The second part of our novel is titled Cosette, and now, 23 chapters / 59 pages into that second part we finally see her again! We’re back in Montfermeil with the Thenardiers and things have not changed much. They have three children of their own, two daughters that the mother seems to love and treat decently well, and a 3 year old son that is actively neglected and denied the love he needs. Then we have Cosette, a child Hugo describes of having two types of “value” for the Thenardiers:
- She is a bargaining chip for extracting value from Fantine.
- She is an unpaid servant to be loaded with various types of undesirable labor.
Hugo lets us know that Montfermeil was a town with no water source of it’s own, and for the Thenardiers that meant a 15 minute walk out of town to fetch water from a natural spring. During the day this was a task they paid someone to do (in partnership with others in their part of town) but after dark this would fall to Cosette. Still a tiny child, clad in rags, Cosette was terribly afraid of going out to the spring in the dark, so she would do whatever she could to make sure they were well supplied.
Here we see her under the kitchen table, clad in rags, knitting stockings for the Thenardier children (stockings she would surely never be a ble to wear despite her desperate need for them).It’s a stark visual. We’re told this was where she chose to be, and the reader is left to draw conclusions as to why - out of sight? Out of reach? Somewhat shielded from angry hands and shouts? Hidden in her own little cavern, carving out a space of her own in a hostile environment.
It’s easy to hate the Thenardiers and I won’t argue for them in any meaningful way. It’s an ugly thing when the brokenness of our environment harms people and then bends them into people that do harm. The Thenardiers are responsible for their actions, and those actions are despicable - but they are still a product of the same conditions that made Valjean, Javert, Fantine, and Cosette what they were. The system and it’s destructive, dehumanizing effects is the real villain in our story. The other villains are secondary, and they are products of the system. I’m looking forward to asking the “why” questions around those damaged by the system and their radically different paths. That seems to be at the heart of what Hugo wants to show us.