Fontaine earned too little. Her debts grew heavier and heavier. Mr. and Mrs. Denardi, who did not collect the money on time, wrote to her from time to time, letters that made her sad and letters that bankrupted her with their demands. One day they wrote her a letter saying that her little Cosette had no clothes in that cold weather, that she needed a woolen dress, and that her mother should send ten francs for it. She received that letter and rubbed it in her hands all day. In the evening she went to a barber's store on the corner and took down her comb. Her breathtaking blonde hair hung down to her waist.
"What beautiful hair!" The barber shouted.
"How much will you pay for it?" She said.
"Ten francs."
"Cut it."
She bought a flannel-knit skirt and sent it to Denardi.
The dress made the Denardi's furious. They wanted money originally.
They then gave the dress to Eponine to wear. The poor lark was still trembling in the wind.
Fontaine thought to herself, "My child will not be cold any more; I have taken my hair and made it into a garment for her." She wore a small flat cap of her own to cover her bald head, and she remained beautiful.
A gloomy thought rose in Fantine's heart. When she saw that she could no longer comb her hair, she began to resent everything around her. She had always respected Uncle Madeleine as much as anyone else, but the repeated thought that it was he who had thrown her away, and that it was he who had caused her so much pain, made her hate him too. And she hated him especially. When the workers stood in front of the factory and she passed by, she deliberately sang in a playful manner. An old woman worker, once, seeing her singing and laughing like that, said, "This girl will not come to any good."
She fell in love with a man, a man she did not love, and it was only out of resentment and a desire to make a fool of herself. The man was a poor man, a wandering musician, a lazy scoundrel, who beat her, and when he had spent the night, he became disgusted and threw her away.
She loved her child with all her heart.
The more she fell, the darker everything around her became, and the sweeter Angel became in the depths of her heart. She used to say, "When I am rich, I shall have my Cosette by my side." Then came another laugh. The coughing sickness did not leave her, and she had night sweats.
One day she received a letter from Mr. and Mrs. Denardi, which said, "Cosette has a local disease called scarlet fever. It is not possible without expensive medicine. The illness has cost us all our money and we can no longer afford to pay for it. If you do not send forty francs within these eight days, the child will be ruined."
She let out a loud laugh and turned to her old neighbor woman and said:
"Ha! They are really good people! Forty francs! Just forty francs! That's two Napoleons! Where do they expect me to find them? How stupid these country people are!"
But as she went to the stairs she took out the letter again, and, approaching the skylight, read it again.
Then she came down the stairs and ran toward the front door, running and jumping and laughing.
A man ran into her and asked her,
"What makes you so happy as this?"
She replied:
"Two rednecks just wrote me a letter, joking with me, and they asked me for forty francs. These rednecks are good!"
She walked across the square and saw many people gathered around a strange car, on the roof of which stood a man dressed in red, with his teeth and claws open, who was orating to the audience. The man was a traveling dentist peddling complete sets of teeth, toothpaste, tooth powder and medicinal wine.
Fontaine burrowed into the pile to listen to the speech, and laughed along with the rest of the crowd; there was a mixture of jaded talk, for the ruffians, and colloquialisms, for the decent people. When the tooth-puller saw the beautiful girl smiling with her mouth open, he suddenly called out:
"Hey, that smiling girl, your teeth are so beautiful! If you will sell me your porcelain plates, I will bid a gold Napoleon for each one."
"My porcelain tiles? What are porcelain tiles?" Fantine asked.
"Porcelain tags," the dentist replied, "are incisors, the two upper rows."
"That's scary!" Fantine exclaimed.
"Two Napoleons!" A toothless old woman next to her deflated her mouth and said,
"What a blessing for the maiden!"
Fontaine fled, looking into her ears lest she hear the man's muffled voice. But the man still cried out, "Think of it, beauty! Two Napoleons are of great use. If you wish, to-night, come to the Silver Deck Inn, and you may find me there."
Fontaine returned home, enraged, and told her good neighbor, Margaret, what had happened, "Do you know anything of the sort? Isn't that a terrible person? How can you let someone like that walk around? Pull out my two front teeth! What a monstrous sight I shall become! Hair can be born, but teeth, yikes, that siren! I'd rather jump backwards off a six-story building! He told me that tonight, he's at the Silver Deck Inn."
"What's he offering?" Margaret asked.
"Two Napoleons."
