A/N Alright, the thing with the spider is just a little reminiscent of Notre Dame de Paris, but Hugo was a bit obsessed with spiders, so that's how I'm justifying it.
" . . . he said in a voice that might well have, have . . . "
"Struck"
"Have struck! Might well have struck terror? What's 'terror', father?"
"Fear, Cosette."
"Oh. That might well have struck fear into the bravest heart (and yet did not seem to be angry) – "
"Good evening, Monsieur. Good evening, Beauty. Now you read what Beauty says."
"Good evening, Beast."
"Have you come to see me of your own free will?" And then the little girl's father stops reading, words trailing off into the dim evening light as he twists round in his chair. The sudden shift in the man's attention has been caused by a sound which the little girl, absorbed in pulling a story from the mass of print on the page, finger running determinedly under the lines, has not perceived, that of the street door being opened.
There is a tense bar's rest in which the man wonders if he might be imagining things, and then they both hear the dull sound of the door being pushed back into place, hinges griping from cold and ill-usage.
"Who was that, father?"
"Mere Taillon, child, gone to fetch her tisane."
Satisfied, the child's finger moves on and she continues reading: "Yes Beast, I came of my own free will – "
The man places one of his strong, rough hands over her tiny one, and raises the other hand to his lips in a pantomime request for silence.
The child complies and together they sit and listen to the noise of footsteps coming up the old stairs. At first they sound like the firm, heavy paces of a man, but listened to carefully they also sound slow and tired, and the man reminds himself that Mere Taillon wears thick soled shoes.
Never the less, there is a prickling knot at the bad of his shoulders that will not be reasoned away and so he leans forward and blows out their candle – snuffing it with a single snort of breath from his left nostril – an action which would be a clue, were anyone by to read it.
"Off to bed, Cosette, and go quiet now!" he says in an undertone.
The child, thinking this whispering all part of some new game, smiles and offers her face for him to kiss. But, just as her father places his lips lightly on the top of her forehead, still downy with wispy baby kiss curls, the steps in the corridor cease and he freezes, holding her very tight for a moment before releasing her.
The child departs instantly, sensing that something is the matter, but not sure what. She does not tell her father that there might be someone in the house other than Mere Taillon, not out of a desire to keep secrets, but because her understanding of secrets is still incomplete enough that it does not occur to her that anyone in the house might have one to keep.
On her little trestle bad in the small inner room, Cosette has snuggled well down into the covers, pulling the coverlet up about her cheeks and hugging her knees to her chest, all curled up like a weevil in a biscuit.
She does this because there is a high, cold wind blowing, rattling the cheap glass in its wormy panes, and she does it because she can – she now has a warm bed and a thick blanket, and no grimy settle or greasy plates to force her from it in the morning.
Also, she fancies that if she lies very still, she will better be able to concentrate on the story that she was reading with her father, remember the words exactly as she had picked them off the page. Perhaps, if she lies very still, and curls up very tight, and listens very hard, the wind will tell her the end.
Cosette does so want to know the end of that story, which she loves, childishly, as she loves all tales of magic. Cosette believes in magic, since she has no reason not to. The ingredients of fairytale, long forgotten or reasoned into archetypes for us, have in her short life appeared as nothing short of cold, hard reality. Like all true heroines, she has no mother, might as well have dropped with the spring rain for all anyone knew about her parents. Wicked step-mothers? Well, she knew all about them, and deep dark woods and, like all true heroines, her life had changed. Her prince had come for her and Cosette, in her tenement room, fully and without arrogance believes herself to be the equal of any queen.
The house she lives in, too, has its ownsort of magic. A secret, somnolent kind, as if a pall of fairy fog had descended over the little streets around the Barriere des Gobelins. By day there is almost no-body to be seen there, only the grass growing up between the cobbles, rank and melancholy, and moss clinging to the decrepit, crumbling walls, walls which will, unexpectedly and miraculously, bring forth the most beautiful little flowers from time to time. Occasionally a stray dogwill pass, trotting through the mud and nosing at the weeds, pursuing investigations of its own. The old building has something uncanny about it – in the way it is numbered both 50 and 52, as if assuming a double identity. It is, on the one hand, an imposing landmark, known to all the neighbors by its anecdotal title of 'The Gorbeau Property' and yet, by and large, they manage to forget about the place's existence. No-one ever comes there, save the two market gardeners who rent the bottom floor, Monsieur Denis and Monsieur Decoin, who Cosette loves to watch go about their business simply because there is very little else to do. Other than the wholly predictable comings and goings of these two gardeners, the old woman, the man and the child live from one day to the next, identical, day alone in the silent and almost hermetic world of the Gorbeau house, neither desiring nor encountering change.
That is, until that evening.
