Les Miserables: Love, Fear & Cosette

This chapter is one of the longer one’s we have seen and it does a beautiful job of using young Cosette to draw a strong distinction between fear and love. The entirety of the chapter takes place at the Inn, and the action really revolves around Valjean, the Thenardiers, & Cosette.

Hug does a great job of describing the type of fear that little 8 year old Cosette was constantly experiencing at the hands of Madame Thenardier:

Everything about her, her general attitude and bearing, her quavering and hesitant speech, her gaze, her silence, her every movement expressed a single impulse, that of fear.

This isn’t normal for an 8 year old child. Where a warm and safe environment built to promote flourishing would have produced curiosity, wonder, openness and comfort; we see instead all the signs of an abusive and destructive environment. It’s heart breaking. Hugo goes on:

In then depths of her eyes there was the haggard gleam of terror.

Not love. Not joy. Not mirth. “The haggard gleam of terror.” I wish I could say this was a look I’m not familiar with it, but we’ve all seen it plastered across our newsfeeds and social media accounts: children in war-torn countries experiencing atrocities no human should ever be exposed to. In their sweet eyes we see this haggard gleam of terror. A vacancy that can’t escape reality, a lifelessness that is the fruit of repeated exposure to trauma that should have never happened in the first place.

This is young Cosette. Not as her mother remembered her, but the product of 5 years of abuse at the hands of the monstrous Thenardiers. Jean Valjean sees her suffering and is well aware of it’s cause, but rather than rage, he begins to show the child the one true cure for fear (though it takes a very long time to fully eradicate the effects of terror) - Valjean shows Cosette love in the most practical ways imaginable.

• He “finds” a twenty-sous piece to save her from a beating
• He pays five-francs so she can be liberated from her task of knitting and have some time to play
• He buys her the doll that she had so longingly gazed upon earlier, the one she thought “fit for a princess”
• He leaves a gold coin worth 20 francs in her shoe as a Christmas gift

Now these monetary gifts are not in and of themselves love. They are an expression of love. The same gifts could have been given from a different motive, or with different aims. But here, in a very practical way Valjean is observing the terrible treatment Cosette lives with and the abject terror it puts her in and he is doing what he can in the immediate moment to try and change her experience. With each gift, an outpouring of love that has the potential to reshape the horizons of what Cosette believes is possible.

The possibility that she could be loved. The possibility that she is worthy of love. The possibility that things could change. The possibility that she could experience joy, peace, and love rather than fear and suffering.

It isn’t just Cosette that could be changed. This act of love has the potential to change the observers as well. In the case of Madame Thenardier, she sees it happen and dismisses it as madness. Why? Because that is the only kind of response she can take that doesn’t confront her with the reality of who she is and how she needs to change. If Valjean’s gifts for Cosette are a mirror showing her that she is worthy of love, then they are a mirror for the Thenardiers as well, showing them that they are monstrous and must change.

Listen to the words of Madame Thenardier when she talks to her husband about this:

That old lunatic, what’s gotten into him, coming here and turning the place upside down, wanting the brat to play, giving her dolls - a forty-franc doll for a slit that I wouldn’t give forty sous for! Next thing you know he’ll call her ‘your Highness’! Is the man mad?

Upside down indeed. In a broken system that encourages extraction, whenever someone comes into a situation where power has been asserted through violence and used to actively oppress and strip the humanity out of people and responds by embodying love and grace, it is seen as upside down and unthinkable. In a worldview shaped by oppressive systems, the Thenardiers can make no sense of generosity, love or kindness. Everything must be transactional or it’s madness!

In a world full of Thenardiers and Cosettes, let’s do what we can to be like Jean Valjean. A saint in the truest sense of the word.