François Le Bossu

After a fall leaves him permanently deformed, twelve-year-old François Le Bossu becomes a target for cruelty. Taunted and excluded by everyone in his village, he has forgotten what kindness feels like until the day he meets Christine des Ormes. She is wealthy, educated, and dressed in silk but neglected by her parents and brutalized by her guardian, Madame des Ormes. These two wounded children recognize something in each other that the adult world has denied them: true understanding. They become inseparable, their friendship a refuge from各自 的苦难. But when Madame des Ormes announces they are moving to Paris, separating the two children forever, François faces his greatest fear yet. Will he lose the one person who saw past his hunched back? Ségur writes with piercing compassion about the particular cruelties children inflict on those who are different, and the extraordinary resilience required to survive them. This is a story about finding light in darkness, and how one small friendship can be the difference between despair and hope.