To be astray and to seem free is to be lost.
These poor little creatures were, in fact, lost.
These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to some trouble, as the reader will recollect.
Children of the Thenardiers, leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the ground by the wind.
Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon''s day, and which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand, had been converted into rags.
Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics as "Abandoned children," whom the police take note of, collect, mislay and find again on the pavements of Paris.
It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these miserable little creatures being in that garden.
If the superintendents had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth. Poor little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should reflect that, as children, they have a right to flowers.
These children were there, thanks to the locked gates.
They were there contrary to the regulations.
They had slipped into the garden and there they remained.
Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight is supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied with the outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden, and had not seen the two delinquents.