yment is much sought after, and to secure it one needs influence and
protectors. Is it not monstrous to see a man seeking work that he may
eat, and finding no work and therefore no food in this great city
resplendent and resonant with wealth? The wife does not eat, the children
do not eat. And then comes black famine, brutishness, and finally revolt
and the snapping of all social ties under the frightful injustice meted
out to poor beings who by their weakness are condemned to death. And the
old workman, he whose limbs have been worn out by half a century of hard
toil, without possibility of saving a copper, on what pallet of agony, in
what dark hole must he not sink to die? Should he then be finished off
with a mallet, like a crippled beast of burden, on the day when ceasing
to work he also ceases to eat? Almost all pass away in the hospitals,
others disappear, unknown, swept off by the muddy flow of the streets.
One morning, on some rotten straw in a loathsome hovel, Pierre found a
poor devil who had died of hunger and had been forgotten there for a
week. The rats had devoured his face.

But it was particularly on an evening of the last winter that Pierre's
heart had overflowed with pity. Awful in winter time are the sufferings
of the poor in their fireless hovels, where the snow penetrates by every
chink. The Seine rolls blocks of ice, the soil is frost-bound, in all
sorts of callings there is an enforced cessation of work. Bands of
urchins, barefooted, scarcely clad, hungry and racked by coughing, wander
about the ragpickers' "rents" and are carried off by sudden hurricanes of
consumption. Pierre found families, women with five and six children, who
had not eaten for three days, and who huddled together in heaps to try to
keep themselves warm. And on that terrible evening, before anybody else,
he went down a dark passage and entered a room of terror, where he found
that a mother had just committed suicide with her five little
ones--driven to it by despair and hunger--a tragedy of misery which for a
few hours would make all Paris shudder! There was not an article of
furniture or linen left in the place; it had been necessary to sell
everything bit by bit to a neighbouring dealer. There was nothing but the
stove where the charcoal was still smoking and a half-emptied palliasse
on which the mother had fallen, suckling her last-born, a babe but three
months old. And a drop of blood had trickled from the nipple of her
bre