daylight of
public opprobrium, this man accepted all, excused all, pardoned all, and
merely asked of Providence, of man, of the law, of society, of nature,
of the world, one thing, that Cosette might love him!

That Cosette might continue to love him! That God would not prevent
the heart of the child from coming to him, and from remaining with him!
Beloved by Cosette, he felt that he was healed, rested, appeased, loaded
with benefits, recompensed, crowned. Beloved by Cosette, it was well
with him! He asked nothing more! Had any one said to him: "Do you want
anything better?" he would have answered: "No." God might have said to
him: "Do you desire heaven?" and he would have replied: "I should lose
by it."

Everything which could affect this situation, if only on the surface,
made him shudder like the beginning of something new. He had never
known very distinctly himself what the beauty of a woman means; but he
understood instinctively, that it was something terrible.

He gazed with terror on this beauty, which was blossoming out ever more
triumphant and superb beside him, beneath his very eyes, on the innocent
and formidable brow of that child, from the depths of her homeliness, of
his old age, of his misery, of his reprobation.

He said to himself: "How beautiful she is! What is to become of me?"

There, moreover, lay the difference between his tenderness and the
tenderness of a mother. What he beheld with anguish, a mother would have
gazed upon with joy.

The first symptoms were not long in making their appearance.

On the very morrow of the day on which she had said to herself:
"Decidedly I am beautiful!" Cosette began to pay attention to her
toilet. She recalled the remark of that passer-by: "Pretty, but badly
dressed," the breath of an oracle which had passed beside her and had
vanished, after depositing in her heart one of the two germs which are
destined, later on, to fill the whole life of woman, coquetry. Love is
the other.

With faith in her beauty, the whole feminine soul expanded within her.
She conceived a horror for her merinos, and shame for her plush hat. Her
father had never refused her anything. She at once acquired the whole
science of the bonnet, the gown, the mantle, the boot, the cuff, the
stuff which is in fashion, the color which is becoming, that science
which makes of the Parisian woman something so charming, so deep, and so
dangerous. The words heady woman were invented for the Parisie