Page 1514 - les-miserables

The first symptoms were not long in making their ap-
pearance.
On the very morrow of the day on which she had said
to herself: ‘Decidedly I am beautiful!’ Cosette began to pay
attention to her toilet. She recalled the remark of that pass-
er-by: ‘Pretty, but badly dressed,’ the breath of an oracle
which had passed beside her and had vanished, after depos-
iting in her heart one of the two germs which are destined,
later on, to fill the whole life of woman, coquetry. Love is
the other.
With faith in her beauty, the whole feminine soul ex-
panded within her. She conceived a horror for her merinos,
and shame for her plush hat. Her father had never refused
her anything. She at once acquired the whole science of the
bonnet, the gown, the mantle, the boot, the cuff, the stuff
which is in fashion, the color which is becoming, that sci-
ence which makes of the Parisian woman something so
charming, so deep, and so dangerous. The words heady
woman were invented for the Parisienne.
In less than a month, little Cosette, in that Thebaid of the
Rue de Babylone, was not only one of the prettiest, but one
of the ‘best dressed’ women in Paris, which means a great
deal more.
She would have liked to encounter her ‘passer-by,’ to see
what he would say, and to ‘teach him a lesson!’ The truth is,
that she was ravishing in every respect, and that she distin-
guished the difference between a bonnet from Gerard and
one from Herbaut in the most marvellous way.
Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety. He who

1514 Les Miserables