Happy Finale

Although Cosette had a difficult childhood and even teenage life, she got to overcome all her difficulties and starvations. Along with her father, Jean Valjean, who saved her from the terrible Thénardiers who made her their servant and where she suffered a lot, Cosette kept on with her life. She got education at the convent, and continued to read and be taught by Valjean after they left it. She was nurtured by Valjean in her times of hunger and coldness. Overcoming all these difficulties and falling in love with a man who had her in a pedestal, she got to live the life of a Madame. “She had Marius. The young man came and the good man faded away; such is life” (Hugo 346). Although her husband, Marius, replaced Jean Valjean, he still was condescending and gave Marius and his family, who were living in times of poverty, to overcome it by giving them his funds and then giving them the recipe to work to gain more money for their future life.

Ignorance can lead to many things...

She was practically ignorant to many things, she could never live to full freedom since her father had to stay in secluded and far outside the city places, because of his repeated persecution by an outraged investigator, which would send him back to jail and send Cosette back to excessive poverty and orphanage. “But further than this she was ignorant of everything, which is a charm and a peril. To form the mind of a young girl, all the nuns in the world are not equal to one mother” (Hugo 247). She didn’t see much people, even worse much young men. She also never realized she was a pretty child, so she wouldn’t kwon how to dress, since she was always told to be homely. Once, she realized what she actually possessed she started to put it into practice. Once she met a “monsieur” and fell in love at first sight, she discovered how beautiful the world was and how many mysteries it contains. Then she also realized what it was too loose or never to see again what you love, when Valjean took her apart from Marius uncomprehending her feeling towards him, she realized what love was and what she was without it and fell right into depression. After once again meeting her lover by means of destiny, her life completely turns around into a lovely wonderful life for her.

The song that reflects how Cosette now feels about Marius now that she has discovered love and in someway it has been ripped of from her is "Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart" by Alicia Keys.

http://www.metrolyrics.com/try-sleeping-with-a-broken-heart-lyrics-alicia-keys.html

A need for Love...

She was also famished by love her whole life. Although after she Jean Valjean rescued her and loved her to a point she saw his father, she was always missing a maternal love. She had never experienced or known what the word love meant since she had never had that feeling before. “Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word uttered in its earthly sense. She did not know, therefore, she did not know what name to give to what she now experienced” (Hugo 254). So it was as she had never lacked it for some time until she started to feel extremely alone due to her father’s excursions. This is when she starts to open herself to new things which then lead her into depression. Although she never lived in extreme misery and Jean Valjean had some money because of his savings when he was mayor, she never lived in very nice places. She actually lacked a real home, she had had various houses but they traveled so much they never got to settle in one. Also a home is where you can find love and comfort and she usually never had either since Valjean usually wasn’t always around because had three little houses, and lived different nights in different houses.

A song that potrays the mood of how Cosette felt about the love she felt about Marius is "All Out of Love" by Airsupply.

http://www.lyrics007.com/Air%20Supply%20Lyrics/All%20Out%20Of%20Love%20Lyrics.html

A need for a mother

Cosette as a child never had a father since he left her mother after she was born. Her mother having no money had to leave her with a family which she found along the road while going into the city to look for a job, in order to keep her daughter fed and dressed. She found this family that had two daughters and whose father was a former soldier and now owned an inn. The mother told her Cosette could stay if and the father said it would cost her monthly. After some days of having the child there they would treat her as the servant, sold her clothe and dressed her in rags, and made her eat with the dogs, all this her mother never got a hold of and kept sending the money till the day of her death. “Her clothe being gone they dressed in the cast-off garments…that is in rags. They fed her on odds and ends, a little better than the dog, and a little worst than the cat. The dog and the cat where her messmates” (Hugo 46) Cosette had no friends but the dog and the cat, and had no cloth but used the rags of the two other daughters.

