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They don’t go to the theater, or hardly ever. Cosette does not know this at the time. She scarcely has a notion that others go to the theater week on week, that there is a whole world out there of theater-goers, of people who know people they see in the street, of people who pay calls, and occupy coffeehouses, who hold salons and have affairs, who read poetry. She hasn’t even a notion that poetry exists, except as an artifact of older ages. She had supposed it was a form that was no longer written, something like prophecies (for she had never read a prophecy newer than Nostradamus).
But after the long winter, the very cold winter, their first winter in the house on the rue Plumet, Papa comes to her one morning and says, “Mademoiselle, would you do me the great honor of attending the theater with me?”
His face is very solemn, but he has that shining look which tells her that secretly he is pleased, and when she says, “Of course!” he breaks into a smile.
So they go to the theater to see a play by Hugo, a French author, a play called Hernani. Cosette has a new blue dress. She admires it so much; it has lace at the neck, and embroidered flowers along the sleeves. She feels very fine wearing it with her white gloves, alongside Papa, who is dressed so neatly that one would not credit it, having seen his everyday attire.
"Well," he says, offering her his arm. "We are a fine couple of pheasants, aren’t we?"
The theater is so very grand, grander than she had imagined. There is a chandelier larger than her whole body, bedecking with laces of shivering crystals. Everything she glimpses is red and gold, like a castle, and there are so many gentlemen and ladies. When Cosette brushes past them she catches their scents: the little blossoms of lily and orange in ambergris. Each one, she thinks, is like a breath of a room, a splendid private room she has not seen, and she imagines them all, those strange foreign rooms. Who moves within them? What kind of people? What do they think; how do they speak?
She is drawn from these thoughts by the theater’s sound. She had not expected so much shouting. She sees Papa wince; he does not like noise. But he guides her very gallantly to her seat.
"Is it normal?" she asks. "Such a clamor?"
"I confess I do not know. It may be."
The gentlemen to their left overhears them. “But surely you know! It is the barbarians, my friends, the barbarians! They have come to make a noise in Melpomene’s house, as though a sacrifice of their dignity may ensure some unimaginable success.”
Cosette is much distracted by the gentleman’s remarks, for he has a remarkable white goatee, with a little point that is coiled like the tip of a fern. She wishes that she could reach out and pull it, just once, to see if it would spring back energetically.
Papa is looking at her with an uncertain frown. “It may not, then, be correct for a child? Perhaps we should leave.”
"Oh, no, Papa!" she cries. "I shall absolutely perish if we do. I promise to cover my ears and not hear anything."
"That would rather interfere with your experience of the play," Papa points out, but he does not move to leave.
Finally the knocks sound, and the curtain goes up. Cosette leans forward breathlessly. But the drama that greets her is not the one she leans towards; it is not the drama enacted on stage. Instead, it is a round of jeers from the audience, and an almost-constant whistling— a roar of voices, one over the other, some angry, some laughing. Fistfights break out amongst the gentlemen. She sees a rose ripped from a buttonhole, a savagely torn coat sleeve. Peculiarly, a young man near the front sits playing a lute. He is dressed rather like a Renaissance duke, and seems uninterested in either stage or shouting.
At the interval, the gentleman to their left stands and pronounces: “Dreadful, dreadful.” He picks up his top hat and, very deliberately, casts it out into the theater like a skipping stone. Cosette is overcome by hilarity. She cannot say why, exactly, but the spectacle of the hat— the man’s great and solemn dignity— the little curl of his goatee quivering with rage— is the funniest thing she has seen.
The gentleman shakes his head gravely. “The young,” he says to Papa, “are a savage race.”
Papa looks at Cosette bemusedly. When the gentleman is gone, he asks, “Shall we go? It is not much of a tragedy.”
"It is the best treat in a thousand years, though. Only," she says, still catching her breath, "let us go and walk about, for I wish to admire the gowns of the ladies."
This is not entirely true; she wants to see close up the instigators of this peculiar savagery. But the lobby is crowded, and men are shouting, and quite soon she loses sight of Papa. All the gentlemen are dressed so similarly. She is frightened, a little— it is so loud, and there is so much shoving— but she finds herself also strangely delighted. She thinks: I am no one now. I am quite alone. And then she thinks: Now I am free.
She would be distressed if she thought that Papa would not find her. But she is at the age still when, confidently, she still believes that nothing is beyond her papa’s skill. This is only a brief adventure, a taste of something that makes her feel guilty. So she lets herself seize the impulse to wander. She lets the crowd push her from the lobby, down a little carpeted corridor.
"Are you lost?"
She turns. It is the boy with the lute, peering out from behind a curtain. His hair is all in disarray, and there’s a bruise on his cheek; nevertheless he seems quite calm, and slightly curious.
"No," she says. "That is— a little."
"I always think I am a little lost. At least, I’m never where I’m supposed to be. Come inside; it’s quite fun." He beckons her towards the curtain.
Cosette ducks under it, feeling very daring. Behind it is a private box, all done out in gilt. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she hazards.
"No; I’ve already told you: never." He sprawls across a velvet-lined seat.
"What happened to your lute?"
"I’m afraid it’s all in splinters."
"Oh, no! Did one of the…" she gestures broadly, "others break it?"
"No; it was my friend Bahorel. He tends to believe, you see, in times of crisis, that everything is a weapon."
"Did it at least take some of the enemy with it?"
