Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

“Pour augmenter son numéraire
Et raccourcir notre horizon,
La ferme a jugé nécessaire
De mettre Paris en prison.”[6 - This may be literally translated: —]

“To increase its revenue
And draw closer our horizon,
The farm has deemed it necessary
To put Paris in prison.”

All this might be very witty, but the Minister cared little about it. He doubtless said to himself, like his famous predecessor, Mazarin, “They sing: then they will pay.” He was right: they paid. It occurred to the architect Ledoux, who had been instructed to erect offices for the reception of the dues, that the buildings might as well be fortified, and Paris thus became surrounded by a line of not very effective defences. Petitions were addressed to the king requesting the abolition of the Barriers, and M. de Calonne’s successor declared that he would have them knocked down and the fragments sold as building-materials. Things had arrived at this point when the Revolution of ‘89 broke out. The populace then set fire to some of the Barriers and knocked holes through the walls in several places, but did not touch the buildings, concerning which the National Convention subsequently issued the following decree: —

“The national buildings designated under the name of ‘Barriers’ are erected in Paris as public monuments. The various epochs of the Revolution and the victories gained by the revolutionary armies over tyrants are engraved upon them in characters of bronze. The Committee of Public Safety is authorised to take every possible measure for the prompt execution of the present decree, while inviting men of letters and artists to co-operate and to compose inscriptions.”

At this period, however, there were many obstacles between the publication of a decree and its execution, and it was not therefore astonishing that the famous buildings were for a time forgotten. The octroi had now been suspended, and it was not till the fifth year of the Republic that the Directory instituted a “municipal octroi of beneficence,” the product of which was intended for the hospitals. The Barriers were thereupon repaired, and the taxation clerks re-established in their offices on the city boundaries. “The architect Ledoux,” says Dulaure, in his History of Paris, “in his desire to exhibit proofs of the fecundity of his genius, has frequently shown nothing but aberration. The luxury which he lavished upon all his architectural productions outrage all artistic propriety. People saw, with discontent and murmuring, pompous edifices consecrated to a taxation oppressive to all classes of society, and very galling to commerce. This was to whiten sepulchres, – to hold instruments of oppression up to admiration.”

At the end of the Empire no less than sixty Barriers existed round Paris. Five of these were suppressed under the Restoration, though only to be reopened later on. Thenceforward, until 1860, when the barriers were demolished, few changes occurred. It was at the end of 1859 that the Imperial Government, after having appointed a commission of inquiry, formulated a project, which was adopted by the legislative body and the Senate, and which, incorporating eleven communes of the department of the Seine, ordered the demolition of the octroi wall, and of the famous buildings with which Ledoux had so elaborately decorated the Barriers of Paris. The Barriers have not, however, completely disappeared. They are sufficiently numerous in the present day, though they have been put back as far as the fortifications and received the name of gates.

Of the Barriers which figure most largely in history, that of Clichy stands foremost. Here, under the Revolution, the members of the Clichy Club assembled, and here in 1814 the last act of the French military and political drama was played.

The Barrière de l’Étoile is famous as the one by which, on the 15th of December, 1840, the Emperor Napoleon – dead, but living in the memory of all – re-entered Paris to be re-interred at the Invalides. It was a memorable day for the Parisians, who never forgot the splendour of the cortège or the frigid weather which prevailed at the time, and which was so rigorous that the companions of the great captain could have fancied that they were once more on the road to Moscow. Eighteen months later, a four-wheeled cabriolet might have been seen rapidly passing this same barrier. Having reached La Porte Maillot, the equipage redoubled its pace, moving in the direction of the Avenue de la Révolte. The horses had bolted, and a man sprang out of the carriage – he fell. It was the Prince-Royal, the Duke of Orleans, who expired in a grocer’s shop on the 13th of July, 1842, at half-past four in the afternoon.

It was at the Barrière de la Villette, on the 30th of March, 1814, that the capitulation of Paris was signed, the first article of which provided that the French troops, under the orders of the Ducs de Trévise and de Raguse, should evacuate the capital, while the last article recommended the town of Paris to the generosity of the Allied Powers.

