After Tholomyès abandons Fantine, she leaves Cosette with the Thénardiers at their inn in Montfermeil, paying them to care for her child while she goes to work in the city of Montreuil-sur-Mer when Cosette is two years old.
When the French police came to arrest him, he tried to escape from a second-floor window during an early morning raid at his sister's apartment in the Paris suburb east of Montfermeil, but he was overpowered and arrested a few minutes later.