from the point of view of a perfect commonwealth,
and, perhaps, even more to be commiserated, the immense army of the
helpless and sickly poor,--paupers, paralytics, scrofulous, consumptive,
idiotic, cancerous,--demands from the State or the municipal
administration a machinery as complex and as extensive as the criminals.
For a multitude of these unfortunates the words of Victor Hugo are true:
"They begin in the hospital, and end in the hospice." "The child comes
into the world in a _Maternite_, and, later, if life has not been
generous to him, he finishes his days in one of the asylums for the
aged, at Bicetre, at the Salpetriere, at Debrousse, at Brevannes, at
Ivry, after having more than once paid his tribute to sickness in the
wards of some hospital! And still more, at intervals, during certain
difficult hours, he has been obliged to ask aid of the Bureau de
Bienfaisance, so that, during the whole of his life, this unlucky one
has been the pensioner of the _Assistance Publique_."

[Illustration: ARREST OF A DANGEROUS MALEFACTOR BY "AGENTS DE LA SURETE"
IN THE QUARTIER BELLEVILLE, CELEBRATED FOR ITS "GUINGUETTES."

After a drawing by M. Martin.]

Very fortunate are those who succeed in obtaining a bed at the hospice
in which to end their days; the number of applicants each year exceeds
by three or four thousand the number of vacancies. The crippled and
incurable paupers, for whom all labor is impossible, are admitted
without regard to age; the octogenarians, cancerous, blind, and
epileptic, and the sick transferred from the hospitals to the hospices,
are always eligible; but the slightest misdemeanor recorded on their
civil papers, even though atoned for by a long life of honesty, is fatal
to the hopes of the unfortunate aged;--for them there is no asylum but
the Depot de Mendicite. The most celebrated of these hospices of Paris
are the Bicetre and the Salpetriere; the former at Gentilly, about a
kilometre from the southern fortifications, and the latter on the
Boulevard d'Hopital. The Bicetre especially, under the ancient regime,
represented everything that was abhorrent in a mediaeval hospital,
asylum, and jail combined; it was "at once a prison, a depot de
mendicite, an asylum for the aged, a special hospital, a lunatic asylum,
a political Bastille, an establishment for receiving sick children." It
owes its name, it is recorded, to Jean de Pontoise, Bishop of
Winchester,--corrupted into Bicetre!--who built a ch