“You have suffered much, poor mother. Oh! do not complain; you now have the dowry of the elect. It is thus that men are transformed into angels. It is not their fault they do not know how to go to work otherwise. You see this hell from which you have just emerged is the first form of heaven. It was necessary to begin there.” He sighed deeply. But she smiled on him with that sublime smile in which two teeth were lacking. That same night, Javert wrote a letter. The next morning be posted it himself at the office of M. sur M. It was addressed to Paris, and the superscription ran: _To Monsieur Chabouillet, Secretary of Monsieur le Préfet of Police_. As the affair in the station-house had been bruited about, the post-mistress and some other persons who saw the letter before it was sent off, and who recognized Javert’s handwriting on the cover, thought that he was sending in his resignation. M. Madeleine made haste to write to the Thénardiers. Fantine owed them one hundred and twenty francs. He sent them three hundred francs, telling them to pay themselves from that sum, and to fetch the child instantly to M. sur M., where her sick mother required her presence. This dazzled Thénardier. “The devil!” said the man to his wife; “don’t let’s allow the child to go. This lark is going to turn into a milch cow. I see through it. Some ninny has taken a fancy to the mother.” He replied with a very well drawn-up bill for five hundred and some odd francs. In this memorandum two indisputable items figured up over three hundred francs,—one for the doctor, the other for the apothecary who had attended and physicked Éponine and Azelma through two long illnesses. Cosette, as we have already said, had not been ill. It was only a question of a trifling substitution of names. At the foot of the memorandum Thénardier wrote, _Received on account, three hundred francs_. M. Madeleine immediately sent three hundred francs more, and wrote, “Make haste to bring Cosette.” “Christi!” said Thénardier, “let’s not give up the child.” In the meantime, Fantine did not recover. She still remained in the infirmary.