Georges Méliès (the film's director) reportedly filmed two different endings for this film. The first ending depicts the beggar girl freezing to death on the street, and then her soul entering heaven. And a second (and more famous) ending where the beggar is rescued by a wealthy couple, who then resolve her family's financial problems. The first ending was reserved for French audiences, and the second version for American audiences. Film historians consider this as evidence that American film audiences in the 1900s already had a reputation for preferring happy endings over tragic endings.
Star Film Catalogue no. 669-677
Available catalogs for this film mention that the main character's name is Marie. However, the beggar girl's name is not actually mentioned in the currently preserved versions of the film.
The dramatic scenes of the poverty, social rejection, and near-death of the beggar girl were unusually realistic for a Georges Méliès' film. The director was primarily known for fantasy films. Film historians suspect that he was trying to adopt realism as a style, because it was considered more marketable at the time of the film's creation.
The film was released on black-and-white, but a stencil-colored print of the film has been preserved at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, a Spanish film archive. This print uses a different technique that the freehand method used to color other films of Georges Méliès. Making it unlikely that this was the work of Élisabeth Thuillier (1841 -1907), the colorist which Méliès typically hired to color his films. The identity of this print's colorist remains unknown.