plied vivaciously:

"I did not oppose them. I opposed them in nothing. They married just as
they pleased. We shouldn't go against people's likings, it turns out
badly. I am a night scavenger because my parents went against my likings.
But for that I would have become a workman like the others."

Here is the way his parents had thwarted him in his likings:

He was at the time a soldier stationed at Havre, not more stupid than
another, or sharper either, a rather simple fellow, however. When he was
not on duty, his greatest pleasure was to walk along the quay, where the
bird dealers congregate. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a soldier from
his own part of the country, he would slowly saunter along by cages
containing parrots with green backs and yellow heads from the banks of
the Amazon, or parrots with gray backs and red heads from Senegal, or
enormous macaws, which look like birds reared in hot-houses, with their
flower-like feathers, their plumes and their tufts. Parrots of every
size, who seem painted with minute care by the miniaturist, God Almighty,
and the little birds, all the smaller birds hopped about, yellow, blue
and variegated, mingling their cries with the noise of the quay; and
adding to the din caused by unloading the vessels, as well as by
passengers and vehicles, a violent clamor, loud, shrill and deafening, as
if from some distant forest of monsters.

Boitelle would pause, with wondering eyes, wide-open mouth, laughing and
enraptured, showing his teeth to the captive cockatoos, who kept nodding
their white or yellow topknots toward the glaring red of his breeches and
the copper buckle of his belt. When he found a bird that could talk he
put questions to it, and if it happened at the time to be disposed to
reply and to hold a conversation with him he would carry away enough
amusement to last him till evening. He also found heaps of amusement in
looking at the monkeys, and could conceive no greater luxury for a rich
man than to own these animals as one owns cats and dogs. This kind of
taste for the exotic he had in his blood, as people have a taste for the
chase, or for medicine, or for the priesthood. He could not help
returning to the quay every time the gates of the barracks opened, drawn
toward it by an irresistible longing.

On one occasion, having stopped almost in ecstasy before an enormous
macaw, which was swelling out its plumes, bending forward and bridling up
again as if making the court c