Pascaline is the typical _jeune fille_. In the First Act she is a child of thirteen; thirteen, _l’âge ingrat_, for at that period the French _jeune fille_ is plain. It is considered right—imperative—that she should be plain. If she be not so by nature she is made so. See her in her convent dress, her “Sunday best”—the one that most successfully conceals her natural grace—when Mademoiselle is most nearly a fright. Pascaline, for instance, first appears before us shy, awkward, with her hair dragged back from her forehead and falling down her shoulders in depressing little plaits, and arrayed in a dreadful white dress which no English girl of her age would don without a struggle and a tearful outburst. Nevertheless, the _jeune fille_ is adored, and she knows it. She is strictly, terribly _surveillée_—but that, after all, is a proof of her importance. She must be protected from dangers, so precious is she. Has she, at the age of fifteen, only to cross the street the servant (I can see the indignant glances and hear the expressions of pity of her English sisters) must be close at her elbow. Plenty and plenty of time to wear fine dresses and make the first exciting bow to the world, and to be surprised, and to wonder. Says the French mother, speaking from experience: “It is delicious to be a _jeune fille_. And I tell my Yvonne so, when she grumbles.” But Yvonne’s grumblings do not betray a tragic, desperate state of mind. As a matter of fact, Yvonne, in spite of those dresses and that constant strict, terrible surveillance, is delightfully happy. And I expect her first bow to the world will be made all the more exciting by that long, rigid training, and that she will don her elegant dresses with all the more rapture, and that she will find life the more brilliant, exhilarating and extraordinary. The parents preserve those old, ugly dresses. When Cosette left her convent, and discarded her depressing dress for tasteful finery, and did what she pleased with her hair, and became all of a sudden beautiful—Jean Valjean kept the dress, and often brought it forth in secret, and looked upon it with infinite tenderness and emotion....