Les Deux Gosses

Les Deux Gosses (published in English as Two Little Vagrants) is an 1880 French melodrama by Pierre Decourcelle in which a wealthy aristocrat, wrongly convinced his wife has been unfaithful, abandons his young son to a cruel itinerant carnival worker rather than accept the boy as his own. The serialized novel — later adapted for the stage and multiple films — follows the child's suffering and eventual, remorseful reclamation, set against a stark contrast between the world of the rich and the world of the poor.

This isn't a business book — it's one of the pulpy serial romances a teenage Coco Chanel smuggled into the convent orphanage where she was raised, and it earns its place in the library through her, not through any lesson of its own. As she later put it, "those novels taught me about life"; this is the raw material that shaped the sensibility she later built a fashion empire on.

The founder lesson is less about plot and more about formation: an orphaned, penniless girl found in cheap melodrama a vocabulary for drama, reversal, class contrast, and reinvention that she would spend the rest of her life re-staging in her own biography and in her clothes. Founders' early, unglamorous influences — a paperback, a pulp serial, a show that "doesn't count" — often turn out to be the actual source code for their later taste and instincts, long before any business education arrives.

Read alongside her biographies, it's a reminder that the inputs shaping a founder's worldview rarely look prestigious in the moment.