“Phoebus de Chateaupers likewise came to a 'tragic end': he married.”

“With a remainder of that brotherly compassion which is never totally absent from the heart of a drinker, Phoebus rolled Jehan with his foot onto one of those poor man's pillows which Providence provides on all the street corners of Paris and which the rich disdainfully refer to as heaps of garbage.”

“Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.”

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”

“Large sums passed through his hands. Nevertheless, nothing changed his way of life or added the slightest luxury to his simple life. Quite the contrary, As there is always more misery at the lower end than humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received, like water on parched soil. No matter how much money came to him, he never had enough. And then he robbed himself.”

“Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood rolled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction whence the shot came, and began to sing.”

“The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed. M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next in the fate of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden days, the fall of his own family, the tragic spectacles of '93, which were, perhaps, even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from a distance, with the magnifying powers of terror,—did these cause the ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life, suddenly smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune? No one could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.”