In their toilettes, in their gayety, in the noise which they made, there was sovereignty. When they entered, the Thenardier said to them in a grumbling tone which was full of adoration, "Ah! there you are, you children!"
Then drawing them, one after the other to her knees, smoothing their hair, tying their ribbons afresh, and then releasing them with that gentle manner of shaking off which is peculiar to mothers, she exclaimed, "What frights they are!"
They went and seated themselves in the chimney-corner. They had a doll, which they turned over and over on their knees with all sorts of joyous chatter.
From time to time Cosette raised her eyes from her knitting, and watched their play with a melancholy air.
Eponine and Azelma did not look at Cosette.
She was the same as a dog to them.
These three little girls did not yet reckon up four and twenty years between them, but they already represented the whole society of man; envy on the one side, disdain on the other.
The doll of the Thenardier sisters was very much faded, very old, and much broken; but it seemed none the less admirable to Cosette, who had never had a doll in her life, a real doll, to make use of the expression which all children will understand.
All at once, the Thenardier, who had been going back and forth in the room, perceived that Cosette's mind was distracted, and that, instead of working, she was paying attention to the little ones at their play.
"Ah!
I've caught you at it!" she cried.
"So that's the way you work! I'll make you work to the tune of the whip; that I will."
The stranger turned to the Thenardier, without quitting his chair.
"Bah, Madame," he said, with an almost timid air, "let her play!"
Such a wish expressed by a traveller who had eaten a slice of mutton and had drunk a couple of bottles of wine with his supper, and who had not the air of being frightfully poor, would have been equivalent to an order.
But that a man with such a hat should permit himself such a desire, and that a man with such a coat should permit himself to have a will, was something which Madame Thenardier did not intend to tolerate.
She retorted with acrimony:--
"She must work, since she eats.
I don't feed her to do nothing."
"What is she making?" went on the stranger, in a gentle voice which contrasted strangely with his beggarly garments and his porter's shoulders.