Page 1510 - les-miserables

CHAPTER V

THE ROSE PERCEIVES THAT

IT IS AN ENGINE OF WAR

One day, Cosette chanced to look at herself in her mir-
ror, and she said to herself: ‘Really!’ It seemed to her almost
that she was pretty. This threw her in a singularly troubled
state of mind. Up to that moment she had never thought
of her face. She saw herself in her mirror, but she did not
look at herself. And then, she had so often been told that she
was homely; Jean Valjean alone said gently: ‘No indeed! no
indeed!’ At all events, Cosette had always thought herself
homely, and had grown up in that belief with the easy res-
ignation of childhood. And here, all at once, was her mirror
saying to her, as Jean Valjean had said: ‘No indeed!’ That
night, she did not sleep. ‘What if I were pretty!’ she thought.
‘How odd it would be if I were pretty!’ And she recalled
those of her companions whose beauty had produced a sen-
sation in the convent, and she said to herself: ‘What! Am I
to be like Mademoiselle So-and-So?’
The next morning she looked at herself again, not by ac-
cident this time, and she was assailed with doubts: ‘Where

1510 Les Miserables