Fantine had awoken just moments after Monsieur Madeleine had left in search of her child. Perhaps awoken is not the best word. She had stood beside her bed, and she had looked down at that torn and wretched body that had been hers. The nurses did not recognize her standing there, not with health in her cheeks once more and her hair flowing down her back as it had in her youth, when dreams still existed and before the world had turned them sour with the stink of men.
In her hand, she held a necklace.
The necklace she had not believed would truly exist. It had been promised by the woman who claimed she lived in another world, another place. Fantine took it all for madness, blamed it all on the consumption that she knew would end her life and leave her child to starve or die. Or, worse yet, to become what she had become; better the child should die. But no, the necklace was there, between her fingers, and the words she had exchanged with the woman were in her head.
She would not return to the docks. She would not return to that life, if it could be called a life. Her daughter was safe in the care of a man that would raise her in love, and so she turned and left the hospital behind, and she wondered at second chances. She had done nothing to deserve one, but perhaps God was forgiving in the end. Or perhaps he was not, and perhaps this was all a farce. But she had fallen low before, and she would not fall low again.
She knew her own world better than any other did, and the way it swirled around her when she exited the hospital made her aware of the passage of time. It was not as it had been when she'd entered. She took lodging for the night, as was seemly; a woman out in the evening meant only one thing, and she would not be that girl again.
In the bright light of day, she sought out someone who would help. The old man was one she had known once. A kind face in Monsieur Madeleine's factory, one that had been cast off due to age in the nine years that had passed in that blink of an eye. The man sold the necklace, and Fantine's pretty smile and a promise that she would keep him near bought and paid for his loyalty. The property was purchased, and the license as well, sold only to F, with no other designation on the contract.
Within a day, she filled the building with girls from the docks. Places on the rue were meant to be filled with better girls, but Fantine did not own to that belief. The hard work of carriages and horses, furniture and fire, were given to pretty boys from the darker corners that no one spoke of. She procured medical men, and she put the women too old or too ugly to work in her kitchen and her washing room. The young girls, once the doctors had declared them clean, were scrubbed of Paris' filth, then given rooms and a night's rest. Everyone ate a warm meal that night, one purchased with what remained of the necklace's shimmering bounty, and loyalty came by way of a warm bed and a full spoon.
It was a new beginning, and she was to be in control for once. She felt no great pity, and she felt no great guilt. She was a ruined woman, and she could not seek out the child that had been raised for her. No decent man would wed her, and who would want to wed someone already dead inside? But she would thrive, and the girls in her care would as well. It was a new dawn, and she embraced it.