Scarcely more than a month later, on the 3rd of May, it was by the Barrière de la Chapelle that Louis XVIII. entered Paris, after having put his signature to the famous declaration at the Château of St. Ouen. On his arrival before this barrier, the édiles presented him with the keys of the city. In 1815 he quitted Paris by the Barrière de Clichy, to enter it once more the same year, without ceremonial, by the same Barrier.

More than one of the Barriers has been the scene of executions and assassinations, and plays a lugubrious part in the history of the capital. The sombre pictures, however, which they conjure up are relieved by many of a picturesque and festive character. On Sundays, especially before the establishment of railways, the Barriers of Paris were invaded by a noisy troop of promenaders. The workman was an assiduous guest at the taverns and tea-gardens which swarmed on the outskirts; and even to-day a large proportion of toilers make their way on the Sabbath towards Belleville or Ménilmontant, singing this refrain of a popular song:

“Pour rigoler montons,
Montons à la barrière.”[7 - “Let’s go up and have a lark,Let’s go up to the Barrier!”]

There used to be a good deal of deep drinking at the Barriers, and violent quarrels not infrequently marked the close of the festive day. Sometimes a drunkard would roll down and lie at full length along the octroi wall. In the ordinary way he would have gone to sleep and woke up comparatively sober. But one of a class of pickpockets who haunted the Barriers was sure to approach him, and, under pretext of lifting him on to his feet, carefully relieve the bewildered victim of the few sous which remained to him. These thieves, who passed their days and nights on the confines of the city, and who, detesting work, lived at the expense of their honest neighbours, were often inveterate malefactors of the worst kind, and the abolition of the Barriers had the highly desirable effect of exterminating them as a class.

It may not be inopportune, at this point, to take a view of the criminal population of Paris in general. They afford a study which excites no small degree of combined interest and regret. The number is large in Paris of those who, having repudiated all restraint and banished the last vestige of self-respect, live aloof from society and never touch it except for purposes of injury. Despite the incessant surveillance of which they are the object, despite the laws which hedge them about, accuse and punish them, they remain in the great capital, like an unsubdued tribe, always in revolt, bent upon evil, and often accomplishing it with audacity. They seem to float over civilisation like scum, or to lie at the bottom of it like dregs of a liquid.

Idleness, or at least the instinctive hatred of all regular occupation, desperate want, and a passion for gross pleasures, are among the causes of that vagabondage in Paris which is characterised by defiance of the law, theft, and sometimes murder. Stupidity and irreflection may often have a good deal to do with the matter; but as a rule the Parisian rascal, subsisting by fraud and larceny, expends more ingenuity and energy in the conception and execution of his schemes than would be necessary to make him prosper in some lucrative trade.

The existence of these wretches is sufficiently unenjoyable. At once hunters and game, with their ears bent to catch the slightest sound, always on the alert, never sleeping without one eye open, devouring their meals whenever they can get any, tormented as much by their passions as by their fears, they feel, whilst pursuing their sinister projects, that the police are dogging their steps, that hounds of terribly keen scent are busy upon their track. This life of stratagem and law-breaking is said to have its charms – and justly, perhaps, since so many men voluntarily choose it; but if the excitement of the constant hazard they run, combined with the chance of spoil, exhilarates youthful malefactors, many an old thief, on the other hand, disgusted, sickened by incessantly playing the part of a stag at bay, has gone to the Préfecture of Police and said: “I am the man. Arrest me. I can’t stand this sort of life.”

Semi-starvation is the fate of a large proportion of these criminals. Many of them for years together have slept on rude couches lit only by the stars – under bridges, in half-built boats or houses, or squares: many of them do not know what daily bread is. “Do you like being here?” said an official to a little girl of twelve who was temporarily lodged in the “depôt,” her father and mother both having been arrested for crime. “Oh, yes,” was the reply, “we have something to eat here every day.”

It would be difficult to fix, even approximatively, the number of persons who in Paris give themselves up to theft. The ticket-of-leave men, notorious vagabonds and others, are well known to the police. But there are numbers of persons, in a town so populous as Paris, who become thieves through circumstances: from finding themselves in a difficult position, or from a sudden temptation.

