Cosette was made to run on errands, to sweep the rooms, the courtyard, the street, to wash the dishes, to even carry burdens.
The Thenardiers considered themselves all the more authorized to behave in this manner, since the mother, who was still at M. sur M., had become irregular in her payments.
Some months she was in arrears.
If this mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of these three years, she would not have recognized her child.
Cosette, so pretty and rosy on her arrival in that house, was now thin and pale. She had an indescribably uneasy look.
"The sly creature," said the Thenardiers.
Injustice had made her peevish, and misery had made her ugly. Nothing remained to her except her beautiful eyes, which inspired pain, because, large as they were, it seemed as though one beheld in them a still larger amount of sadness.
It was a heart-breaking thing to see this poor child, not yet six years old, shivering in the winter in her old rags of linen, full of holes, sweeping the street before daylight, with an enormous broom in her tiny red hands, and a tear in her great eyes.
She was called the Lark in the neighborhood.
The populace, who are fond of these figures of speech, had taken a fancy to bestow this name on this trembling, frightened, and shivering little creature, no bigger than a bird, who was awake every morning before any one else in the house or the village, and was always in the street or the fields before daybreak.
Only the little lark never sang.
BOOK FIFTH.--THE DESCENT
CHAPTER I
THE HISTORY OF A PROGRESS IN BLACK GLASS TRINKETS
And in the meantime, what had become of that mother who according to the people at Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child? Where was she?
What was she doing?
After leaving her little Cosette with the Thenardiers, she had continued her journey, and had reached M. sur M.
This, it will be remembered, was in 1818.