ir necks. If their mother
had known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents
severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for
the pint of milk behind their mother's back, and the children were not
punished.

In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as
a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did
whatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she do with
seven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery, which was
being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no work.
The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!

One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church Square at
Faverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a violent blow on
the grated front of his shop. He arrived in time to see an arm passed
through a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and the
glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off. Isabeau ran
out in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau ran
after him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the loaf, but his
arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.

This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals
of the time for theft and breaking and entering an inhabited house at
night. He had a gun which he used better than any one else in the world,
he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his case. There exists a
legitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler,
smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will remark
cursorily, there is still an abyss between these races of men and the
hideous assassin of the towns. The poacher lives in the forest, the
smuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea. The cities make ferocious
men because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest,
make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without
destroying the humane side.

Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code were explicit.
There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when
the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in
which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment
of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in the
galleys.

On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by the
general-in-chief of the army of I