In this connection M. Maxime Ducamp may once more be cited. “There is an incontrovertible fact,” he says, “which natural history explains. Criminals – those, I mean, who live by crime – are always the same to whatever class of society they may belong. They are actuated by the same passions, the same wants, the same appetites. Whatever certain philosophers may have said on the subject, a man steals very rarely to get bread. The three great tempting causes are women, cards, and drink.” There are exceptions, however, which writers on the subject have duly noted. Rafinat, who was mixed up with the robbery of medals from the Bibliothèque Royale, used to send home to his family the product of what he himself called his “expeditions.” For one, however, of this kind there are ten thousand who steal only to satisfy their brutal tastes. An old proverb says, “Generous as a thief,” and the proverb is right. The thief who saves the produce of his robberies is an anomaly only to be met with among certain “receivers” of Jewish race.

As soon as the thief has made a good stroke, he gives away money right and left, pays his debts, lends to anyone who happens to be in need, and invites everyone to share his good fortune. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and can refuse nothing to anyone. Being constantly watched, thieves denounce themselves by their excessive expenditure, which seems to be one of their invincible needs; and they then fall promptly into the hands of the police. They know that they are pursued; the theft committed one day may cause their arrest the day afterwards. They wish, therefore, to enjoy themselves, and they spend in debauchery the time still left at their disposal. So the pig in a shipwreck will devour food at the very moment when the vessel is sinking.

“Bad roads end in pitfalls,” say the French peasants. Criminals know this, and the road they follow leads invariably to prison, the galleys, the penal colonies, the scaffold. Those who by cunning or good luck succeed in escaping the police, which is on the watch for them, and Justice, which claims them as her own, are singularly rare, and amongst them may be cited a man of a certain celebrity, who flourished some forty or fifty years ago. His name was Piednoir. He was not an assassin; he knew the Code, and never risked his head. He was content to commit robbery by means of false keys. But he was a past-master in his art, and from 1834 until 1843 escaped from the consequences of twenty-one different warrants of arrest. He had excellent manners, led an elegant life, and bitterly regretted having had his ears pierced in his childhood, which, he said, gave him rather a common air. He employed ordinary thieves to prepare an affair, and when everything was ready took charge of its execution. He then divided the plunder into shares, reserving the lion’s part for himself. When his accomplices were brought to trial they behaved towards him with wonderful devotion. One of them, however, admitted that he had been twice in relations with Piednoir; on one occasion, when Piednoir met him in the disguise of a rag-picker, a second time when, dressed as a man of fashion and driving a tilbury, he pulled up in front of the Café de Paris and threw the witness a two-sous piece wrapped up in a scrap of paper which contained written instructions concerning a projected robbery. Piednoir was condemned in his absence to twenty years’ hard labour. He was living at the time luxuriously in Holland on the products of his industry as a thief. Most of these melancholy personages have, according to M. Maxime Ducamp, to whom no side of Paris life, no class of the Paris population, is unfamiliar, a common, contemptible appearance, though some few of them have a certain distinction, natural or acquired, which renders them more and more redoubtable. Mitifiau, who took the title of Count de Belair, and claimed to be the son of a general who died under the first Empire, was a man of irreproachable manners. He went into society – the very best society, to which none but well-bred persons are supposed to be admitted – and lived by swindling, by clever thefts, and by card-sharping. He was arrested as he was committing a robbery by means of false keys.

Some of these malefactors would seem to be separated for ever from crime by the elevated tastes they profess and the intellectual occupations in which they are apparently absorbed. But their evil instincts are too much for them. Thus it once happened that a mathematician, versed in the highest sciences, and dreaming only of abstract speculation, was condemned to seven years’ imprisonment for stealing from a shop. But for the extraordinary sagacity and entire absence of illusions on the part of the police, many a malefactor would succeed in concealing his true character. Some years ago a certain Toutpriant, living at No. 28, Rue Vert, had eight horses in his stables, besides carriages from the best makers. He was a retired clerk, who planned robberies on a large scale, training and directing a number of young brigands to that end, and himself living under a false name either on his own estate, where he had excellent shooting, or at fashionable watering-places. “There are some families,” says M. Ducamp, “which, by a wretched tradition, seem given up to theft from generation to generation. The grandfather was a thief; the father stole, the son steals, the grandson will steal. The child is taught his trade from the earliest years. He learns to step without making a sound, to see without appearing to look, to open a lock with a nail, to hide what he has stolen, and to cry out ‘Stop thief!’ when he is pursued. The families of Piednoir, Cœur-de-Roy, and Nathan drove the police to despair and tired out the tribunals. The periods of imprisonment to which the Nathans, father, mother, brothers, and sons-in-law, altogether fourteen persons, were condemned, represent a total of 209 years.”

