on his kindness; his mind was rough and his heart was soft. During
their conversations in the Luxembourg, he gave her explanations of
everything, drawing on what he had read, and also on what he had
suffered. As she listened to him, Cosette's eyes wandered vaguely about.

This simple man sufficed for Cosette's thought, the same as the wild
garden sufficed for her eyes. When she had had a good chase after the
butterflies, she came panting up to him and said: "Ah! How I have run!"
He kissed her brow.

Cosette adored the goodman. She was always at his heels. Where Jean
Valjean was, there happiness was. Jean Valjean lived neither in the
pavilion nor the garden; she took greater pleasure in the paved back
courtyard, than in the enclosure filled with flowers, and in his little
lodge furnished with straw-seated chairs than in the great drawing-room
hung with tapestry, against which stood tufted easy-chairs. Jean Valjean
sometimes said to her, smiling at his happiness in being importuned: "Do
go to your own quarters! Leave me alone a little!"

She gave him those charming and tender scoldings which are so graceful
when they come from a daughter to her father.

"Father, I am very cold in your rooms; why don't you have a carpet here
and a stove?"

"Dear child, there are so many people who are better than I and who have
not even a roof over their heads."

"Then why is there a fire in my rooms, and everything that is needed?"

"Because you are a woman and a child."

"Bah! must men be cold and feel uncomfortable?"

"Certain men."

"That is good, I shall come here so often that you will be obliged to
have a fire."

And again she said to him:--

"Father, why do you eat horrible bread like that?"

"Because, my daughter."

"Well, if you eat it, I will eat it too."

Then, in order to prevent Cosette eating black bread, Jean Valjean ate
white bread.

Cosette had but a confused recollection of her childhood. She prayed
morning and evening for her mother whom she had never known. The
Thenardiers had remained with her as two hideous figures in a dream. She
remembered that she had gone "one day, at night," to fetch water in a
forest. She thought that it had been very far from Paris. It seemed to
her that she had begun to live in an abyss, and that it was Jean Valjean
who had rescued her from it. Her childhood produced upon her the effect
of a time when there had been nothing around her but millepeds, spiders,
and serpents.