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 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.
The “principal lodger” of Jean Valjean’s day was dead and had been replaced by another exactly like her. I know not what philosopher has said: “Old women are never lacking.”
This new old woman was named Madame Bourgon, and had nothing remarkable about her life except a dynasty of three parakeets, who had reigned in succession over her soul.
The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a family of four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two daughters, already well grown, all four of whom were lodged in the same attic, one of the cells which we have already mentioned.