The thieves of Jewish race are, according to M. Ducamp, those among whom handkerchief-stealing descends from father to son. They are formidable not for their audacity, for they scarcely ever commit murder, but by their persistence in a criminal career, by the inviolable secrecy maintained among them, their marvellous patience, and the facilities they possess for concealing themselves in the houses of their co-religionists. Jewish thieves are hardly ever at open war with society. They maintain a secret, subtle struggle. They seem to be taking a silent revenge, and it might be said that they have right on their side and that they are only taking back – as the opportunity presents itself – the property of which their ancestors had been so often, so violently, and so unjustly deprived by ours. Sometimes they form associations and rob wholesale. They have their correspondents, their depots, their purchasers, their account-books. Everything that is brought to them can be turned to account, from the lead of the house-pipes to a lady’s feather. The chief calls himself a commission agent and sends goods to South America, Germany, and Russia. The German-Jewish jargon which they speak among themselves is incomprehensible to the rest of the world and helps to save them from detection. Concealing their secret actions behind an ostensibly honest trade, they are the first deceivers in the world. There are numbers of criminals, however, who, whatever instincts they may have inherited, have not been trained to crime. “A child,” says the writer already cited on this subject, which he has studied so thoroughly, “stops away from school. He acquires idle habits and, coming home late, is beaten by his father. The effect of the lesson lasts a little while; but he has tasted the liberty he loves, he has experienced the pleasure of keeping away from books – the books he hates; and fearing the paternal correction, he takes care the next time he plays truant not to return home. He sleeps beneath an archway, and if he escapes the attention of the police wakes up the next morning to find himself on the pavement of the great city without a sou in his pocket. Being very hungry, he contrives to steal a sausage. The first step has now been taken. Young as he is, he has acquired a fatal knowledge. He has learned how to live without working, and he is now almost certainly lost. Vice has taken possession of him; crime awaits him. As he gets older he is urged on by all the passions of the young man. He steals some money from his father, from his employer: wherever the chance presents itself. If he is taken, he is condemned by a compassionate judge to a brief term of imprisonment, during which he lives among the vilest. He hears nothing but the boasts of criminals, who pride themselves on their atrocious actions and inspire him with a desire to imitate them. On leaving gaol he meets some of his prison companions. His timid operations of former days are turned into ridicule. The talk is now of burglary, of affairs which involve some risk but return handsome profits. The crime is resolved upon. An imprudent person happens to witness its commission, calls for the police, and is killed. The little vagabond of other days has become an assassin, and will end his career on the scaffold. Physical energy and moral weakness: such are the two principal features in the character of nearly all criminals. Some of them affect to be at war with a society in which the poor man, according to them, has no place. Mere nonsense. In a society so profoundly democratic as ours, in which waiters have become kings, the sons of innkeepers prime ministers, and foundlings illustrious men of science, there is a place for everyone.”

CHAPTER XLV.

PARISIAN MENDICANCY: THE PARIS POOR

Parisian Mendicancy in the Sixteenth Century – The General Hospital – Louis XV. and the Beggars – The Revolution – Mendicancy as a Regular Profession – The Organ-grinders and the Trade in Italian Children – The French Treatment of the Poor – Asylums, Alms-houses, and Retreats – The Droit des Pauvres– The Cost of the Poor

IN Paris, formerly, mendicancy was so grave and manifest a plague that it could escape the eyes of no one, and there is not a single Paris historian who has omitted to write upon the subject. The documents which subsist in reference to it – Parliamentary decrees, for instance, and royal edicts, would supply material for a complete history of mendicity, not only detailed but even anecdotal. There was a time when the beggars of Paris organised themselves into troops, which were under the command of a chief. The members of these troops understood their business. The orphans and other little scamps, in groups of three or four, would go out into the streets shivering and half-naked, weeping and begging for bread; ostensible husbands and wives, with their own or other people’s children, exhibited certificates to the effect that their property had been destroyed by lightning; the marchandiers were merchants whom some conflagration had reduced to misery; the piètres excelled in tying their calves up to their thighs and proceeding legless on crutches; while the sabouleux rolled on the ground, with leaps and contortions, foaming – thanks to a piece of soap which they kept in their mouths – as though they were epileptic.

