United States or Iraq ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"Well," said she, "there is no more water!" A momentary silence ensued. The child did not breathe. "Bah!" resumed Madame Thenardier, examining the half-filled glass, "this will be enough." Cosette applied herself to her work once more, but for a quarter of an hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big snow-flake.

When he did not take Cosette with him, she remained with the old woman; but the child's delight was to go out with the good man. She preferred an hour with him to all her rapturous tete-a-tetes with Catherine. He held her hand as they walked, and said sweet things to her. It turned out that Cosette was a very gay little person.

When they had left the church behind them, the man, on perceiving all the open-air booths, asked Cosette: "So there is a fair going on here?" "No, sir; it is Christmas." As they approached the tavern, Cosette timidly touched his arm: "Monsieur?" "What, my child?" "We are quite near the house." "Well?" "Will you let me take my bucket now?" "Why?"

And then, the moon fell full upon that facade, and the man who was watching at the corner of the street would have seen Jean Valjean in the act of climbing. And finally, what was to be done with Cosette? How was she to be drawn up to the top of a three-story house? He gave up all idea of climbing by means of the drain-pipe, and crawled along the wall to get back into the Rue Polonceau.

Henry was so absorbed that he did not observe a colloquy between two of the croupiers at the middle of the table. The bank was broken, and every soul in every room knew it in the fraction of a second. 'Come, said Cosette, as soon as Henry had received the winnings. 'Come, she repeated, pulling his sleeve nervously.

And then, there still remained some petty but pressing debts in the neighborhood, and they were collecting the bills for them, etc., etc. "I shall send some one to fetch Cosette!" said Father Madeleine. "If necessary, I will go myself." He wrote the following letter to Fantine's dictation, and made her sign it: "MONSIEUR THENARDIER: You will deliver Cosette to this person.

He began to speak to them in a voice so feeble that it seemed to come from a distance, and one would have said that a wall now rose between them and him. "Draw near, draw near, both of you. I love you dearly. Oh! how good it is to die like this! And thou lovest me also, my Cosette. I knew well that thou still felt friendly towards thy poor old man.

But he had found Cosette sad; Cosette had been weeping. Her eyes were red. This was the first cloud in that wonderful dream. Marius' first word had been: "What is the matter?" And she had replied: "This." Then she had seated herself on the bench near the steps, and while he tremblingly took his place beside her, she had continued:

There is nothing but the maternal instinct, that admirable intuition composed of the memories of the virgin and the experience of the woman, which knows how this half-light is to be created and of what it should consist. Nothing supplies the place of this instinct. All the nuns in the world are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl's soul. Cosette had had no mother.

"Here they are in prison, and henceforth they will be incapacitated for doing any harm," he thought, "but what a lamentable family in distress!" As for the hideous vision of the Barriere du Maine, Cosette had not referred to it again.