Chapter 51 Ten Consequences of Success

She was driven out at the end of winter.Summer is over and winter is coming again.The days are shorter and the work less.In winter there is no heat at all, no light at all, no noon at all, and the morning is followed by night, mist, dusk, the windows are dark, and nothing can be discerned.The sky is like a light-transmitting eye in a dark room, and the whole day is like sitting in a cellar.The sun also seems to be a poor man.Miserable season!Winter turns the water in the sky and the hearts of people into ice.Her creditors pressed her hard. Fantine earned very little money.Her debt grew heavier and heavier.The Thenardiers, who did not receive their money in due time, wrote her frequently, whose content made her sad, and whose demands bankrupted her.One day they wrote her a letter, saying that her little Cosette had nothing to wear in such cold weather, and that she wanted a wool skirt, and that her mother should send ten francs for it.She received the letter and rubbed it in her hands all day.In the evening, she went to a barber's on the corner of the street and took out her comb.Her stunning blonde hair fell to her waist.

"Beautiful hair!" exclaimed the barber. "How much will you give?" she said. "Ten francs." "Cut it." She bought a skirt made of wool and sent it to Thenardier. The dress made the Thenardiers very angry.What they wanted was money.They gave the dress to Éponine.Poor lark was still trembling at the wind. Fantine thought: "My child will not be cold anymore, I have made her clothes of my hair." She herself put on a bonnet, which hid her bald head, and she was still beautiful. A gloomy thought arose in Fantine's heart.When she saw that she could no longer comb her hair, she began to resent everything around her.She had always respected Comrade Madeleine as much as anyone else, but she hated him too when she repeatedly thought of him as the one who drove her away and made her suffer.And especially hate him.When the workers stood at the gate of the factory and she passed by, she sang with a smile on her face.

An old female worker once saw her singing and laughing like that, and said, "This girl will not end well." She befriended a man, someone irrelevant, whom she didn't love, out of sheer resentment and a will to misbehave.The man was a poor man, a wandering musician, and a lazy rascal. He beat her, and when the spring night was over, he became disgusted and threw her away. She loves her children with all her heart. The more degraded she was, the darker all things became around her, and the sweeter the angel seemed to her in the depths of her soul.She used to say: "When I'm rich, I'll have my Cosette by my side," and laughed again.The cough didn't leave her, and she was still sweating.

One day, she received a letter from the Thenardiers, saying: "Cosette is suffering from an endemic disease called scarlet fever. It must be expensive medicine. This disease has cost us all our money." We can't afford to pay for the medicine anymore. If you don't send forty francs within eight days, the baby will be lost." She laughed aloud, and said to her old neighbor: "Ha! They're good men! Forty francs! Only forty francs! That's two Napoleons! Where do they want me to find them? How stupid are these peasants!" But when she reached the stairs she took out the letter again, leaned close to the skylight, and read it again.

Then she came down the stairs and ran out of the gate, jumping and laughing as she ran. Someone met her and asked her: "What makes you so happy?" She replied: "Two peasants have just written me a letter, joking with me, asking me for forty francs. These peasants are very good!" She walked through the square and saw many people surrounding a strange car. On the roof stood a man in red, with teeth and claws, speaking to the audience.The man was a wandering dentist who peddled complete sets of teeth, toothpaste, powder, and liquor. Fantine slipped into the crowd to hear the speech, and laughed with the others, and what he said was quackery, for hooligans, and vulgar, for decent people.Fang Fang, who had pulled out his tooth, saw the beautiful girl with her mouth open and smiled, and suddenly cried out:

"Hey, smiling girl, you have beautiful teeth! If you will sell me your porcelain plates, I will offer you a gold Napoleon each." "My china plate? What is it?" asked Fantine. "Porcelain plaques," replied the dentist, "are the front teeth, the upper two front teeth." "How frightening!" exclaimed Fantine. "Two Napoleons!" a toothless old woman next to her said with a pout, "how lucky this lady is!" Fantine fled, trying her ears so as not to hear the man's hoarse voice, but the man still cried: "Think about it, my beauty! Two Napoleons will be of great use. If you like, you will be able tonight." Come to the Silverdeck Inn, where you will find me."