In this connection a droll anecdote may be told. A veteran Parisian beggar had a very beautiful daughter, and many a suitor petitioned the father for her hand. One day a retired soldier, who had taken to mendicancy, came to him to implore the paternal consent. “What are your qualifications?” asked the old man. “I have only one leg,” replied the amorous warrior. “Bah!” cried the father, “you have no chance; only yesterday I refused a man without either legs or arms.”

In the middle ages, however, the humours of mendicancy, were frequently lost in the gravity of the perils to which a city infested by cunning and desperate beggars was exposed. An edict was issued in 1524 condemning mendicants to be whipped and banished. It apparently had little effect, for in the following year they were ordered to quit Paris under pain of being hanged. In 1532 the Parliament ordered that, chained in pairs, they should be employed to clean out the sewers, which at this period were, for the most part, open. In 1561 an ordinance of Charles IX. sentenced all beggars to the galleys during the remainder of their life; for in those days, the offender who once found himself chained to the oar never went on shore again. A Parliamentary decree of 1606 proclaimed that all beggars should be whipped in public by the assistants of the executioner; a particular mark, moreover, was to be placed on their shoulder; while, in virtue of an ordinance of 1602, their heads were shaved – a punishment which was at least beneficial to them from a hygienic point of view.

And now we reach the moment when severely punitive laws against mendicancy were about to give way to preventive measures characterised by humanity. The first person to occupy himself with the fate of the mendicants seems to have been a certain theoretical reformer named Jean Douet de Romp Croissant. He published, in pamphlet form, a series of memoirs addressed to the Queen Regent. Many of the schemes he put forward were wild in the extreme, but his writings contain the germs of one or two excellent institutions. He proposed the organisation of those State pawnshops which were ultimately to be opened in France, though not until 1778. In view of the filthy condition of the Paris streets, the dangers to which pedestrians were exposed from highwaymen, and the extraordinary number of beggars then in the capital, he proposed to employ these beggars in cleaning the town and protecting the citizens. His idea was to place a beggar at every fifty yards along the thoroughfares, armed with a brush and shovel, so as to remove the refuse and to be able to call his next neighbour to the rescue should any wayfarer fall into the hands of thieves. The scheme had its practical and reasonable side, but no attempt was ever made to execute it.

It is to Louis XIV., or more correctly, to M. de Belièvre, first president of the Parliament, that the honour is due of having first acted in this matter with deliberation, method, and success. An edict of the 4th of May, 1656, created the General Hospital, chiefly composed of three establishments: Notre Dame de la Pitié; the Maison de St. Denis or Petit Arsenal, familiarly known as Salpetrière; and Bicêtre. According to Sauval the number of beggars in Paris then exceeded forty thousand. They formed “an independent people, who knew neither law, nor religion, nor superior, nor police; impiety, sensuality, libertinage, were all that reigned amongst them.” De Belièvre’s measure was already accepted in principle, but grave doubts were entertained respecting its application.

The authorities feared that so vast a crowd of lawless people might be able to defy their power. Everything, however, was effected in an orderly manner, and with a facility by no means anticipated. It was announced in all the churches that, on the 7th of May, 1657, the General Hospital would be open to as many of the poor as deserved admission, and at the same time criers went about the streets proclaiming a warning to beggars against ever asking alms again. On the 14th of May every beggar who could be found in Paris was arrested and shut up. The city now found itself delivered from an ancient and formidable scourge.

How complete was the delivery may be seen from the account left of their visit to Paris by two young Dutchmen – De Villers by name – who went to inspect the “Little Arsenal designed for the confinement of paupers accustomed to be in the streets,” and who, expatiating on the admirable plan and general arrangements of the institution, declared it the finest one of the kind imaginable, and that not one beggar was then to be found in Paris.