At around six O'clock it had grown dark, as if the quartier was not dreary enough in the light. Immediately as it did so, as if he had been waiting for nightfall, Cosette's father went out, leaving here in the care of the old chief tenant, Mere Taillon. Having asked the little girl all the questions she could think of, and having received the most unsatisfactory answers, Mother Taillon was no longer greatly interested in Cosette.
Leaving the child sat in her front room, from which she fulfilled her duties as concierge, she would stump off, bent double like a whoop, to tidy her kitchen, grumbling and whistling between her two teeth over whatever it was that the world was coming to these days.
Cosette did not mind this, she was well used to being solitary and always found something with which to amuse herself.
That evening, just as she had finished the end of bread which the old woman always gave her on such occasions "to keep her occupied2, Cosette noticed a spider, a little money spider, scuttle along the rough wooden table and across Mere Taillon's half played came of patience. Too used to spiders from an early age to be frightened, particularly of one so small, Cosette was simply curious as to where the little creature was going, especially since money spiders are lucky. Miss Eponine had told her that once, in a rare moment of kindness, as she had stopped Cosette from flattening one with her brush. "Don't, Cosette!" she had said, "Or it'll be bad luck for you."
Cosette decided that she would follow the spider since, if it was good luck, she reasoned it might be even better luck if she could catch it and keep it.
Coming to the edge of the table, the money spider made what was half a leap and half a climb and continued its dainty way across the floor. Cosette watched it head into the far corner of the room and, crouching on the floor, went to look for it
In the corners of the room there was what almost amounted to a topsoil of dust, and long training prompted Cosette to remark to herself, quietly and grimly, "Should be cleaned, that". The wainscoting was starting to splinter away from the walls, and the entire corner from floor to ceiling was latticed thickly with cobwebs like washing lines in a slum quarter, but all made of thread finer than any Countess's stockings.
Sitting in the web, at about eye level to Cosette, was a spider. Not, however, the little money spider. This was the largest spider that Cosette, despite her years of cleaning dark and dirty corners, had ever seen. It was, at her best guess, the breadth of her father's hand, with a shiny black body and paler, thin, mechanical looking legs. It flexed and waved the first pair of these legs and Cosette, rapt and just a little nervous, wondered it the spider was cross with her for chasing its baby.
The spider waved its legs again and Cosette observed how they had a bulge at the joints, like the buds on a spring twig, and then she heard the sound of someone with a heavy step entering the room. On instinct, she turned to face whoever had entered. It was a stranger, and he must have mistaken Cosette's look of concentration – mouth open and eyes slightly narrowed – for fear, for he said in a deep, calm voice: "Don't be frightened, P'tite."
Cosette had not been frightened, leastways not until she looked at the stranger properly. He was a tall man with grey whiskers and hair held back in a tight queue. He carried a heavy cane and reminded the child of . . . Of something she did not like, what was it? Yes! Of the well in the woods at eveningtime, of the icy water slopping over her hands and cold, ferny leaves brushing her face, and of all the wild things she had feared that she would meet in those woods one night when fetching water. The strange man looked at her and, perhaps because of the way his skin was a little too dark and his eyes a little too pale, she shivered and christened him 'Monsieur Loup' in her head.
"What were you looking at?" asked Monsieur Loup, and there was something about the pale eyes and deep voice that made the child feel constrained to answer, so she nodded towards the corner and said, "There M'sieu. Look."
Monsieur Loup strode over to where the child was standing in two long paces, and the frowned. Cosette, thinking that he had not seen the spider, and knowing that one must never jest with animals, not even the cook's moggie or the courier's pony, much less a wild beast, pointed so near that she was almost touching the creature's web. Monsieur Loup crouched down, inclined his shaggy head, and smiled.
"Ha, yes! You see how she is clever, P'tite?"
"Clever, M'sieu?"
"Yes."
Curiosity distinctly piqued, Cosette forgot to be frightened of the wild, strange gentleman: "What is she doing, M'sieu?"
"Spinning, child. All day long spinning like a good housewife, and no Lyonais silk merchant ever had a finer cloth. And why does she spin? To catch a fly! For days and days she lays her trap, thread by thread, ever so diligently, until everything is perfect. And then she waits. Sometimes for days she waits. But when that fly comes along, when the one she's waiting for stumbles into her net . . . " he trailed off and then clapped his two enormous hands together.
"Poor fly," said Cosette quietly.
He fixed her with a stern, searching glance in which there was not a hint of indulgence. The he said quietly, "That depends, P'tite. That depends.
Then, drawing himself back up to his full and considerable height, he asked the child in a businesslike tone: "Is Madame Taillon about?"
"No, M'sieu, she's cleaning in the kitchen. She should be done soon. Do you want me to call her?"
"If she should be done soon then I see no need," said the stranger, sitting himself down in front of Mere Taillon's unfinished card game, propping his cane up next to him against the table.
Idly, he picked up the cards to continue with the old woman's game and, with equal nonchalance, he begins to question the child, as any affable citizen with time to kill might.