Fantine returned home, furious, and told her good neighbor Marguerite what had happened: "Do you understand this? Isn't that a terrible person? How can you let that kind of person go around? Lost my two front teeth! What a wretch I'm going to be! Hair can grow back, but teeth, ah, that she-boy! I'd rather jump headfirst from the sixth floor! He told me that tonight, he was on Silver Deck Inn." "What price does he offer?" asked Marguerite. "Two Napoleons." "That's forty francs." "Yes," said Fantine, "forty francs."

She was absent-minded for a while and ran to work.At the end of a quarter of an hour, she left her work and ran up the stairs to read the letter from the Thenardiers again. She turned and said to Marguerite who was working beside her: "What is scarlet fever? Do you know?" "I know," replied the old girl, "it's a disease." "Does that disease require a lot of medicine?" "Oh! Many strange medicines are needed." "How did you get that disease?" "That's how it hurts, that kind of disease." "Do children get that disease too?"

"Children are the most vulnerable." "Will you die if you get this disease?" "Easy," said Margaret. Fantine went out, went back up the stairs, and read the letter over again. In the evening, when she went downstairs, she was seen walking toward the Rue de Paris, where there are many inns. The next morning, before dawn, Marguerite walked into Fantine's room (they worked together like this every day, and they lit a candle together), and she saw Fantine sitting on the bed, pale and frozen Like.She is not asleep yet.Her yarmulke fell on her knees.The candle burned all night, and was almost exhausted.

Margaret stopped by the door.She was terrified at the sight of such disorder, and cried: "Savior! This candle is out! Something must have happened!" Then she saw Fantine turn her bald head towards her. Fantine aged ten years in one night. "Jesus!" said Marguerite, "what has happened to you, Fantine?" "Nothing," replied Fantine. "It's just right. My child won't die. That kind of disease scares me. Now she's saved. I'm also relieved." As she spoke, she pointed to the table and showed the old girl the two shiny Napoleons.

"Oh, Jesus God!" said Marguerite, "this is a fortune! Where did you find these louis d'or?" "I have it," replied Fantine. At the same time she smiled.The candle was shining in her face.It was a bloody smile.A line of red saliva hung from the corner of her mouth, and there was a black hole in her mouth. Those two teeth were pulled out. She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil. It was a scam by the Thenardiers to make money, and Cosette was not ill. Fantine threw her mirror out of the window.She had long since abandoned the small room on the first floor, and moved into a barred building under the roof; Bumping your head from time to time, her room is one of those.The poor man has to bend gradually to the end of his house, as he to the end of his life.She has no bed, only a piece of rag left, which is her quilt, a straw mat on the ground, and a broken straw chair.The little rose tree she had raised had withered in the corner of the room, and no one thought about it anymore.In another corner, there is a cream bowl used to hold water, which has been frozen in winter, and the layers of ice circles mark the high and low water levels, and have been there for a long time.She is no longer afraid of being ridiculed, and now she doesn't even care about grooming.The final manifestation is that she often wears a dirty little hat on the street.Maybe it was lack of time, maybe it was inadvertently, she no longer mended her clothes.If the heel of the sock is torn, it will be pulled into the shoe, and the more torn the heel is, the more it will be pulled.This can be seen in those vertical creases.She used many scraps of bamboo cloth that would break at the touch of a finger to patch her worn undershirt.Her creditors quarreled with her, and she never had a moment's rest.She met them often in the street, and often on her stairs.She used to cry all night and think all night, and her eyes were amazingly bright.And feel pain in the shoulder above the left scapula from time to time.She coughs from time to time.She hated Uncle Madeleine, but she never complained.She sewed seventeen hours a day, but a contractor who took over the women's work at a low price suddenly lowered the wages, and the daily wages of the irregular workers were reduced to nine sous.Seventeen hours' work at nine sous a day!The cruelty of her creditors intensified.The junk dealer who'd taken almost all the furniture kept saying to her, "When will you pay me, bitch?"She felt that she had nowhere to go, so a kind of trapped animal feeling arose in her heart.At this moment, Thenardier wrote to her again, saying that he had waited a long time, and that he had waited so long, that he had done his best, and that he wanted a hundred francs at once, or he would send out little Cosette, who had just recovered from a serious illness. They couldn't care how cold the weather was or how far the road was, so they had to let her go. If she wanted to, she would just die by the roadside. "A hundred francs!" thought Fantine, "but where is the chance of earning five francs a day?" "Damn it!" she said, "sell it all." The miserable man became a public prostitute.