In course of years, however, in spite of the General Hospital and of the Hôtel des Invalides, opened in 1670 to indigent soldiers, mendicants once more multiplied in the streets of Paris. The French metropolis was indeed an irresistible centre of attraction to malefactors, vagabonds, and beggars. Misery flowed thither not only from the provinces but from abroad. At the close of the seventeenth century a curious and ingenious ordinance was issued for preventing mendicancy, by which any person giving alms to a beggar was liable to a fine of fifty francs. Under regency, the famous Law put forth an emigration scheme for the clearance of vagabonds from Paris. Authority was obtained for the transportation of indigent young men and women from the various pauper institutions to America, and numbers were shipped. The result, however, was apparently unsatisfactory, for in 1725 the Duke of Bourbon ordered that every mendicant who had come from the provinces to Paris should be seized, branded on the arm, and deprived of his possessions.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, recourse was again had to the scheme of Law, and beggars, particularly young and strong ones, were kidnapped for transportation to the colonies by gangs of men in the pay of the authorities. Blunders, however, occurred. Gentlemen’s servants who chanced to be out at night, as well as the sons of artisans, were seized and carried off. And now Paris, so credulous, so ready to believe the most improbable tales, grew terrified. It was said – first in a whisper, then aloud – that Louis XV., devoured by leprosy, could not recover health except by taking each morning a bath of human blood, and that the pauper children who disappeared were bled to death for the benefit of the royal invalid. The rumour went so far as to produce riots, in which a number of the king’s archers were killed and at least one of the kidnappers torn to pieces. The Government now found it necessary to relinquish the emigration project, and every endeavour was made to provide mendicants with employment at home. In 1766 a severe law was passed by which every mendicant caught begging was to be branded on the left arm with the letter “M,” and sent to the galleys for nine years, or for life should the offence be repeated.

Such heavy threats and penalties, however, were useless. The king himself recognised the fact, and, in a wise and beneficent letter, wrote as follows: “I have felt keenly afflicted at the great number of mendicants that fill the streets of Paris and Versailles… We must furnish work for the strong, a hospital for the invalids, and a house of detention for those who resist the benefits of the law.”

The Revolution, like every violent social or political movement, had a disturbing effect on the regular industries, and threw upon the streets of Paris vast numbers of workmen whom want of occupation plunged into a misery rendered still deeper by the prevailing scarcity of bread. The first decree on the subject of mendicancy was issued May 20th, 1790. Needlework in special workshops was to be provided for the women and children, the healthy men were to be put to manual labour; the sick and infirm were to be treated in the hospitals; foreign beggars were to be banished from the country, and provincial beggars conducted back to their native place with pecuniary assistance along the road at the rate of three sous a league, and with the obligation to follow a prescribed route – a clause in the mendicancy law which is to-day still in force.

It was easy, however, to decree the extinction of mendicancy. Unfortunately, mendicants continued to exist. A sharp law was passed whereby every citizen convicted of having given any description of alms to a beggar was condemned to a fine “equivalent to the value of two days’ work”; whilst every person convicted of having solicited money or bread in the streets or public ways was liable to arrest. Under the Directory mendicants were for a time allowed to beg as they chose. They abused their liberty, however, and became importunate and even menacing in their quest of alms. Then they were arrested on all hands by soldiers, who drove them outside the city with blows from the butt-end of their muskets. Once in the country, some of them got into mischief, stopped carriages and robbed pedestrians; so that it was found necessary to issue an edict whereby any beggar bearing firearms or any kind of weapon, even though he had not made use of it, was liable to imprisonment for a period varying from two to five years, with police surveillance to follow.

But rigour and leniency have proved alike powerless in Paris to relieve the city of its beggars. Mendicancy is a profession, and it is not exercised only by extending the hand and whining for alms. It tries to disguise itself under various forms. It opens carriage-doors, sells flowers and lucifers in the streets and on the boulevards, picks up cigar-ends which it vends to illicit tobacco manufacturers at one franc a pound, sings beneath the windows of the rich, turns the handle of the barrel-organ, and lets out, at so much a day, little children to be exhibited for the excitement of public sympathy. That the exhibition of articles for sale from the street gutter is frequently but a pretence everyone knows. The present writer once asked a woman, who sold matches in Paris, whether a good many pedestrians did not give her the sou without requiring anything in return. “Yes, sir,” she replied, in a tone of lament, “but sometimes they take the matches!”

