with the laugh of his age on his lips, he had not had a
heart absolutely sombre and empty. This child was well muffled up in a
pair of man's trousers, but he did not get them from his father, and a
woman's chemise, but he did not get it from his mother. Some people or
other had clothed him in rags out of charity. Still, he had a father and
a mother. But his father did not think of him, and his mother did not
love him.

He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of
those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.

This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The
pavements were less hard to him than his mother's heart.

His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.

He simply took flight.

He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering, lad, with a
vivacious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch,
scraped the gutters, stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows, gayly
laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief.
He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because
he was free.

When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social
order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children, they
escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them.

Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened, every
two or three months, that he said, "Come, I'll go and see mamma!" Then
he quitted the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin, descended
to the quays, crossed the bridges, reached the suburbs, arrived at the
Salpetriere, and came to a halt, where? Precisely at that double number
50-52 with which the reader is acquainted--at the Gorbeau hovel.

At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally
decorated with the placard: "Chambers to let," chanced to be, a rare
thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the
case in Paris, had no connection with each other. All belonged to
that indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest of petty
bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances, and which extends from misery
to misery into the lowest depths of society down to those two beings
in whom all the material things of civilization end, the sewer-man who
sweeps up the mud, and the ragpicker who collects scraps.

The "principal lodger" of Jean Valjean's day was dead and had been
replaced b