Cosette, on her side, had also, unknown to herself, become another being, poor little thing!
She was so little when her mother left her, that she no longer remembered her.
Like all children, who resemble young shoots of the vine, which cling to everything, she had tried to love; she had not succeeded.
All had repulsed her,-- the Thenardiers, their children, other children.
She had loved the dog, and he had died, after which nothing and nobody would have anything to do with her.
It is a sad thing to say, and we have already intimated it, that, at eight years of age, her heart was cold. It was not her fault; it was not the faculty of loving that she lacked; alas! it was the possibility.
Thus, from the very first day, all her sentient and thinking powers loved this kind man.
She felt that which she had never felt before--a sensation of expansion.
The man no longer produced on her the effect of being old or poor; she thought Jean Valjean handsome, just as she thought the hovel pretty.
These are the effects of the dawn, of childhood, of joy.
The novelty of the earth and of life counts for something here.
Nothing is so charming as the coloring reflection of happiness on a garret. We all have in our past a delightful garret.
Nature, a difference of fifty years, had set a profound gulf between Jean Valjean and Cosette; destiny filled in this gulf. Destiny suddenly united and wedded with its irresistible power these two uprooted existences, differing in age, alike in sorrow. One, in fact, completed the other.
Cosette's instinct sought a father, as Jean Valjean's instinct sought a child.
To meet was to find each other.
At the mysterious moment when their hands touched, they were welded together.
When these two souls perceived each other, they recognized each other as necessary to each other, and embraced each other closely.
Taking the words in their most comprehensive and absolute sense, we may say that, separated from every one by the walls of the tomb, Jean Valjean was the widower, and Cosette was the orphan: this situation caused Jean Valjean to become Cosette's father after a celestial fashion.
And in truth, the mysterious impression produced on Cosette in the depths of the forest of Chelles by the hand of Jean Valjean grasping hers in the dark was not an illusion, but a reality. The entrance of that man into the destiny of that child had been the advent of God.
Moreover, Jean Valjean had chosen his refuge well.