Cosette: Victor Hugo’s Heroin in Les Misérables
by Valerie Silensky

Paris has a lot to occupy the eyes and the mind – all different glamorous stimuli, in all different colors and languages. But what gripped me most the very first time I visited Paris, eleven years ago, was not the colors of the Pompidou Center, the steel of the Eiffel Tower or the air along the Seine's banks. Rather, if the reader telescopes down, beyond the big buildings and photogenic tourist attractions, past the parks, into the house that is now better known as the Maison de Victor Hugo, into one of the rooms, on the wall, the reader will find my little prize: Cosette.

(Surely anyone who goes to La Maison de Victor Hugo has read and loved her story, which makes this picture all the more sad and compelling – we can remember the words on the page, or at least how we felt reading them, before and after she was adopted. The woman she became, who supported her father and her lover, is who lives on in our minds, with the French Revolution in the background. Yet it is not that woman we are looking at on the wall chez Hugo, it is the child.)

Cosette isn't big, and she isn't in color, and she sure isn't glamorous. She's a little pen-and-ink sketch mounted just above my eye height on one of the walls in la maison. She's immortalized under glass and by framing. And, unlike most of us in Paris, she's utterly miserable. She's just a little girl, and she's being made to clean and sweep, and it's just awful. Her face reflects fear, and sadness; she has these big eyes that just swallow you up, reach out and grab you. It's her face you see, not the rags that scarcely cover her body or the filth that she stands in. Her face is at once that of a little girl and also of someone much older. Her thin hair is long and scraggly, and she's so unloved, yet there is something else on her face, something under that poor-little-girl façade. There is a kind of stoic resolve, a determination, if not to prevail, then to exist – something that has to that point been denied her. She has never been acknowledged as a person, but this doesn't matter – she knows herself, and you can see it in her face. It shouts that she is here, she is alive and intelligent and full of feeling. It is remarkable to see this in her face because she has no clue what kind of future Hugo has in store for her, what kind of life she will lead.

This article is republished with the authorization of Paris Eiffel Tower News - a great guide for a Paris vacation. Copyright (c) 2004 Paris Eiffel Tower News - All rights reserved.

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