A song that relates to this motherless child is a song called "I want a mom" by Cyndi Lauper.

http://www.mothersdaycelebration.com/mothers-day-songs3.html#i-want-a-mom

The creation of Cosette

Victor Hugo created this child Cosette to portray the theme of how a woman gets ruined and devastated by the starvation of a healthy mind and body. Cosette was created out of love and treason, her mother, Fantine, loved Cosette’s father but he left her once the baby was born. It also explains how her mother was also ruined by starvation and passed this starvation of love and money to her by leaving her alone in a stranger’s house in order to overcome the hunger. “Children at that age are only copies of their mother: the size is reduced, that is all. Years past and then another… they thought Cosette was forgotten by her mother” (Hugo 47). Cosette, left alone in that inn, was now considered an orphan with no father and just her mother’s alimony to the inn. She is also used to describe how she never had actual love, in some way she always lacked it or in a way was ignorant to it. I also believe Hugo used her to show how a child’s mind grows and how ignorance may turn into knowledge.

Intro Les Miserables

The book, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, is a book which takes place in France, talks about how men and women die spiritually, morally and physically by the degradation of poverty. This book is about how a poor man who works in pruning the land, whose name is Jean Valjean. Unable to feed the family because of his low wages he steals a loaf of bread and is later found and incarcerated. After many failures of trying to escape, which prolong his time in the galleys, he gets out after nineteen years. “Jean Valjean entered the galleys sobbing shuddering: he went out hardened; he entered in despair: he went out sullen.” (Hugo 25). After a lesson from the bishop and his encounter with Petit Gervais, he decides to turn his life and becomes mayor of M- sur M-. Where he owns an industrialized factory and meets Fantine a poor woman who has left her daughter, Cosette, in an inn with the Thénardiers which mistreat the girl and scam the mother, in order to work and sustain her child. After she dies Valjean escapes the city and takes Cosette with him honoring her mother’s wishes. “On that same evening that Jean Valjean had rescued Cosette from the clutches of the Thénardiers, he entered Paris again” (Hugo 118). Cosette and Valjean travel around France together in order to escape the police, Cosette grows along the way to be a beautiful woman and encounters many experiences. Victor Hugo portrays three different themes that arouse in between the whole play. The theme I will be focusing is the ruin of woman by starvation, physical or spiritual.

Marius and Cosette

1. Marius first fell in love with Cosette when in a period of six month Cosette was no longer homely, but beautiful and well dressed. This was the first time that there eyes met in the park when he was walking by and his eyes caught her eyes, it was a magical moment they both felt something that they had never felt before, something they didn't even know about, like love at first sight.
"Jack Foley: Its like seeing someone for the first time, and you look at each other for a few seconds, and theres this kind of recognition like you both know something. Next moment the persons gone, and its too late to do anything about it." (Steven Soderbergh, Out of Sight)

2. After this encounter Marius goes every day to the park of Luxemburg to look at Cosette but not dare to go any further and speak to her. Cosette now awaits anxiously to go to the park and dresses very nice so that Marius can see her, she attempts to start something when she decides to pass by him again. When Jean Valjean, stops taking Cosette to the park due to Marius stalking, Marius and Cosette enter in a state of depression.
" Cool, I spent my time just thinkin', thinkin', thinkin' 'bout you, Every single day, yes I'm really missin' missin' you, And all those things we used to, used to, used to do, Hey girl, what's up? It used to, used to be just me and you. Can you meet me halfway, right at the boarderline? That's where I'm gonna wait for you, I'll be lookin' out night and day, Took my heart to the limit, and this is where I stay. Ooh, Ooh, I can't go any further then this, Ooh, Ooh, I want you so bad it's my only wish." (Black Eyed Peas, Can You Meet Me Half Way)

3. At last, Marius fiinds Cosette once again, this time he leaves a card in her chair freaking her out at the moment but then fufilling her wishes. The next day he appears in her house and they introduce themselves and profess their love to each other, this is when they find out they where meant for each other.
"They barely emerge from the shadow.
Their murmurs raise gentle signsat the foot of the foundation.
Their white tennis shoes gleam.
Far from those stones,
returned to one another,they forget in their lipsthe scream of the massacres,chests opened by dint of obsidian or bayonet —

Indifferent to the shadow that covers them,the young lovers murmur or stay silent,
while the night grows over the ruins,
bolts down the plinths of the temples,the inscriptions.
And over there, the urnwith two skeletons embracingin their dusty deathbed,beneath the crystal where the flowers of an offering are drying."
(Elsa Cross, The Lovers of Tlatelolco)