"Ah, alas, I did not see." He folds his hands meditatively, as though in prayer. He is wearing a pine green waistcoat, Cosette notices— no, not a waistcoat, but a sort of doublet-thing, with laces up the front and antique shoulders. "Menin, aeide thea, teis emeis pandouras… Is that right? I am a failure as a poet, at least when it comes to adjective endings.”
"I wouldn’t know." She perches at the edge of the box. "Are you a poet?"
"Theoretically I am."
"I didn’t know that there were any poets."
"Oh." This seems to perturb him. He looks very distressed. "What other creatures do you class as extinct?"
"I don’t know." She laughs. "What a peculiar question!"
"Only I would not mind being rare, like wolverines and things, or even like the aurochs that sleepeth under the ice, but I should so hate for my bones to be mounted in museums, like the dodo. Don’t you think?"
"I don’t know what that is."
"A very fat bird. With a beak like so." He demonstrates. "And very small wings." Tucking his hands under his armpits, he demonstrates also the wings, drawing his feet up on the chair so that he resembles a large chicken. "I do not know what noise they made, but I can say confidently that it was absurd, for everything about them was absurd." He attempts the noise. It falls somewhere between a cow-call and a sheep.
Cosette thinks she will die from laughing. “What happened to them?”
"Oh… we killed them all."
"How terrible!"
"I know!" He sighs in sorrow, though he remains poised most ridiculously. "It seems to me, mademoiselle, that you are a person of feeling."
She blushes a little. “I try to be.”
"Are you married?"
She blushes more. “No!”
"Good. Never marry."
"Why shouldn’t I?"
"It is the death of sensibilité.”
"I think you are very unfair to married people."
Unfolding himself from his dodo’s crouch, he considers this gravely. “No,” he says at last. “I am struck by a fit of soothsaying. The fumes of Delphi are very strong in me today. Do not marry, or marry only adventure.”
"I think you are teasing me."
He smiles then, quick and sudden. “Do you dislike it?”
"Not at all." Carry on, she is about to say, when a large man attired in a Robespierre waistcoat bursts through the curtain, clutching the remains of the lute: wood splintered and strings all flying.
"My friend Bahorel," the former lute-player indicates. "Bahorel, you find me as by the waters of Babylon, weeping and lamenting the loss of my lute."
"You have had your apology already," Bahorel complains.
"I want another."
"Oh, I would give you a thorough apology, were there not a lady present.” Pausing, he examines Cosette. “Why is there a lady present? I leave you alone for five minutes, Jehan—”
"I am lost," Cosette interrupts. "I was frightened by the crowd. Monsieur—"
"Prouvaire," the ex-lutist supplies.
"—was kind enough to reassure me."
"I’ll just bet he did."
"Hush, Bahorel, your opinion is not needed." Prouvaire extends an arm towards Cosette, very proper, very courtly. "Mademoiselle? Shall we go in search of your escort?"
Cosette accepts with a curtsy. “Monsieur. I am obliged.”
They sail past Bahorel. Prouvaire turns his nose up. Cosette has never seen such a gesture in real life. Somehow she had not imagined it to be so comic. She is laughing again by the time they are outside.
“Have you an escort?” Prouvaire asks her.
"Yes; my father. He will probably not like you."
"That is all right. No father has ever liked me. Somehow I have managed to survive. Will you find him, though? It is not as noisy."
"Yes. That is, I think so; he is not generally hard to find."
"Good." He lifts her hand to his lips.
She catches her breath, suddenly shy.
"Don’t worry," he whispers, his own breath a huff of laughter. "I am not very venomous."
"I don’t believe you," she says.
"Probably wise." But he touches his mouth to her hand anyway, leaving the warm press of a kiss. "I must run now; whether you credit it or not, I am actually getting paid for this."
"All right," she says. "Good luck with the poetry."
His response is a bow. “And you, mademoiselle: good luck with marriage.”
Then they are parted: he to his box, and she to the lobby, where her father is. Where her father is flustered, frantic and waiting; where he tugs her into his embrace and says, “My God, Cosette, where have you been?”
"I was lost," she says. "A gentleman found me, and set me on the right path again."
He does not think to question her answer. Perhaps, she thinks, he cannot imagine such a thing. Certainly he cannot imagine Prouvaire, with his green velvet doublet and dodo-ing. She begins to see that in fact his world has limits, and that perhaps she is not wholly inside of them. It is a curious thought. It does not make her angry or sad, but imbues her with a sense of largeness. I am someone, she thinks, who can laugh with poets, who knows the sort of men that use lutes for weapons and quote in Greek. Marry adventure, Prouvaire had said. It would be very convenient if life could be arranged so that adventure came handsome, with a fine family, but somehow she thinks it might be more complicated than that. She wonders, very fleetingly, whether Prouvaire is married, whether he wants to marry. It is difficult to conceive. For a long time afterwards she thinks about his kiss. She maps the trace of it out on her hand, at odd moments, pensively. You hear about people in the ancient world who were marked out for various things: for luck, for glory, the wrath of God, for power, for sacrifice. None of this pertains to her: to small, meek, studious Cosette. But perhaps, she thinks, perhaps they didn’t know either. She begins to carry herself differently. She looks in the mirror one morning and considers: Could I be pretty? She feels herself growing towards the future. She peers into it and waits, holding her breath, until she feels light-headed and perfectly free.