It was a harrowing sight to see in the winter time the poor child, not yet six years old, shivering under the tatters of what was once a calico dress, sweeping the street before daylight with an enormous broom in her little red hands and tears in her large eyes.
In the place she was called the Lark. People like figurative names and were pleased thus to name this little being, not larger than a bird, trembling, frightened, and shivering, awake every morning first of all the house and village, always in the street or the in the fields before dawn.
Only the poor Lark never sang.

Alas! he [Jean Valjean] was no less feeble than Cosette. He protected her, and she gave strength to him. Thanks to him, she could walk upright in life; thanks to her, he could persist in virtuous deeds. He was the support of this child, and this child was his prop and staff.

Beautiful chestnut hair, shaded with veins of gold, a brow which seemed chiseled marble, cheeks which seemed made of roses, a pale incarnadine, a flushed whiteness, and exquisite mouth, whence came a smile like a gleam of sunshine, and a voice like music . . .

She was indeed of marvelous beauty. The only remark which could be made, that would resemble crticism, is that the contradiction between her ook, whic was sad, and her smile, which was joyous, gave to her contenance something a little wild, which produced this effect, that at certain moments this sweet face became strange without ceasing to be charming.

Still, we repeat, when she came there she was but a child. Jean Valjean gave her this uncultivated garden. "Do whatever you like with it, said he to her. It delighted Cosette; she ransacked every thicket and turned over eveyr stone, she sought for "animals;" she played while she dreamed; she loved this garden for the insects which she found in the grass under her feet, while she loved it for the stars which she saw in the branches over her head."

Cosette adored the goodman. She was always running after him. Where Jean Valjean was, was happiness. As Jean Valjean did not live in the summer-house or the garden, she found more pleasure in the paved back-yard than in the inclosure full of flowers, and in the little bedroom furnished with straw charis than in the great parlour hung with tapestry, where she could recline on silken armchairs. Jean Valjean sometimes said to her, smiling with the happiness of being teased: "Why don't you go home? why don't you leave me alone?"

Cosette had but a vague remembrance of her childhood. She prayed morning and evening for her mother, whom she had never known. The Thénardiers had remained to her like two hideous faces of some dream. She remembered that she had been “one day, at night,” sent into a wood after water. She thought that that was very far from Paris. It seemed to her that she had commenced life in an abyss, and that Jean Valjean had drawn her out of it. Her childhood impressed her as a time when there were only centipedes, spiders, and snakes about her.

"How can I be to blame in a thing in which I can do nothing, and of which I know nothing?"

What was taking place in this spirit so young, and already so impenetrable? What was in course of accomplishment in it? what was happening to Cosette's soul? Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean sat by his bedside with his head in his hands, and he spent whole nights asking himself: “What is there in Cosette's mind?” and thinking what things she could be thinking about.

Were there a fourth Grace named Melancholy, and were it smiling, she would have seemed that Grace.

Cosette's whole person was alertness, ingenuousness, transparency, whiteness, candour, radiance. We might say of Cosette that she was pellucid. She gave to him who saw her a sensation of April and of dawn. There was dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of auroral light in womanly form.

It was quite natural that Marius, adoring her, should admire her. But the truth is that this little schoolgirl, fresh from the convent mill, talked with an exquisite penetration and said at times all amanner of true and delicate words. Her prattle was conversation. She made no mistakes, and saw clearly.

"Thus is youth constituted; it quickly wipes its eyes; it believes sorrow useless and does not accept it. Youth is the smile of the future before an unknown being which is itself. It is natural for it to be happy. It seems as though it breathed hope."