'or. He
had not divined that what had fallen from heaven had come from Gavroche.
He had taken the purse to the police commissioner of the quarter, as
a lost article placed by the finder at the disposal of claimants. The
purse was actually lost. It is unnecessary to say that no one claimed
it, and that it did not succor M. Mabeuf.

Moreover, M. Mabeuf had continued his downward course.

His experiments on indigo had been no more successful in the Jardin des
Plantes than in his garden at Austerlitz. The year before he had owed
his housekeeper's wages; now, as we have seen, he owed three quarters
of his rent. The pawnshop had sold the plates of his Flora after the
expiration of thirteen months. Some coppersmith had made stewpans of
them. His copper plates gone, and being unable to complete even the
incomplete copies of his Flora which were in his possession, he had
disposed of the text, at a miserable price, as waste paper, to a
second-hand bookseller. Nothing now remained to him of his life's work.
He set to work to eat up the money for these copies. When he saw that
this wretched resource was becoming exhausted, he gave up his garden
and allowed it to run to waste. Before this, a long time before, he had
given up his two eggs and the morsel of beef which he ate from time
to time. He dined on bread and potatoes. He had sold the last of his
furniture, then all duplicates of his bedding, his clothing and his
blankets, then his herbariums and prints; but he still retained his most
precious books, many of which were of the greatest rarity, among others,
Les Quadrins Historiques de la Bible, edition of 1560; La Concordance
des Bibles, by Pierre de Besse; Les Marguerites de la Marguerite, of
Jean de La Haye, with a dedication to the Queen of Navarre; the book de
la Charge et Dignite de l'Ambassadeur, by the Sieur de Villiers
Hotman; a Florilegium Rabbinicum of 1644; a Tibullus of 1567, with this
magnificent inscription: Venetiis, in aedibus Manutianis; and lastly, a
Diogenes Laertius, printed at Lyons in 1644, which contained the famous
variant of the manuscript 411, thirteenth century, of the Vatican, and
those of the two manuscripts of Venice, 393 and 394, consulted with
such fruitful results by Henri Estienne, and all the passages in Doric
dialect which are only found in the celebrated manuscript of the twelfth
century belonging to the Naples Library. M. Mabeuf never had any fire
in his chamber, and went to bed at sundown,