1778

Every few minutes, Étienne stopped and turned back, squinting into the rising sun, watching the last clump of ramshackle buildings, the final trace of the big city in which he had been raised, grow smaller. His impatient mother tugged at his sleeve again, and he reluctantly continued on the path.

"Perche," his mother said again. Étienne rolled his eyes. "Perche will be much for suitable, boy. You'll never see another towering wig or pannier as long as you live! I was raised in Perche, and you'd never catch me crouched in filth while ladies pass by overhead—" And she broke off, fury clogging her throat, and jerked Étienne forward more roughly while the boy did not try to hide a smile.

It had been two months since Étienne and his friends had discovered that the grate at Le Peletier was not completely intact. One of the more intrepid boys had wriggled through the hole created by a missing and a broken bar into the darkness, crying that it was not so very deep and that he could clearly see his comrades. Étienne continued to smirk as he remembered his friend's little white face peering up from the abyss, and the realization that came to all of the assembled boys at the same time. So each evening he and several of his friends waited in the depths of the sewer, watching the grate until, at last, one of the fine ladies passed overhead on her way to the opera. There was always jostling for a better view, and they took turns clinging to the rungs along the side of the tunnel in order to be closer.

Étienne had been the lucky boy on the ladder the day that a fight had broken out amongst his friends below. The scuffle had attracted the attention of a nearby vendor, who had taken them all by surprise by suddenly plunging a long arm through the hole, seizing Étienne, and dragging him out through the little hole. And, through the worst luck imaginable, the vendor was a friend of Étienne's mother.

This latest offense was discovered at the same time that it was announced that France had joined the American colonies in their revolution against Britain, and Étienne's mother was certain that the war, though fought on distant shores, would manage to affect her own daily life if she remained in France's capital. Using her son's delinquency as an excuse, she quickly pawned all of their possessions and packed a little food in a carefully knotted handkerchief. She had somehow seized upon her old hometown as the perfect place to raise a child, and nothing could dissuade her from resettling to that rural place.

Étienne had trotted grudgingly alongside his mother for the first day, but as he saw fewer buildings and more trees and fields, he began to drag his feet. The journey was tedious and difficult: they squatted at the roadside only when the sun was directly overhead, and his mother broke them off a little hunk each of the heavy loaf of black bread she carried in her handkerchief. At night, she slept with the handkerchief clutched in her arms like a dying child.

The bread ran out two days before the two of them reached Perche, and in that time the mother encouraged Étienne to pray so frequently that he actually began to walk faster each time she opened her mouth. He had seen that the mother's strength was flagging, and his only thought was to escape her zealous preaching. The one thing she had kept from their home in Paris was a wooden rosary that was always around her neck, and Étienne heard her murmuring prayers and shifting beads so often that he accepted it as background noise and hardly paid it any attention.

Étienne associated God and religion with long, stifled hours in a sweltering stone building, his body encased in his least comfortable clothes, while the people around him muttered and hummed tunelessly. It was torturous to enter those heavy, dark wooden doors and know that his friends still played in the sunny streets. Étienne's sole joy in leaving Paris was the knowledge that each step took him further from the religious prison to which he had so often been confined.

Another thing he left behind was Julie.

Many of Étienne's friends on the streets had had mothers or older sisters who called themselves "mistresses." The children had been fascinated by the term, and on his eighth birthday, half a year ago, the other boys had deemed Étienne old enough to have a mistress of his own. There had always been a few rough little girls who ran with their crowd, and Étienne, the youngest boy of the lot, was instantly paired with the youngest girl. Julie's duties as "mistress" included following Étienne everywhere (but home) and doing whatever he told her to, for that was what the older boys claimed their big sisters always did. Étienne had been proud to be grown enough to have a mistress until Julie, who a year older, had begun to take her role too seriously. He was equally attracted to and terrified of her.

But all of this conflicting emotion was useless now, so far from Paris. He would never see his friends, the inside of that church, or Julie again.

