poor child passively held her peace.

What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted God,
find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life, very small and in the
midst of men all naked!

CHAPTER III--MEN MUST HAVE WINE, AND HORSES MUST HAVE WATER

Four new travellers had arrived.

Cosette was meditating sadly; for, although she was only eight years
old, she had already suffered so much that she reflected with the
lugubrious air of an old woman. Her eye was black in consequence of a
blow from Madame Thenardier's fist, which caused the latter to remark
from time to time, "How ugly she is with her fist-blow on her eye!"

Cosette was thinking that it was dark, very dark, that the pitchers and
caraffes in the chambers of the travellers who had arrived must have
been filled and that there was no more water in the cistern.

She was somewhat reassured because no one in the Thenardier
establishment drank much water. Thirsty people were never lacking there;
but their thirst was of the sort which applies to the jug rather than to
the pitcher. Any one who had asked for a glass of water among all those
glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to all these men. But there
came a moment when the child trembled; Madame Thenardier raised the
cover of a stew-pan which was boiling on the stove, then seized a glass
and briskly approached the cistern. She turned the faucet; the child
had raised her head and was following all the woman's movements. A thin
stream of water trickled from the faucet, and half filled the glass.
"Well," said she, "there is no more water!" A momentary silence ensued.
The child did not breathe.

"Bah!" resumed Madame Thenardier, examining the half-filled glass, "this
will be enough."

Cosette applied herself to her work once more, but for a quarter of an
hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big snow-flake.

She counted the minutes that passed in this manner, and wished it were
the next morning.

From time to time one of the drinkers looked into the street, and
exclaimed, "It's as black as an oven!" or, "One must needs be a cat
to go about the streets without a lantern at this hour!" And Cosette
trembled.

All at once one of the pedlers who lodged in the hostelry entered, and
said in a harsh voice:--

"My horse has not been watered."

"Yes, it has," said Madame Thenardier.

"I tell you that it has not," retorted the pedler.

Cosette had emerged from under