Mother Thenardier loved her two daughters passionately, which caused her to hate the stranger.
It is sad to think that the love of a mother can possess villainous aspects.
Little as was the space occupied by Cosette, it seemed to her as though it were taken from her own, and that that little child diminished the air which her daughters breathed. This woman, like many women of her sort, had a load of caresses and a burden of blows and injuries to dispense each day. If she had not had Cosette, it is certain that her daughters, idolized as they were, would have received the whole of it; but the stranger did them the service to divert the blows to herself. Her daughters received nothing but caresses.
Cosette could not make a motion which did not draw down upon her head a heavy shower of violent blows and unmerited chastisement.
The sweet, feeble being, who should not have understood anything of this world or of God, incessantly punished, scolded, ill-used, beaten, and seeing beside her two little creatures like herself, who lived in a ray of dawn!
Madame Thenardier was vicious with Cosette.
Eponine and Azelma were vicious.
Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size is smaller; that is all.
A year passed; then another.
People in the village said:--
"Those Thenardiers are good people.
They are not rich, and yet they are bringing up a poor child who was abandoned on their hands!"
They thought that Cosette's mother had forgotten her.
In the meanwhile, Thenardier, having learned, it is impossible to say by what obscure means, that the child was probably a bastard, and that the mother could not acknowledge it, exacted fifteen francs a month, saying that "the creature" was growing and "eating," and threatening to send her away.
"Let her not bother me," he exclaimed, "or I'll fire her brat right into the middle of her secrets. I must have an increase."
The mother paid the fifteen francs.
From year to year the child grew, and so did her wretchedness.
As long as Cosette was little, she was the scape-goat of the two other children; as soon as she began to develop a little, that is to say, before she was even five years old, she became the servant of the household.
Five years old! the reader will say; that is not probable. Alas! it is true.
Social suffering begins at all ages. Have we not recently seen the trial of a man named Dumollard, an orphan turned bandit, who, from the age of five, as the official documents state, being alone in the world, "worked for his living and stole"?