Author's Note: I've never felt that there were enough Fantine stories out there, which both surprised and disappointed me, as she's always been one of my favorite characters in Les Miserables. Thus, I began to write this not only for that reason, but also to explore what might have happened if…well, things had gone a bit differently. These characters belong, of course, to the brilliant Victor Hugo, not me. Please read and review!
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Chapter One
"Answer the door, Cosette," Madame Thenardier growled when she heard a tentative knock at the door of the inn.
Cosette hurriedly did as she was told so as to escape her mistress's wrath. She involuntarily shivered when the door opened and the cruel winter wind threw itself at her. After the initial shock of the cold had passed, she glanced at the woman standing outside who was staring at her in a most peculiar fashion. There was the strangest combination of shock, sorrow, and, at the same time, a kind of bittersweet joy in her eyes as she looked at the emaciated child dressed in rags. Cosette stared back at her, somehow held by her gaze, until she was roughly shoved aside by the Thenardieress.
"Move aside, and let the lady in, can't you see it's cold out?" she snapped at Cosette. "Please forgive me, Madame, for I've done my best to teach manners to this impudent little brat, but--" she stopped in mid-sentence, and her face became noticeably pale.
"I will ask you to kindly refrain from referring to my daughter that way," Fantine replied, her voice dripping with bitter enmity. The look in her eyes was no longer difficult to decipher, for they were now hard and cold.
"I--well--eh..." the other woman stammered rather stupidly.
Fantine brushed by her coolly, looking extremely dignified despite the toll poverty had taken on her, and walked over to Cosette. She knelt in front of her daughter and again seemed at a lost for words. At long last she reached up to brush a strand of hair out of the little girl's face, but Cosette winced and drew back, unused to anything but the cruelty she had known for most of her short life.
At this, Fantine's eyes filled with tears. "Mon enfant," she whispered sadly. "Ma pauvre enfant."
"I don't know what you expected," Madame Thenardier said, having regained her composure. "You sent us barely enough to keep her alive, much less well fed and clothed."
"I sent you everything I had," Fantine replied angrily.
With this as proof of Fantine's destitution, Madame Thenardier was no longer ashamed of the way Cosette appeared to her mother. The innkeeper's wife had always felt a self-justified dominance over those less fortunate than herself, and so she now spoke to Fantine in a haughty manner.
"Well, Madame, everything you had," she said mockingly, "was not enough. Especially since this brat," she spat the word out, purposely ignoring Fantine's earlier request, "is so very troublesome and too stupid to earn her keep."
Fantine's eyes blazed and her voice wavered. "She should not have had to earn her keep. She is a child!" She rose to her feet. "In any event, she will no longer be a 'trouble' to you, for I am taking her with me today."
"You actually believe she will go with you?" Madame Thenardier sneered. "When I am the only mother she knows? Why, she would no sooner leave here with a stranger off the streets." The Thenardieress noted the pained look in the other woman's eyes and smiled to herself.
Silence filled the air as Fantine contemplated Madame Thenardier's words. The shame and guilt she had always felt for not having her daughter with her had multiplied in only a few seconds. Cosette would not find her life with the Thenardiers intolerable if it was the only life she could remember...if they were the only "parents" she could remember, Fantine thought. Besides, she said to herself, she has no reason to trust me. For all she knows--
These tormenting thoughts were interrupted when Fantine felt a tiny hand gingerly taking her own. She looked down to see the little girl standing beside her, looking up at her with large, trusting eyes. "I've missed you, Maman."