What does this mean? why, these are revolutions, aren’t they? what has taken place? come, look me in the face.
And you won’t live with us!
And you won’t have my chamber!
What have I done to you?
Has anything happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Well then?”
“Everything is as usual.”
“Why do you change your name?”
“You have changed yours, surely.”
He smiled again with the same smile as before and added:
“Since you are Madame Pontmercy, I certainly can be Monsieur Jean.”
“I don’t understand anything about it.
All this is idiotic.
I shall ask permission of my husband for you to be ‘Monsieur Jean.’
I hope that he will not consent to it.
You cause me a great deal of pain.
One does have freaks, but one does not cause one’s little Cosette grief.
That is wrong.
You have no right to be wicked, you who are so good.”
He made no reply.
She seized his hands with vivacity, and raising them to her face with an irresistible movement, she pressed them against her neck beneath her chin, which is a gesture of profound tenderness.
“Oh!” she said to him, “be good!”
And she went on:
“This is what I call being good: being nice and coming and living here,—there are birds here as there are in the Rue Plumet,—living with us, quitting that hole of a Rue de l’Homme Arme, not giving us riddles to guess, being like all the rest of the world, dining with us, breakfasting with us, being my father.”
He loosed her hands.
“You no longer need a father, you have a husband.”
Cosette became angry.
“I no longer need a father!
One really does not know what to say to things like that, which are not common sense!”
“If Toussaint were here,” resumed Jean Valjean, like a person who is driven to seek authorities, and who clutches at every branch, “she would be the first to agree that it is true that I have always had ways of my own.
There is nothing new in this.
I always have loved my black corner.”
“But it is cold here.
One cannot see distinctly.
It is abominable, that it is, to wish to be Monsieur Jean!
I will not have you say ‘you’ to me.
“Just now, as I was coming hither,” replied Jean Valjean, “I saw a piece of furniture in the Rue Saint Louis.
It was at a cabinet-maker’s.
If I were a pretty woman, I would treat myself to that bit of furniture.
A very neat toilet table in the reigning style.
What you call rosewood, I think.
It is inlaid.
The mirror is quite large.
There are drawers.
It is pretty.”
“Hou! the villainous bear!” replied Cosette. And with supreme grace, setting her teeth and drawing back her lips, she blew at Jean Valjean.
She was a Grace copying a cat.
“I am furious,” she resumed.
“Ever since yesterday, you have made me rage, all of you. I am greatly vexed.