him, and he said to himself, "How beautiful she is! what will become of me?" Here lay the difference between his tenderness and that of a mother,--what he saw with agony a mother would have seen with joy. The first symptoms speedily manifested themselves. From the day when Cosette said to herself, "I am decidedly good-looking," she paid attention to her toilet. She remembered the remark of the passer-by,--pretty, but badly dressed,--a blast of the oracle which passed by her and died out, after depositing in her heart one of those two germs which are destined at a later period to occupy a woman's entire life,--coquettishness. The other is love. With faith in her beauty, all her feminine soul was expanded within her; she had a horror of merinos, and felt ashamed of plush. Her father never refused her anything, and she knew at once the whole science of the hat, the dress, the mantle, the slipper, and the sleeve, of the fabric that suits, and the color that is becoming,--the science which makes the Parisian woman something so charming, profound, and dangerous. The expression "femme capiteuse" was invented for the Parisian. In less than a month little Cosette was in this Thebaïs of the Rue de Babylone, not only one of the prettiest women, which is something, but one of the best dressed in Paris, which is a great deal more. She would have liked to meet her "passer-by," to see what he would say, and teach him a lesson. The fact is, that she was in every respect ravishing, and could admirably distinguish a bonnet of Gerard's from one of Herbaut's. Jean Valjean regarded these ravages with anxiety, and while feeling that he could never do more than crawl or walk at the most, he could see Cosette's wings growing. However, by the simple inspection of Cosette's toilet, a woman would have seen that she had no mother. Certain small proprieties and social conventionalisms were not observed by Cosette; a mother, for instance, would have told her that an unmarried girl does not wear brocade. The first day that Cosette went out in her dress and cloak of black brocade, and her white crape bonnet, she took Jean Valjean's arm, gay, radiant, blushing, proud, and striking. "Father," she said, "how do you think I look?" Jean Valjean replied, in a voice which resembled the bitter voice of an envious person, "Charming." During the walk he was as usual, but when he returned home he asked Cosette,-- "Will you not put on that dress and bonnet, you know which, again?" This took place in Cosette's room; she returned to the wardrobe in which her boarding-school dress was hanging. "That disguise?" she said, "how can you expect it, father? Oh, no, indeed, I shall never put on those horrors again; with that thing on my head I look like a regular dowdy." Jean Valjean heaved a deep sigh.