Page 316 - les-miserables

‘How much will you give me for it?’ said she.
‘Ten francs.’
‘Cut it off.’
She purchased a knitted petticoat and sent it to the Th-
enardiers. This petticoat made the Thenardiers furious. It
was the money that they wanted. They gave the petticoat to
Eponine. The poor Lark continued to shiver.
Fantine thought: ‘My child is no longer cold. I have
clothed her with my hair.’ She put on little round caps which
concealed her shorn head, and in which she was still pret-
ty.
Dark thoughts held possession of Fantine’s heart.
When she saw that she could no longer dress her hair, she
began to hate every one about her. She had long shared the
universal veneration for Father Madeleine; yet, by dint of
repeating to herself that it was he who had discharged her,
that he was the cause of her unhappiness, she came to hate
him also, and most of all. 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.

316 Les Miserables