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 Salpêtrière, 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.