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Updated: May 22, 2025
So a house was taken in the Rue Plumet, and here, with a faithful servant, the old man dwelt with his adopted child. But Jean Valjean took other rooms in Paris, in case of accidents. Cosette was growing up. She was conscious of her good looks, and she was in love with a well-connected youth named Marius, the son of Baron Pontmercy. Jean Valjean learnt of this secret love-making with dismay.
All at once a heavily laden carrier's cart, which was passing along the boulevard, shook the frail bed, like a clap of thunder, and made it quiver from top to bottom. "Yes, madame!" cried Cosette, waking with a start, "here I am! here I am!" And she sprang out of bed, her eyes still half shut with the heaviness of sleep, extending her arms towards the corner of the wall.
Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress and told her that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of his brother, which permitted him henceforth to live without working, he should leave the service of the convent and take his daughter with him; but that, as it was not just that Cosette, since she had not taken the vows, should have received her education gratuitously, he humbly begged the Reverend Prioress to see fit that he should offer to the community, as indemnity, for the five years which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five thousand francs.
Quite by chance he remembered the magazine article, and a statement therein that prudent people, when they had won a large sum, drove straight to Smith's Bank and banked it coram publico, so that scoundrels might be aware that assault with violence in the night hours would be futile. 'If we lunch? Cosette suggested, while Henry was getting his hat. 'No, not yet, he said importantly.
The loves of Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are few books in the world that can be compared with it.
However, he was thought to be dead, and this still further increased the obscurity which had gathered about him. At Paris, one of the journals which chronicled the fact fell into his hands. He felt reassured and almost at peace, as though he had really been dead. On the evening of the day when Jean Valjean rescued Cosette from the claws of the Thenardiers, he returned to Paris.
Hugo, to whom the human heart was as a printed page, has given us an admirable portrait of "the way of a man with a maid" in the courtship of Marius and Cosette. Youth and ardor and opportunity, yet no thought of evil all the dross in human nature transformed into the spirituelle by the pure white light of love. True, all men are not Mariuses or Romeos.
Sadness, uneasiness, anxiety, depression, this fresh misfortune of being forced to flee by night, to seek a chance refuge in Paris for Cosette and himself, the necessity of regulating his pace to the pace of the child all this, without his being aware of it, had altered Jean Valjean's walk, and impressed on his bearing such senility, that the police themselves, incarnate in the person of Javert, might, and did in fact, make a mistake.
So, step by step, and hurt by hurt, Ruth was learning that John Smith was John Smith and nobody else. Presently she was again in that dreadful tavern of the Thénardiers. That was the wonder of these stories; one lived in them. Cosette sat under the table, still as a mouse, fondling her pitiful doll. Dolls. Ruth's gaze wandered from the printed page. She had never had a real doll.
"He answers well." Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word. The prioress looked attentively at Cosette, and said half aloud to the vocal mother: "She will grow up ugly." The two mothers consulted for a few moments in very low tones in the corner of the parlor, then the prioress turned round and said: "Father Fauvent, you will get another knee-cap with a bell. Two will be required now."
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