ers with a certain satisfaction," then, the small retailers, the
old-clothes dealers, plasterers, "those who offer second-hand coats
for sale on the fringes of the market, fourth-rate cooks who, at
the cemetery of the Innocents, sell meat and beans under umbrella
tops,"[3391] next, domestics highly pleased with now being masters of
their masters, kitchen helpers, grooms, lackeys, janitors, every species
of valet, who, in contempt of the law, voted at the elections[3392] and
at the Jacobin club form a group of "silly people" satisfied "that they
were universal geographers because they had ridden post once or twice,"
and that they were politicians "because they had read 'The Four Sons of
Aymon.'"[3393]--But, in this mud, spouting and spreading around in
broad daylight, it is the ordinary scum of great cities which forms the
grossest flux, the outcasts of every trade and profession, dissipated
workmen of all kinds, the irregular and marauding troops of the social
army, the class which, "discharged from La Pitie, run through a career
of disorder and end in Bicetre."[3394] "From La Pitie to Bicetre" is a
well known popular adage. Men of this stamp are without any principle
whatever. If they have fifty francs they live on fifty, and if they have
only five they live on five; spending everything, they are always out of
pocket and save nothing. This is the class that took the Bastille,[3395]
got up the 10th of August, etc. It is the same class which filled the
galleries in the Assembly with all sorts of characters, filling up
the groups," and, during all this time it never did a stroke of work.
Consequently, "a wife who owns a watch, ear-rings, finger-rings, any
jewels, first takes them to the pawnbrokers where they end up being
sold. At this period many of these people owe the butcher, the baker,
the wine-dealer, etc.; nobody trusts them any more. They have ceased to
love their wives, and their children cry for food, while the father is
at the Jacobin club or at the Tuileries. Many of them have abandoned
their position and trade," while, either through "indolence" or
consciousness "of their incapacity,"... "they would with a kind of
sadness see this trade come back to life." That of a political gossip,
of a paid claqueur, is more agreeable, and such is the opinion of
all the idlers, summoned by the bugle to work on the camps around
Paris.----Here,[3396] eight thousand men are paid forty sous a day "to
do nothing"; "the workmen co