One gloomy night, in the darkest depths of the Parisian sewers, where no light or sound has ever reached, there lay a body, all alone. This, of course, was no special occurrence; the sewers, being an excellent place to hide things that one does not want to be found, were crawling, as it were, with the dead. No, it was the corpse itself that was odd.
It was the body of a man, but a man only three feet tall, with brown curly hair, dressed in a brown shirt, baggy brown trousers and a brown vest. It betrayed no outward signs of having been murdered, yet the thing bobbing gently down the stream of wastewater and human filth was certainly dead. It was as though it had simply lost the will to live, laid itself down and died. All was stillness as it made its unhurried way down towards the Seine: no sound broke the silence, no light penetrated the tunnel's inky blackness. There was nothing but the body, the stream, and the tunnel above them. Until suddenly there was.
The corpse did not see the light of a dark-lantern or the shadow of a man cast on the tunnel walls, nor did it hear the splashing of footsteps or the gleeful cackling of the greedy bastard dressed in a stolen military uniform who crouched over it.
The illustrious Monsieur Thernardier, innkeeper, drunk, petty criminal, saw the floating stiff and ran towards it, wriggling his fingers for joy. This was the third stiff he'd found in a week down here; perhaps he'd reward himself later with a drink or a trip to a nearby whorehouse. He grabbed it and dragged it ashore, but upon shining his dark-lantern on it his face fell—this was barely half a man, and probably too poor to bother looting. He almost threw it back, but a strange force stayed his hand. Almost involuntarily, his hand reached to a chain on the stiff's neck, finding at the end of it a plain gold ring. It had no stone, no engraving, no qualities to distinguish it from any other tasty morsel of circular gold, yet to Thernardier it was the most beautiful thing in the world. He pulled the chain apart and held the ring in his hand. Wear me… it said. You know you want to. And he did want to. He wanted to, ever so badly, more than he'd ever wanted anything before, more, even, than he had wanted his wife back before the domestic life transformed her into a foul-tempered balloon.
He slipped the ring, this wonderful ring, this oh-so-precious ring, on his finger—and the corpse was alone once again!
Thernardier looked everywhere, but he was nowhere to be found. "What the 'ell?" he said to himself. "What in the name of the late great God is going on? What the 'ell happened to me?" Desperately he held his hands before his eyes but saw only the sewer behind them. Where his torso and legs should have been there was only water. "Oh, God!" he cried. "Please, please don't let me be dead! I've got a wife, and a beautif—well, a daughter, and 'oo's gonna take care of 'em if I'm gone?" His voice crescendoed until it bounced off of the walls in every direction possible, filling the tunnel with his cries. "I swear I'll never steal nothing from nobody again! Oh, God! Please, just pretty, pretty please, let me live! I'll be good, I'll give all my money to orphans, I'll live a blameless life and go to a church without robbing it, I'll do anything, just please, please, let me live!" As he prayed he clasped his hands together and fell to his knees, soaking himself from the waist downwards. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he could feel the wetness on his cheeks. The water of the sewer felt icy. His palms sweated.
But then, a thought crossed his mind. Could a dead man feel these things? Perhaps not. After all, his legs were just as cold as they'd have been if they were alive; the fact that he couldn't feel them was just as likely due to coldness as it was to death. And he could still feel the rest of himself. He could still see his breath crystallize in front of his face, even if he no longer seemed to have a face. And from these observations he could only conclude that he was somehow still alive. Alive, but invisible. What fun.
"God," he said, "you know what I said before about going straight and living a blameless life? Well, forget all that rot. I'm gonna be rich!" Thernardier stooped down to give the corpse at his feet a big sloppy wet kiss on the mouth and fled, laughing like a maniac, waving his arms invisibly.