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eight years old. The youngest, one.
Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He
took the father’s place, and, in his turn, supported the sister
who had brought him up. This was done simply as a duty
and even a little churlishly on the part of Jean Valjean. Thus
his youth had been spent in rude and ill-paid toil. He had
never known a ‘kind woman friend’ in his native parts. He
had not had the time to fall in love.
He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without
uttering a word. His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the
best part of his repast from his bowl while he was eating,—a
bit of meat, a slice of bacon, the heart of the cabbage,—to
give to one of her children. As he went on eating, with his
head bent over the table and almost into his soup, his long
hair falling about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had
the air of perceiving nothing and allowing it. There was at
Faverolles, not far from the Valjean thatched cottage, on the
other side of the lane, a farmer’s wife named Marie-Claude;
the Valjean children, habitually famished, sometimes went
to borrow from Marie-Claude a pint of milk, in their moth-
er’s name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alley
corner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the
little girls spilled it on their aprons and down their necks. If
their mother had known of this marauding, she would have
punished the delinquents severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and
grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for the pint of milk behind
their mother’s back, and the children were not punished.
In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he
hired out as a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm,