Gosse de riche

A velvet-swaddled Parisian boy—pampered, porcelain-delicate—slips from his gilt nursery into the gutter’s grinning maw; silver spoons melt into street-urchin shivs, lace collars rot into sooty rags, and every cobblestone becomes a cracked mirror mocking the family crest. Directors Charles Burguet, René Hervil, and Louis Mercanton stitch this metamorphosis with flicker-and-flare silent syntax: iris shots bloom like bruised gardenias, intertitles crack like butler’s whips, and Henry Roussel’s patriarchal scowl looms like a gargoyle over Maurice Vauthier’s ragged runaway. Around him, Berthe Jalabert’s consumptive mother flickers in and out of visibility, a ghost of maternal guilt; Suzanne Grandais’s street gamine pirouettes between Fagin and angel, her eyes two cobalt conspiracies; Paulette Ray’s society nymph drifts through soirées that glitter like broken chandeliers. The film’s spine is a single winter night: the boy trades a diamond stickpin for a crust, learns the argot of ragpickers, witnesses a river suicide that doubles as his own christening, and returns at dawn to a mansion now as hollow as a skull. No redemption, no moral homily—only the chill recognition that wealth and poverty are reversible costumes in the same cruel pantomime.