He said to himself: “How beautiful she is! What is to become of me?”

There, moreover, lay the difference between his tenderness and the tenderness of a mother. What he beheld with anguish, a mother would have gazed upon with joy.

The first symptoms were not long in making their appearance.

On the very morrow of the day on which she had said to herself: “Decidedly I am beautiful!” Cosette began to pay attention to her toilet. She recalled the remark of that passerby: “Pretty, but badly dressed,” the breath of an oracle which had passed beside her and had vanished, after depositing in her heart one of the two germs which are destined, later on, to fill the whole life of woman, coquetry. Love is the other.