A dark change took place in Fantine's heart. When she found that she could no longer dress her hair, she began to hate all around her. She had long shared the universal veneration for Father Madeleine: but, through the constant iteration that he had discharged her and was the cause of her misfortune, she grew to hate him too, and worse than the rest. When she passed the factory she pretended to laugh and sing. An old workwoman who once saw her doing so, said, "That's a girl who will come to a bad end." She took a lover, the first who offered, a man she did not love, through bravado and with rage in her heart. He was a scoundrel, a sort of mendicant musician, an idle scamp, who beat her, and left her, as she had chosen him, in disgust. She adored her child. The lower she sank, the darker the gloom became around her, the more did this sweet little angel gleam in her soul. She said: "When I am rich, I shall have my Cosette with me;" and she laughed. She did not get rid of her cough, and she felt a cold perspiration in her back. One day she received from the Thénardiers a letter to the following effect: "Cosette is ill with a complaint which is very prevalent in the country. It is called miliary fever. She must have expensive drugs, and that ruins us, and we cannot pay for them any longer. If you do not send us forty francs within a week, the little one will be dead." She burst into a loud laugh, and said to her old neighbor, "Oh, what funny people! they want forty francs; where do they expect me to get them? What fools those peasants are!" Still, she went to a staircase window and read the letter again; then she went out into the street, still laughing and singing. Some one who met her said, "What has made you so merry?" and she answered, "It is a piece of stupidity some country folk have written; they want forty francs of me--the asses." As she passed across the market-place she saw a crowd surrounding a vehicle of a strange shape, on the box of which a man dressed in red was haranguing. He was a dentist going his rounds, who offered the public complete sets of teeth, opiates, powders, and elixirs. Fantine joined the crowd and began laughing like the rest at this harangue, in which there was slang for the mob, and scientific jargon for respectable persons. The extractor of teeth saw the pretty girl laughing, and suddenly exclaimed,-- "You have fine teeth, my laughing beauty. If you like to sell me your two top front teeth, I will give you a napoleon apiece for them." "What a horrible idea!" Fantine exclaimed. "Two napoleons!" an old toothless woman by her side grumbled; "there's a lucky girl." Fantine ran away and stopped her ears not to hear the hoarse voice of the man, who shouted,-- "Think it over, my dear: two napoleons may be useful. If your heart says Yes, come to-night to the _Tillac d'Argent_, where you will find me."