your daughters to the police. Friends, have a care, have
mercy. Women, unhappy women, we are not in the habit of bestowing much
thought on them. We trust to the women not having received a man's
education, we prevent their reading, we prevent their thinking, we
prevent their occupying themselves with politics; will you prevent them
from going to the dead-house this evening, and recognizing your bodies?
Let us see, those who have families must be tractable, and shake hands
with us and take themselves off, and leave us here alone to attend to
this affair. I know well that courage is required to leave, that it is
hard; but the harder it is, the more meritorious. You say: 'I have a
gun, I am at the barricade; so much the worse, I shall remain there.' So
much the worse is easily said. My friends, there is a morrow; you will
not be here to-morrow, but your families will; and what sufferings! See,
here is a pretty, healthy child, with cheeks like an apple, who babbles,
prattles, chatters, who laughs, who smells sweet beneath your kiss,--and
do you know what becomes of him when he is abandoned? I have seen one,
a very small creature, no taller than that. His father was dead. Poor
people had taken him in out of charity, but they had bread only for
themselves. The child was always hungry. It was winter. He did not cry.
You could see him approach the stove, in which there was never any fire,
and whose pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay. His breathing
was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs flaccid, his belly prominent. He
said nothing. If you spoke to him, he did not answer. He is dead. He was
taken to the Necker Hospital, where I saw him. I was house-surgeon in
that hospital. Now, if there are any fathers among you, fathers whose
happiness it is to stroll on Sundays holding their child's tiny hand in
their robust hand, let each one of those fathers imagine that this child
is his own. That poor brat, I remember, and I seem to see him now, when
he lay nude on the dissecting table, how his ribs stood out on his skin
like the graves beneath the grass in a cemetery. A sort of mud was found
in his stomach. There were ashes in his teeth. Come, let us examine
ourselves conscientiously and take counsel with our heart. Statistics
show that the mortality among abandoned children is fifty-five per cent.
I repeat, it is a question of women, it concerns mothers, it concerns
young girls, it concerns little children. Who is talking to you