Rémi is handed over to Vitalis and leaves the Barberins’ home

Rémi is handed over to Vitalis and made to leave the Barberin home in a scene that converts a transaction between adults into a child’s abrupt loss of home. Barberin accepts payment and insists that Rémi cannot stay; Rémi weeps, reaches toward the men who are deciding his future, and is led away by the wrist. The departing child’s last view of the house, growing smaller along a mountain road, gives physical shape to the separation and to the uncertainty ahead.

Identity and Stakes

The episode comes from Hector Malot’s Sans famille, a novel about Rémi, a foundling raised by M. and Mme Barberin before being given to the itinerant musician Vitalis. Here, the arrangement is not experienced by the child as a new opportunity. Rémi begs not to be taken away and calls for Mme Barberin, whose home has been the setting of his life until this moment. The contrast between the adults’ practical decision and the child’s grief establishes the scene’s central stakes: who will control Rémi’s immediate future, and what will be lost when he is removed from the place he regards as home.

Vitalis tries to reassure him by saying that he will not beat children and that Rémi will have the company of his amusing pupils. The offer points toward the life of travel that awaits him, but it cannot answer the loss Rémi is naming. When Vitalis asks what he has to regret, Rémi answers by calling for Mme Barberin. The exchange makes clear that the promise of a different life and the pain of separation belong to different measures of value: reassurance about future treatment does not replace the attachment to the home he is leaving.

Payment and Coercion

Barberin does not present Rémi with a choice about remaining in the household. He takes the boy roughly by the ear and declares that he will not stay, giving him only Vitalis or the hospice as alternatives. When Rémi continues to cry out for Mme Barberin, Barberin grows angry and threatens to drive him out with a stick. The threat sharpens the difference between Vitalis’s comparatively gentle manner and Barberin’s force: Vitalis speaks of what life with him may be like, while Barberin uses physical handling and threatened violence to make departure unavoidable.

The practical terms of the transfer follow the threat. Vitalis lays eight five-franc coins on the table, a total of forty francs, and Barberin quickly puts them into his pocket. Vitalis then asks for Rémi’s bundle, which Barberin identifies as a blue cotton handkerchief tied at its four corners. These precise objects make the transaction concrete: money changes hands, and the child’s few belongings are gathered for the journey. The scene gives no account of negotiations beyond this exchange, but it shows Barberin accepting payment while Rémi remains the person most affected and least able to decide.

The Forced Departure

When Vitalis calls him by name and tells him to take his bundle, Rémi reaches first toward Vitalis and then toward Barberin. Both turn their heads away. Vitalis takes Rémi by the wrist, and Rémi has to walk. The gesture closes off the possibility of comfort from either adult at the moment of departure: Barberin refuses to meet the child’s appeal, while Vitalis, though more considerate, physically leads him out.

At the threshold, Rémi feels that leaving the poor house is like leaving a piece of his own skin behind. He calls out, but no one answers; his voice dies into a sob. Barberin calls out a farewell and goes back into the house, while Vitalis urges Rémi onward and again takes his arm. Rémi begins walking beside him. Vitalis does not hurry, and Rémi believes that he even sets his pace to match the child’s. That small accommodation does not undo the forced separation, but it distinguishes Vitalis’s conduct from Barberin’s and offers Rémi a limited kindness at the start of an imposed journey.

The Road and Its Meaning

The road climbs the mountain in winding turns. As they ascend, Rémi repeatedly sees Mme Barberin’s house growing smaller. He knows the route well enough to anticipate its final bend: he will see the house once more, and after a few steps onto the plateau it will disappear. The familiar road therefore becomes a measure of how departure works. Each turn carries him farther from the place where he has lived and nearer to an unknown future; the last glimpse is already shadowed by the knowledge that it will be the last.

The scene ends not with arrival or with a settled account of life under Vitalis, but at the threshold of uncertainty. Behind Rémi is the house in which he has been happy until now; ahead is what he cannot yet know. His enforced movement from one to the other makes the handover more than a change of guardian: it is the first decisive rupture in the life described by the novel’s account of the foundling’s adventures. The image of the shrinking house holds together the material facts of the episode—the payment, the bundle, the grip on his wrist—and its emotional consequence, the child’s sense that home is receding beyond recovery.