residence in the galleys, Jean Valjean himself forgot them.
In that heart, where there had been a wound, there was a scar.
That is all. Only once, during all the time which he spent at Toulon,
did he hear his sister mentioned. This happened, I think,
towards the end of the fourth year of his captivity. I know not
through what channels the news reached him. Some one who had known
them in their own country had seen his sister. She was in Paris.
She lived in a poor street Rear Saint-Sulpice, in the Rue du Gindre.
She had with her only one child, a little boy, the youngest.
Where were the other six? Perhaps she did not know herself.
Every morning she went to a printing office, No. 3 Rue du Sabot,
where she was a folder and stitcher. She was obliged to be there
at six o'clock in the morning--long before daylight in winter.
In the same building with the printing office there was a school,
and to this school she took her little boy, who was seven years old.
But as she entered the printing office at six, and the school only
opened at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard, for the school
to open, for an hour--one hour of a winter night in the open air!
They would not allow the child to come into the printing office,
because he was in the way, they said. When the workmen passed in
the morning, they beheld this poor little being seated on the pavement,
overcome with drowsiness, and often fast asleep in the shadow,
crouched down and doubled up over his basket. When it rained,
an old woman, the portress, took pity on him; she took him into her den,
where there was a pallet, a spinning-wheel, and two wooden chairs,
and the little one slumbered in a corner, pressing himself close
to the cat that he might suffer less from cold. At seven o'clock
the school opened, and he entered. That is what was told to Jean
Valjean.