"And what is your name, P'tite?"
"Cosette, M'sieu."
"Cosette! I knew a woman had a daughter named Cosette – " He stopped, as if that story was too sad to tell. "And where is your mother – " he stopped again, as if only just noticing that the child wore mourning, "Ah, yes, of course. You must miss her very much, no?"
Guilessly, the child replied no, since she did not remember her mother at all, and the man flexed his fingers over the cards much the same way as the spider had flexed her legs.
The stranger asked who she lived with, and the child replied "My Papa" He asked where they hail from and she answered "Montfermiel" and, since it seemed this was a pattern they were both used to – he asking and she being asked – they continued, although Cosette was only able to shake her head ignorantly to the rest of his questions.
Throughout this interview a series of expressions have passed across the man's broad countenance like the day's weather. Sometimes his face was hard and ferocious, a questing, dissecting expression in his eyes. At others he seemed almost rueful and apologetic, very nearly approaching gentle, and he ran his fingers through his whiskers absently. This softening was always replaced by a lively, purposeful look of decision.
For her part, Cosette had decided that this man, disconcerting as he indeed was, was no wolf at all, only a dog. A great, wild-looking dog, such as the ones the shepard boys keep, and she remembered that she had been great friends with a dog herself once. Recalling this, she grew bolder and asked the dog-wolf-man some questions of her own.
"What is your name, M'sieu?"
"Dumont. Monsieur Edouard Dumont."
"And are you going to live here, M'sieu Dumont, like me?"
"For a time."
She asked him why he carried a stick, and he looked at her for a moment in silence, taken aback as it no-one had ever asked that question before: "I was wounded in the war, P'tite. In Napoleon's great war"
"At Waterloo?" queried the child, because she had heard of it. Monsieur Dumont smiled at her and said nothing, tuning over the cards on the largest right hand pile.
He submitted to the child's interrogation with good grace, as if accepting it as quid pro quo for his own barrage of questions. When he told her that he worked in a theatre, that, no, he did not have any children but that, yes, he did once have a dog, it was all true. For Monsieur Edouard Dumont meant every word he said, just as an actor means every word that Hamlet says. However, you must realize that the actor is not always Hamlet.
He had been sifting through the same small pack of cards for a good five minutes with no result and so he set them down, remarking as much to his cravat as to anyone else, as if he had a familiar hidden in its folds: "That's never going to come out."
"You could turn them over in twos?" suggested the child, since that was what she had seen Mere Taillon do often enough.
"That's cheating," said Monsieur Dumont, gathering all the cards together into one pile and shuffling them nonchalantly. He cut the pack and pulled out a card – the Four of Hearts – from the pack and laid it on the table. Then he drew another – the King of Spades – followed by the Two of Spades and then the Three. At this last card he frowned to himself, causing a deep vertical line to appear between his eyes.
Cosette has been thinking of the time a brown woman in strangely patterned skirts had once called at The Sergeant of Waterloo. Monsieur had not allowed her inside the inn, but the woman, seemingly unsurprised by this, had sat herself down outside and was soon surrounded by a gaggle of village women, eyes wide open, giggling nervously. Cosette had watched as Madame had called Eponine and Azelma out of the house and the brown woman had chirruped and cooed over the two pretty children whispering to their beaming mother that they would surely married princes, "The cards do not lie."
Mindful of this, Cosette asked Monsieur Dumont, "Do you now what those cards mean, Monsieur?"
Momentarily the man's face hardened, so that she was almost afraid of him again, and then he seemed to relax, smiling a simple, bashful smile: "No, P'tite, can't say that I do."
At that moment Mere Taillon returned, tut-tut ting over the loss of her half-played card game. However, Monsieur Dumont had paid handsomely in advance for his little room, and sowas entitled to his eccentricities..
"Can I help Monsieur?"
"Yes. I'm going out to run an errand – "
"At this time of night?" It was scarcely six o'clock but the old woman was genuinely perturbed.
Monsieur Dumont gripped his heavy cane, "Yes, at this time of night. Could you set the fire in my room, please? And leave me some supper if you have anything? Oh, and see that this is delivered first thing tomorrow." He finished, withdrawing a letter from his waistcoat pocket. Then, with what almost appeared to be a twinkle in those cold, pale eyes, he tipped his hat and remarked, "And so, sweet ladies, goodnight!"
"He must be a dog," concluded Cosette to herself, "because he laughs the way dogs do. Silently."
"Good night, Monsieur Dumont" she said and, because see was strangely sorry to see her peculiar companion go, she added, "Will you come and see us, me and my father? Will we see you tomorrow?"
The dog-wolf, Monsieur Dumont, paused, and when he did answer, his voice was almost sad: "Not tomorrow, no. Butt you will see me again, P'tite. Promise. You and your father."