t, as there is to-day, a policeman at
the corner of every street (a benefit which there is no time to discuss
here); stray children abounded in Paris. The statistics give an average
of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually at that
period, by the police patrols, in unenclosed lands, in houses in process
of construction, and under the arches of the bridges. One of these
nests, which has become famous, produced "the swallows of the bridge of
Arcola." This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social symptoms. All
crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.

Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless. In a relative
measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the
exception is just. While in any other great city the vagabond child is
a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in
some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the
public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy
of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the
surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to
put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our
popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the
idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of
the ocean. To breathe Paris preserves the soul.

What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which
one experiences every time that one meets one of these children around
whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken
family. In the civilization of the present day, incomplete as it still
is, it is not a very abnormal thing to behold these fractured families
pouring themselves out into the darkness, not knowing clearly what has
become of their children, and allowing their own entrails to fall on the
public highway. Hence these obscure destinies. This is called, for this
sad thing has given rise to an expression, "to be cast on the pavements
of Paris."

Let it be said by the way, that this abandonment of children was not
discouraged by the ancient monarchy. A little of Egypt and Bohemia in
the lower regions suited the upper spheres, and compassed the aims of
the powerful. The hatred of instruction for the children of the people
was a dogma. What is the use of "half-lights"? Such was the countersign.
Now, the erring child is the coro