"That's forty francs huh."
"Yeah," Fantine said, "that's forty francs."
She was out of her mind for a moment and ran off to work. A quarter of an hour passed, and she left her work and ran up the stairs to read the letter from Mr. and Mrs. Denardi again.
She turned to Margaret, who was working beside her, and said:
"What is scarlet fever? Do you know?"
"I know," replied that old girl, "it is a disease."
"Don't you need a lot of medicine for that kind of disease?"
"Heh! It takes a lot of wacky medicine."
"How did you get that disease?"
"Just got it, that disease."
"Do children get that disease too?"
"Children are most likely to get it."
"Can you die from that disease?"
"Very easily." Margaret said.
Fontaine walked out and back up the stairs, rereading the letter.
By nightfall, she came downstairs and was seen walking towards the Rue de Paris, which was exactly where there were many inns.
The next morning, before dawn, Marguerite went into Fantine's room (they worked together like this every day, both of them **** lighting a candle), and she saw Fantine sitting on her bed, looking *gloomy* and frozen. She was not yet asleep. Her little round hat had fallen on her knees. That candle had been lit all night and was almost finished.
Margaret stopped by the door. She was horrified* at the sight of that mess, and cried,
"Savior! This candle is finished! Something big must have happened!"
She then saw Fantine turn her bald head toward her.
Fontaine had aged ten years in one night.
"Jesus!" Margaret said, "What has happened to you, Fantine?"
"Nothing," Fantine replied. "That's just as well. My child won't die, that disease, it scared me, and now she's saved. And I'm relieved."
As she spoke, she pointed to the table and pointed out the two glowing Napoleons to the old girl.
"Yikes, Jesus God!" Margaret said, "This is a fortune! Where did you find these gold louis?"
"I got it." Fantine replied.
At the same time she smiled. The candle was shining on her face. It was a blood blurred smile. A strip of red saliva hung from the corner of her mouth, a black hole in her mouth.
These two teeth had been pulled out.
She sent the forty francs to Memphis.
That was the Denardi's scam for money, and Cosette was not ill.
Fontaine threw her mirror out of the window. She had long since given up her little room on the second floor and moved to a bolt-down, shabby building under the roof; and there were many under-roof rooms where the roof met the floor at an angle and where you could sometimes hit your head, and hers was one of them. The poor man had to stoop gradually to the end of his house, as he had to the end of his life. She had no bed left, but a rag, which was her blanket, a straw mattress on the floor, and a broken straw chair. The little rose that she had once kept had withered in a corner of the house, and no one thought of it any more. In another corner of the house, there was a cream bowl used to hold water, the water froze in the winter, layers of ice circles marking the high and low water, placed there for a long time. She had long been unafraid of being laughed at, and now she didn't even have the heart to fix it. The last manifestation of this was the dirty beanie she often wore on the streets. Maybe there was no time, maybe it was unconscious, she stopped mending her garments. When the heels of her stockings were torn they were pulled into her shoes, and the more they were torn the more they were pulled. This can be seen in those vertical folds. She used many bits and pieces of bamboo fabric that split at the touch to piece together her worn-out sweatshirt. Her creditors quarreled with her so that she did not have a moment's rest. She bumped into them from time to time in the street and again on her stairs. Often she cried all night long, and all night long she thought, and her eyes shone with a surprising brightness. And she felt a pain in her shoulder above her left shoulder-blade. She coughed from time to time. She hated Uncle Madeleine, but did not complain. She sewed seventeen hours a day, but a contractor, who had taken over the work of the women prisoners at a low value, suddenly lowered the wages, and the daily wage of the women with irregular work was reduced to nine sous a day. Nine sous per day for seventeen hours' work! The cruelty of her creditors was intensified. The thrift merchant who had taken almost all the furniture kept saying to her, "When will you pay me, bitch?" What did they want from her, merciful God? She felt that she had no way out, and a kind of beastly mood arose in her. And just then there came a letter to her from Donnadie, saying that he had waited so long, and had been so kind, and that he wanted a hundred francs at once, or else he would throw out the little Cosette, who had just recovered from a great illness, and they could not care how cold it was, or how far the road was, and they would have to let her go, and die by the side of the road if she wished to do so. "A hundred francs!" Fantine thought, "but where is the chance of making five francs a day?"
"What the fuck!" She said, "Sell it all."
The bitter man became a public prostitute.