As soon as his mother had announced they were leaving, Étienne had put all of his energies into vexing her. He did anything that would make her disapprove and began to enjoy the thrill of disobedience. Streaks of gray had appeared in his mother's hair over the last few days.

The two reached Perche in the late evening, and the moment the town came into view his mother had frozen where she stood. Étienne had been several paces behind, for they were entering the stage in the day's journey during which he most liked to complain. He joined his mother a moment after she had stopped.

Before them lay Perche, a little wooden town speckled with trembling streetlamps and a skeleton hay cart. Unimpressed, Étienne looked up at his mother and read puzzlement and fear in her eyes. She clutched the rosary with whitening knuckles. "This isn't how it used to look," she breathed. "It was smaller once. This was all a field. Pray for us, Étienne."

The boy scowled at her in the darkness. He loathed his mother.

When at last she had regained her confidence, Étienne's mother took hold of his shoulder and dragged him to the smallest, least alarming house within sight. Made of buckling boards, the house was two stories tall and featured small windows covered with white cloth instead of glass. Étienne's mother knocked meekly on the door, and a moment later it opened. Rather than listen to the adults' negotiations, Étienne peered around the discolored skirts of the husky woman who had greeted them. The interior of the house was rustic, lit by the flickering yellow glow of firelight. The second story was something of a loft, only accessible by a spindly ladder. Étienne could see the open door of a back room on the ground floor, where a man's feet were visible on a bare mattress. The front room contained a fireplace and a table.

After a very small bit of heckling, the imposing woman showed Étienne and his mother to the loft. They were to pay three francs a month for room and board, taking meals with the family below. The man and his wife were called Jondrette.

Monsieur Jondrette was a tall, broad-shouldered and quiet man with an impressive beard. He worked for a neighboring dairy farmer and always left his manure-caked boots at the door before ambling into the house and falling into bed. He only joined the others for dinner if his wife commanded it.

Though she was as big and as masculine as her husband, Madame Jondrette was almost opposite in demeanor. She was brash and demanding, man-like in appearance and household position. Madame Jondrette endlessly overrode Monsieur in conversation and opinion. Their only behavioral similarity was the stern silences into which the couple would often sink. Étienne's mother found these times tedious and began to fill them with incessant chatter and an obnoxious laugh that almost never received a response. The boy himself hardly ever said a word to any of them.

Étienne never loved Perche. Few children would befriend the "city boy" who was impressed by nothing their little town could offer: everything they had, he would say, had been twice as interesting in Paris. If he was ever lonely, he hid it well. He took revenge on the other children by fighting with and stealing from them. Spying little Étienne was reason to put your hands in your pockets or hug your new toy to your heart. He turned into a strong, tough child, finally managing to impress a few other bullies and, upon being accepted by them, following them everywhere.

One year after they arrived in Perche, Étienne awoke before his mother for the first time. He crept over to her pallet, peering at her white face in the darkness. She was perfectly still.

In just a few moments he had crept down the ladder and out of the house without waking the Jondrettes. He passed Jean Labaude, the town crier, who had just emerged into the street and doffed his tricorne hat to the boy. "And what has you up so early in your nightshirt, lad?"

Keeping a solemn face, Étienne told him that his mother was dead. The man patted him on the shoulder, showing real sympathy, but the boy shook him away and dashed into the woods.

Jean Labaude sighed as he watched the child disappear. It was understandable that poor little Étienne would need to be alone to deal with his grief. He, too, had lost a mother as a child, and he remembered crying for months. His heart went out to this poor boy.

Étienne, meanwhile, had reached the edge of the wood. He slowly turned to face the town of Perche, then raised his little fist to the morning sky. A radiant smile broke across his face as the sun broke across the sky. He was free.

That morning Perche was awakened by the town crier's bell.

"Seven o'clock! Madame Thénardier is dead!"