By far his most famous book is Sans Famille (Nobody's Boy, 1878), which deals with the travels of the young orphan Remi, who is sold to the street musician Vitalis at age 8.

He stays locked up for hours devouring books, preferring to abandon his French lessons to read Racine, Lesage or even Molière.

[6] Hector begins to appreciate life in the countryside and indulges in numerous escapades during which he “discovered nature, the cycle of seasons and crops, became interested in trees, flowers, insects, animals..”.

To ensure his livelihood, he wrote a few articles, notably in Journal pour tous, where Jules Simon hired him for his knowledge of botany.

[13] Busy on one hand with his work as a journalist and distracted on the other by Parisian life, Hector Malot found himself unable to advance the writing of his first novel.

He later attempted to exorcise this episode through the writing of Romain Kalbris, a novel in which a dying mother awaits the return of her sailor son.

[16] In 1865 Hector builds at 3 avenue de la Dame-Blanche in Fontenay-souls-Boris, a wooden chalet that he would live in until the end of his life.

When Anna died in 1880, Hector remarried to Marthe Oudinot de La Faverie, age 31, with whom he made numerous trips.

This novel tells the adventures of the foundling, Rémi, who is sold by his adoptive father to a street musician named Vitalis.

Traveling the French and later English roads, Rémi works in different professions and meets many people before setting out to find his biological family.

In 1887, the Journal de Rouen published in its daily edition the novel Ghislaine in serial form, paying homage to Malot’s Norman roots.

In 1893, a year after writing En famille (loosely translated as Nobody’s Girl), Malot’s granddaughter Perrine was born, sharing the name of the heroine of the novel.

He is buried there in the cemetery where he rests in the company of his first wife Anna, his father Jean-Baptiste, his daughter Lucie, his sister Prudence and his son-in-law, General Mesple.