were married, and after that everything went wrong. He didn't take to
me, and turned mother against me. Every one had a blow for me, and so,
to get out of the house, I spent whole days in the Place Clichy, where I
knew the mountebanks. My father-in-law lost his place, and my mother her
work. She used to go out washing to take care of him; this gave her a
cough--the steam.... She is dead at Lamboisiere. She was a good woman.
Since that I have lived with the seller of brushes and the catgut
scraper. Are you going to send me to prison?"

He said this openly, cynically, like a man. He was a little ragged
street-arab, as tall as a boot, his forehead hidden under a queer mop of
yellow hair.

Nobody claimed him, and they sent him to the Reform School.

Not very intelligent, idle, clumsy with his hands, the only trade he
could learn there was not a good one--that of reseating straw chairs.
However, he was obedient, naturally quiet and silent, and he did not
seem to be profoundly corrupted by that school of vice. But when, in his
seventeenth year, he was thrown out again on the streets of Paris, he
unhappily found there his prison comrades, all great scamps, exercising
their dirty professions: teaching dogs to catch rats in the the sewers,
and blacking shoes on ball nights in the passage of the Opera--amateur
wrestlers, who permitted themselves to be thrown by the Hercules of the
booths--or fishing at noontime from rafts; all of these occupations he
followed to some extent, and, some months after he came out of the house
of correction, he was arrested again for a petty theft--a pair of old
shoes prigged from a shop-window. Result: a year in the prison of Sainte
Pelagie, where he served as valet to the political prisoners.

He lived in much surprise among this group of prisoners, all very young,
negligent in dress, who talked in loud voices, and carried their heads
in a very solemn fashion. They used to meet in the cell of one of the
oldest of them, a fellow of some thirty years, already a long time in
prison and quite a fixture at Sainte Pelagie--a large cell, the walls
covered with colored caricatures, and from the window of which one could
see all Paris--its roofs, its spires, and its domes--and far away the
distant line of hills, blue and indistinct upon the sky. There were upon
the walls some shelves filled with volumes and all the old paraphernalia
of a fencing-room: broken masks, rusty foils, breast-plates, and gloves