where the inns are.
The next morning, when Marguerite went into Fantine’s chamber before daybreak, for they always worked together, and so made one candle do for the two, she found Fantine seated upon her couch, pale and icy. She had not been in bed. Her cap had fallen upon her knees. The candle had burned all night, and was almost consumed.
Marguerite stopped upon the threshold, petrified by this wild disorder, and exclaimed: “Good Lord! the candle is all burned out. Something has happened.”
Then she looked at Fantine, who sadly turned her shorn head.
Fantine had grown ten years older since evening.
“Bless us!” said Marguerite, “what is the matter with you, Fantine?”
“Nothing,” said Fantine. “Quite the contrary. My child will not die with that frightful sickness for lack of aid. I am satisfied.”
So saying, she showed the old woman two Napoleons that glistened on the table.
“Oh! good God!” said Marguerite. “Why there is a fortune! where did you get these louis d‘or?”
“I got them,” answered Fantine.
At the same time she smiled. The candle lit up her face. It was a sickening smile, for the corners of her mouth were stained with blood, and a dark cavity revealed itself there.
The two teeth were gone.
She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil.
And this was a ruse of the Thénardiers to get money. Cosette was not sick.
Fantine threw her looking-glass out of the window. Long before she had left her little room on the third story for an attic room with no other fastening than a latch; one of those garret rooms the ceiling of which makes an angle with the floor and hits your head at every moment. The poor cannot go to the end of their chamber or to the end of their destiny, but by bending continually more and more. She no longer had a bed, she retained a rag that she called her coverlid, a mattress on the floor, and a worn-out straw chair. Her little rose-bush was dried up in the corner, forgotten. In the other corner was a butter-pot for water, which froze in the winter, and the different levels at which the water had stood remained marked a long time by circles of ice. She had lost her modesty, she was losing her coquetry. The last sign. She would go out with a dirty cap. Either from want of time or from indifference she no longer washed her linen. As fast as the heels of her stockings wore out she drew them down into her shoes. This was shown by certain perpendicular wrinkles. She mended her old, wornout corsets with bits of calico which were torn by the slightest motion. Her creditors quarrelled with her and gave her no rest. She met them in the street; she met them again on her stairs. She passed whole nights in weeping and thinking. She had a strange brilliancy in her eyes, and a constant pain in her shoulder near the top of her left shoulder-blade. She coughed a great deal. She hated Father Madeleine thoroughly, and never complained. She sewed seventeen hours a day; but a prison contractor, who was working prisoners at a loss, suddenly cut down the price, and this reduced the day’s wages of free labourers to nine sous. Seventeen hours of work, and nine sous a day! Her creditors were more pitiless than ever. The second-hand dealer, who had taken back nearly all his furniture, was constantly saying to her: “When will you pay me, wench?”
Good God! what did they want her to do? She felt herself hunted down, and something of the wild beast began to develop within her. About the same time Thénardier wrote to her that really he had waited with too much generosity, and that he must have a hundred francs immediately, or else little Cosette, just convalescing after her severe sickness, would be turned out of doors into the cold and upon the highway, and that she would become what she could, and would perish if she must. “A hundred francs,” thought Fantine. “But where is there a place where one can earn a hundred sous a day?”
“Come!” said she, “I will sell what is left.”
The unfortunate creature became a woman of the town.