He ran along thus until daybreak, filling the, darkness with his shouts, terrifying stray animals, torn by a terrible anguish and fearing that he was losing his mind.  His wife, seated on the stone step of their home, sobbed until morning.

They did not find their son.  They both aged rapidly in their inconsolable sorrow.  Finally they sold their house and set out to search together.

They inquired of the shepherds on the hillsides, of the tradesmen passing by, of the peasants in the villages and of the authorities in the towns.  But their boy had been lost a long time and no one knew anything about him.  He had probably forgotten his own name by this time and also the name of his village, and his parents wept in silence, having lost hope.

Before long their money came to an end, and they worked out by the day in the farms and inns, doing the most menial work, eating what was left from the tables, sleeping on the ground and suffering from cold.  Then as they became enfeebled by hard work no one would employ them any longer, and they were forced to beg along the high roads.  They accosted passers-by in an entreating voice and with sad, discouraged faces; they begged a morsel of bread from the harvesters who were dining around a tree in the fields at noon, and they ate in silence seated on the edge of a ditch.  An innkeeper to whom they told their story said to them one day: 

“I know some one who had lost their daughter, and they found her in Paris.”

They at once set out for Paris.

When they entered the great city they were bewildered by its size and by the crowds that they saw.  But they knew that Jean must be in the midst of all these people, though they did not know how to set about looking for him.  Then they feared that they might not recognize him, for he was only five years old when they last saw him.

They visited every place, went through all the streets, stopping whenever they saw a group of people, hoping for some providential meeting, some extraordinary luck, some compassionate fate.

They frequently walked at haphazard straight ahead, leaning one against the other, looking so sad and poverty-stricken that people would give them alms without their asking.

They spent every Sunday at the doors of the churches, watching the crowds entering and leaving, trying to distinguish among the faces one that might be familiar.  Several times they thought they recognized him, but always found they had made a mistake.

In the vestibule of one of the churches which they visited the most frequently there was an old dispenser of holy Water who had become their friend.  He also had a very sad history, and their sympathy for him had established a bond of close friendship between them.  It ended by them all three living together in a poor lodging on the top floor of a large house situated at some distance, quite on the outskirts of the city, and the wheelwright would sometimes take his new friend’s place at the church when the latter was ill.