The eighteenth century, old, decrepit, and vicious, was about to come to an end, when in the corner of a little room haunted by rats, a child, the subject of this story, was born.

It was on the morning of Shrove Tuesday, the 6th of March, 1798,--just as the day had flung aside its black night-cap, and the morning sun was about to shed its rays upon the earth,--that this son of a crippled mother and a humpbacked tailor first saw the light.

The child was born in a house situated in one of the old streets of Agen--15 Rue Fon-de-Rache--not far from the shop on the Gravier where Jasmin afterwards carried on the trade of a barber and hairdresser.
"When a prince is born," said Jasmin in his Souvenirs, "his entrance into the world is saluted with rounds of cannon, but when I, the son of a poor tailor made my appearance, I was not saluted even with the sound of a popgun." Yet Jasmin was afterwards to become a king of hearts! A Charivari was, however, going on in front of a neighbour's door, as a nuptial serenade on the occasion of some unsuitable marriage; when the clamour of horns and kettles, marrow-bones and cleavers, saluted the mother's ears, accompanied by thirty burlesque verses, the composition of the father of the child who had just been born.
Jacques Jasmin was only one child amongst many.

The parents had considerable difficulty in providing for the wants of the family, in food as well as clothing.

Besides the father's small earnings as a tailor of the lowest standing, the mother occasionally earned a little money as a laundress.