Romain Kalbris by Hector Malot

Hector Malot (1830-1907) was a French writer who was born in the Seine-Maritime town of La Bouille. He studied law in Rouen and Paris, but his true interest was literature. He worked for Lloyd Francais as a dramatic reviewer and L'Opinion Nationale as a literary critic. Les Amants was his debut work, published in 1859. Malot went on to write more than 70 books in all.

Sans Famille (Nobody's Boy, 1878) is by far his most famous work, and it follows the adventures of Remi, a young orphan who is sold to the street musician Vitalis at the age of ten. Sans Famille became famous as a children's book, despite the fact that it was not intended to be one. In 1895, he announced his retirement as a fiction writer, but in 1896, he reappeared with the novel L'amour Dominateur and the autobiography Le Roman de mes Romans (The Novel of My Novels).