In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Paris was rife with crime and crawling with criminals. These reprobates, these leeches whose only sustenance was the blood of their victims, they sank to the bottom of society and festered there, a collection of hideous, unlanced boils. No garlic could keep away these vampires; a golden crucifix on a delicate chain only encouraged them further.

They were parasites, not predators. Predators feed on the old, the weak, the sickly. Parasites feed on the young, the strong, the healthy, weakening them from within. Rags and tatters protected a child from theft, though not from other forms of exploitation. Our social fungi preferred to attack the creme de la creme. These particular emanations of the gutter were known collectively as Patron-Minette.

For some time in late 1830, they watched a group of young men who congregated in a cafe in the Latin Quarter. M. Jondrette, the nominal mastermind of the operation, found them through his fair young neighbor. That boy had no money, and was spared the plague that descended upon his companions like a scruffy archangel determined to reap the benefits of these firstborn sons.

The attacks did not come all at once; for all that these villains lived like tapeworms, in the veritable sewers of Paris, they had enough mind to know that such a concerted attack would be not only rebuffed but reported, while there was more of a chance that, singularly and spread unevenly, the boys would comment on them, but not make any report to the police. The bloodsuckers were aided and abetted in this by the boys' own pursuits, though they could not have known that they watched a group of self-styled revolutionaries.

The first theft was the easiest one of all, and the one that spurred them on to further folly and further involvement with the group. For, as Babet said, "If the most sodden of the lot has so much in his pockets when he falls asleep in a public room not a mile from his room, what could the rest have?"

The next had very little, in fact, but the theft was nearly as similar. When Montparnasse took hold of his sleeve and pulled him into an alleyway where the lamplight would not reflect off of his pate and alert others, the young man rolled his eyes to the heavens and said to someone absent, "All right, all right, as you wish." To the thief, he said only, "Please, be careful with my coat. I've just mended the elbows again, and I can't afford another patch. You want my purse? Here it is." He sighed again. When Montparnasse reported back to his cronies about the odd fellow, they said that it wasn't unlikely that he was mad, but he was worth rolling in any case, and that Montparnasse shouldn't complain about such an easy time.

After the first two, they were expecting no trouble. The third boy disillusioned them. When a heavy hand landed on his shoulder and spun him around, he looked up at Gueulemer and asked with a chuckle, "Baptiste? Is it - it is! God, man, where have you been?" before embracing him. The hardened cutpurse, twice the young man's weight, was so surprised that he didn't even steal the boy's money, and could only stammer when asked if he still wrote to his mother every week. It would not have been proper for him to answer that he couldn't, as half the time he was in prison, but he didn't want to dishearten the earnest fellow.

Claquesous was not pleased with this. He dispatched Montparnasse again, saying that perhaps quick fingers would succeed where lunkheaded muscle failed. Indeed, the young assassin met with success, bringing back the most money yet, and that after he had spent half of it on a lady of negotiable affection. If he had known that the victim composed a villanelle about his attacker and sent it to the police, he would have been more discomfited. Luckily for Patron-Minette, though unlucky for their youthful prey, the clerk counted it as a prank and burned it.

Babet's mistresses refused to speak to him until the bruise around his eye faded to yellow and his powder could cover it again. He would not have been much reassured if he had known that the boy who did the damage was home from work for a week, waiting for his hand to heal enough so that he had fine control of his fingers again. Gueulemer taunted Babet for his delicacy until the latter brought up the failed theft, at which point he blushed and desisted.

After the fiasco of the violent boy, they waited thirty-four days before accosting the next. A shadow followed the brightest, most lovely of them all, for two nights. The first was to determine where the man lodged, the second to strike and defile his beauty with the knowledge of crime. Claquesous told his partners that the boy had given his money without a fight, but held to his dignity throughout. Afterward, though the pickpocket had faded into the night and was certain that he was invisible, the boy lectured him about the darkening of his soul. At the end of the declamation, he swore an oath of revenge that made even Nothing-at-all's neck prickle. They did not tell him to be less superstitious; half of their survival depended on believing the improbable.

The next man, hardly a boy at all, gave Gueulemer no trouble once he was unconscious, and as the colossus said, anyone who made that much of a disturbance in the middle of the night in a residential district deserved to wake up with a pounding headache. M. Jondrette took away the waistcoat his brute had stolen, saying that the fabric was more suited to a girl than a boy. Montparnasse did not fail to notice Eponine's red skirt the next week. She almost made the buttonholes work well.

Montparnasse also found his next victim frightening, though not in the same way as Claquesous found his. The boy in question burst into near hysterical sneezes and pled with him not to use violence, claiming he had "osteoporosis" or something of the sort. With the sort of honor rarely shown by parasite to host, the dandy acquiesced. The boy handed over his money without any trouble after that, though it was somewhat slimy from his fingers.

Between the sneezing, the lecturing, and the resignation, the thieves were more than half convinced that the boys whose money bought their dinners were truly mad. The final theft reassured them: it went exactly as they expected. The boy was angry at first, but when he saw the knife he became terrified and pled that they shouldn't hurt him, as he was going to an assignation with his mistress and it was quite bad enough that they were taking his money without ruining his beauty, too. That was enough of a common complaint from the vain dandies of Paris that they shrugged off the earlier aberrations and decided that the decision to steal from these boys was quite a good one. They decided that when the other normal areas of funding grew weak, they would turn to the university students again.

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