Mendicancy is a profession, and in the exercise of it a good deal of ingenuity, and one might almost say talent, is frequently shown. Not a few Parisian beggars have become historical. Years ago there was a female beggar in Paris, without legs and with only one arm, who could, by a certain trick in her breathing, produce in her interior a sound like the tick of a pendulum. “Listen! ladies and gentlemen,” she used to exclaim, “I have a clock in my stomach!” Her gaping auditors used thereupon to apply their ear to her back. It was true! There was a clock inside her! They could hear the click of the pendulum!

Formerly, in the gardens of the Hôtel Gontaut was stationed an old blind man accompanied by a poodle. Every day he arrived and departed at the same hours. Seated on a camp-stool, with a woollen cap on his head, and enveloped in a large overcoat with seven plaits, he did nothing all day but keep a pair of expressionless eyes directed towards heaven, and shake his tin money-box from time to time. It was a tradition in Paris that he had given his daughter a dowry of three hundred thousand francs on the occasion of her marriage to a notary, and that in the evening, after rattling his money-box all day, the old man could often be seen in a box at the opera, to which he had driven in his carriage.

A blind beggar is always sure of a tolerable income, and, although he may not frequent the opera, he generally lives well. “One day,” says M. Ducamp in his work on Paris, “as I was crossing the Pont des Arts, I saw a woman taking one of the blind beggars his dinner. She put into his hand a metal porringer, which he rapidly uncovered. He smelt it and asked – ‘What do you call this?’ ‘It is stewed mutton and peas,’ replied the woman with a certain expression of fear. ‘Devil take you and the mutton too! You know I only care for beef!’ I retained my alms and kept them for a better occasion.” How profitable a misfortune the loss of sight has long been to Paris beggars may be seen from a report drawn up in 1853 on the subject of mendicancy, which sets forth that “a number of blind beggars come to Paris just for the season, and return with enough money to live comfortably at home through the winter.”

Jugglers at one time abounded in the city of Paris, together with public exhibitors of all kinds; men, for instance, whose stock-in-trade consisted of a dromedary and an ape – which rode through the boulevards on the dromedary’s back. These adventurers so obstructed the traffic that a series of restrictive ordinances were passed on the subject. That of February 28th, 1865, which was based on all the preceding ordinances, provides that every individual wishing to take up the profession of juggler, organ-grinder, singer, or perambulating musician, must be provided with an authorisation from the Préfecture of Police. To obtain this, the applicant must be a Frenchman, must have resided for a year past in the jurisdiction of the Préfecture, and must bear a fair moral character. This authorisation has to be renewed every three months, and the holder must carry on him a numbered metal badge. It is expressly forbidden to mendicants of this class to take with them those of their children who are under sixteen years old, to lend their badge, to divine, prophesy, or interpret dreams, or to perform in public any operation which infringes on the profession of the manicure or the dentist.

The profession of organ-grinder has declined in Paris. The street was his domain, and he was often accompanied by assistants in queer costumes, who grinned, gesticulated, and sang as he played beneath the windows of the well-to-do. Towards 1830 one of these wanderers was well known to Parisians as “the Marquis,” from the costume he wore. Although upwards of fifty years of age, he was extremely nimble, and he excelled in throwing into an open window, on the fourth or fifth floor, a two-sou piece wrapped up in a small book of songs. His customer would thereupon throw him down double the amount. It was asserted by some that he belonged to the secret police, and he, in any case, rendered it important services.

A new organ costs from four hundred to five hundred francs, a second-hand one, with an occasional flat note, one hundred or a hundred and fifty. This is a great expense, and necessitates beforehand a capital such as few of the mendicant class possess. Most organ-grinders, therefore, hire their instrument by the day, paying for a small organ between fifty centimes and a franc; or for a big Cremona organ, which imitates an entire orchestra, ten francs, with another two francs for the hire of the assistant in charge.

These better kind of organ-grinders generally earn a good deal of money; it is no uncommon thing for them to return to their squalid homes with a profit of fifty francs.