Cosette meets Valjean
Close Reading 154-157
Cosette has been charged with filling up a bucket with water alone deep in the forest. Tired, she sits on the ground for a brief rest.
The child looked with a startled eye upon that great star which she did not know and which made her afraid. The planet, in fact, was at that moment very near the horizon and was crossing a dense bed of mist which gave it a horrid redness. The mist, gloomily empurpled, magnified the star. One would have called it a luminous wound.
Darkness makes the brain giddy. Man needs light; whoever plunges into the opposite of day feels his heart chilled. When the eye sees blackness, the mind sees trouble. In an eclipse, in night, in the sooty darkness, there is anxiety even to the strongest. Nobody walks alone at night in the forest without trembling. You feel something hideous, as if the soul were amalgamating with the shadow. This penetration of the darkness is inexpressibly dismal for a child.
… She shuddered. Words fail to express the peculiar strangeness of that shudder which chilled her through and through. Her eye had become wild. She felt that perhaps she would be compelled to return there at the same hour the next night.
… She only had one thought, to fly, to fly with all her might, across woods, across fields, to houses, to windows, to lighted candles.
…This anguish [having more than an hour to travel back into town with the heavy burden of the water bucket] added to her dismay at being alone in the woods at night. She was worn out with fatigue, and was not yet out of the forest.
And she cried, “Oh! My God! My God!”
A large dark form, straight and erect, was walking beside her in the gloom.
The child was not afraid at all.
- Underline lines that pertain to light or imagery of light.
- She is worn out with fatigue; How is this literal? Figurative?
- When she cries out “My God,” who appears? What two words used to describe him in this sentence, could also be used to describe Beinvenu?
- Anytime a character goes through a journey into the woods, it is a metaphor for his/her life struggle. What sentences, phrases, could be used to metaphorically discuss Cosette’s situation living with the Thenardiers.