“At a later time she extended the circle of her excursions, and wandered all over Paris, in company of other children like herself, stopping on the boulevards, before the brilliant shops or performing jugglers, trying to learn how to steal from open stalls, and at night asking in a plaintive voice for alms in behalf of her poor sick father.  When twelve years old she was as thin as a plank, and as green as a June apple, with sharp elbows and long red hands.  But she had beautiful light hair, teeth like a young dog’s, and large, impudent eyes.  Merely upon seeing her go along, her head high with an air of saucy indifference, coquettish under her rags, and walking with elastic steps, you would have guessed in her the young Parisian girl, the sister of the poor ‘gamin,’ a thousand times more wicked than her brothers, and far more dangerous to society.  She was as depraved as the worst of sinners, fearing neither God nor the Devil, nor man, nor anything.

“However, she did fear the police.

“For from them she derived the only notions of morality she ever possessed; otherwise, it would have been love’s labor lost to talk to her of virtue or of duty.  These words would have conveyed no meaning to her imagination; she knew no more about them than about the abstract ideas which they represent.

“One day, however, her mother, who had virtually made a servant of her, had a praiseworthy inspiration.  Finding that she had some money, she dressed her anew from head to foot, bought her a kind of outfit, and bound her as an apprentice to a dressmaker.

“But it came too late.

“Every kind of restraint was naturally intolerable to such a vagabond nature.  The order and the regularity of the house in which she lived were a horror to her.  To sit still all day long, a needle in her hand, appeared to her harder than death itself.  The very comforts around her embarrassed her, and she felt as a savage would feel in tight boots.  At the end of the first week, therefore, she ran away from the dressmaker, stealing a hundred francs.  As long as these lasted, she roved over Paris.  When they were spent, and she was hungry, she came back to her mother.

“But her mother had moved away, and no one knew what had become of her.  She was inquired after, but never found.  Any other person would have been in despair.  Not she.  The same day she entered as waiter in a cheap coffee-house.  Turned out there, she found employment in a low restaurant, where she had to wash up the dishes and plates.  Sent away here, also, she became a servant in two or three other places of still lower character; then, at last, utterly disgusted, she determined to do nothing at all.

“She was sinking into the gutter, she was on the point of being lost before she had reached womanhood, like fruit which spoils before it is ripe, when a man turned up who was fated to arm her for life’s Struggle, and to change the vulgar thief into the accomplished monster of perversity whom you know.”