When she passed the factory in working hours, when the workpeople were at the door, she affected to laugh and sing.
An old workwoman who once saw her laughing and singing in this fashion said,
“There’s a girl who will come to a bad end.”
She took a lover, the first who offered, a man whom she did not love, out of bravado and with rage in her heart.
He was a miserable scamp, a sort of mendicant musician, a lazy beggar, who beat her, and who abandoned her as she had taken him, in disgust.
She adored her child.
The lower she descended, the darker everything grew about her, the more radiant shone that little angel at the bottom of her heart.
She said,
“When I get rich, I will have my Cosette with me;” and she laughed.
Her cough did not leave her, and she had sweats on her back.
One day she received from the Thenardiers a letter couched in the following terms:
“Cosette is ill with a malady which is going the rounds of the neighborhood.
A miliary fever, they call it.
Expensive drugs are required.
This is ruining us, and we can no longer pay for them.
If you do not send us forty francs before the week is out, the little one will be dead.”
She burst out laughing, and said to her old neighbor:
“Ah! they are good!
Forty francs! the idea!
That makes two napoleons!
Where do they think I am to get them?
These peasants are stupid, truly.”
Nevertheless she went to a dormer window in the staircase and read the letter once more.
Then she descended the stairs and emerged, running and leaping and still laughing.
Some one met her and said to her,
“What makes you so gay?”
She replied:
“A fine piece of stupidity that some country people have written to me.
They demand forty francs of me.
So much for you, you peasants!”
As she crossed the square, she saw a great many people collected around a carriage of eccentric shape, upon the top of which stood a man dressed in red, who was holding forth.
He was a quack dentist on his rounds, who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates, powders and elixirs.
Fantine mingled in the group, and began to laugh with the rest at the harangue, which contained slang for the populace and jargon for respectable people.
The tooth-puller espied the lovely, laughing girl, and suddenly exclaimed:
“You have beautiful teeth, you girl there, who are laughing; if you want to sell me your palettes, I will give you a gold napoleon apiece for them.”
“What are my palettes?” asked Fantine.
“The palettes,” replied the dental professor, “are the front teeth, the two upper ones.”
“How horrible!” exclaimed Fantine.
“Two napoleons!” grumbled a toothless old woman who was present.
“Here’s a lucky girl!”
Fantine fled and stopped her ears that she might not hear the hoarse voice of the man shouting to her:
“Reflect, my beauty! two napoleons; they may prove of service.
If your heart bids you, come this evening to the inn of the Tillac d’Argent; you will find me there.”
Fantine returned home. She was furious, and related the occurrence to her good neighbor Marguerite:
“Can you understand such a thing?
Is he not an abominable man?
How can they allow such people to go about the country!
Pull out my two front teeth!
Why, I should be horrible!
My hair will grow again, but my teeth!