hildren, legitimate, natural, or stolen. I was assured
that in this little dwelling and in the others dwelt more than five
hundred large families, piled one upon the other. Large as is this
court, it was formerly much more so. On every side it has been
encroached upon by lodgings, low, sunken, dark, and deformed,
constructed of earth and of mud, and all of them crowded with the evil
poor.'

"In fact, under Francois I the Cour des Miracles had a physiognomy much
more strongly marked than under Louis XIV. The narrow and miry streets,
insinuating themselves between the hovels in wood, halting and crippled,
turned and returned upon themselves, to end finally in a repulsive
sewer. Neither air nor sunshine ever penetrated into these infamous
alleys, from which escaped, at all seasons of the year, nauseating
odors, and too often, also, pestilential miasmas. There vegetated in the
most sordid uncleanliness the subjects of the kingdom of beggary. All
that Paris illegally received in the way of mendicants, false cripples,
false blind, false lepers horrible to see, covered with ulcers, there
wallowed in orgies, in frantic feasting, in gambling....

". . . All these _truands_ recognized a veritable hierarchy; there were to
be distinguished among them three distinct classes,--the _capons_, or
_voleurs_ (thieves); the _francs-mitous_, or _mendiants_ (beggars), and
the _rifodes_, or _vagabonds_. All together formed a kingdom, the chief
of which was called the grand Coesre; he carried a banner on which was
depicted a dead dog, and, quite like his colleague, the King of France,
he had a court and courtiers.

"It was the kingdom of _Argot_ (cant, slang), the code or the formula of
which prescribed theft and plunder.

"Its enclosure, restricted to the Cour des Miracles, was place of refuge
[legal asylum]; all the historians have repeated it, but we do not think
that this right had ever been officially recognized, and it existed
rather through force of circumstances; in this sense, that when a thief
or an assassin had taken refuge in one of the dens of which we have
spoken, it was found more convenient to leave him there in peace than
to run the risk of taking him out of it. However this may be, the
_argotiers_ were quite masters in their own house, and enjoyed in
complete liberty the right of living as seemed good to them. In order
that it might not be permitted that they should be accused of wanting
for religion, they had stolen a st