What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted God, find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life, very small and in the midst of men all naked!
BOOK THIRD.--ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN
CHAPTER III
MEN MUST HAVE WINE, AND HORSES MUST HAVE WATER
Four new travellers had arrived.
Cosette was meditating sadly; for, although she was only eight years old, she had already suffered so much that she reflected with the lugubrious air of an old woman.
Her eye was black in consequence of a blow from Madame Thenardier's fist, which caused the latter to remark from time to time, "How ugly she is with her fist-blow on her eye!"
Cosette was thinking that it was dark, very dark, that the pitchers and caraffes in the chambers of the travellers who had arrived must have been filled and that there was no more water in the cistern.
She was somewhat reassured because no one in the Thenardier establishment drank much water.
Thirsty people were never lacking there; but their thirst was of the sort which applies to the jug rather than to the pitcher.
Any one who had asked for a glass of water among all those glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to all these men.
But there came a moment when the child trembled; Madame Thenardier raised the cover of a stew-pan which was boiling on the stove, then seized a glass and briskly approached the cistern. She turned the faucet; the child had raised her head and was following all the woman's movements.
A thin stream of water trickled from the faucet, and half filled the glass.
"Well," said she, "there is no more water!"
A momentary silence ensued.
The child did not breathe.
"Bah!" resumed Madame Thenardier, examining the half-filled glass, "this will be enough."
Cosette applied herself to her work once more, but for a quarter of an hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big snow-flake.