on a year to support them, and God knows how they
were bedded and fed! Water, straw, bread, and two ounces of salted
grease, the whole at an expense of five sous a day; and, as the price
of provisions for twenty years back had increased more than a third,
the keeper who had them in charge was obliged to make them fast or ruin
himself.--With respect to the mode of filling the depots, the police are
Turks in their treatment of the lower class; they strike into the
heap, their broom bruising as many as they sweep out. According to the
ordinance of 1778, writes an intendant,[5334] "the police must arrest
not only beggars and vagabonds whom they encounter but, again, those
denounced as such or as suspected persons. The citizen, the most
irreproachable in his conduct and the least open to suspicion of
vagabondage, is not sure of not being shut up in the depot, as his
freedom depends on a policeman who is constantly liable to be deceived
by a false denunciation or corrupted by a bribe. I have seen in the
depot at Rennes several husbands arrested solely through the
denunciation of their wives, and as many women through that of their
husbands; several children by the first wife at the solicitation of
their step-mothers; many female domestics pregnant by the masters they
served, shut up at their instigation, and girls in the same situation at
the instance of their seducers; children denounced by their fathers, and
fathers denounced by their children; all without the slightest evidence
of vagabondage or mendicity. . . . No decision of the provost's court
exists restoring the incarcerated to their liberty, notwithstanding the
infinite number arrested unjustly."

Suppose that a human intendant, like this one, sets them at liberty:
there they are in the streets, without a penny, beggars through the
action of a law which proscribes mendicity and which adds to the
wretched it prosecutes the wretched it creates, still more embittered
and corrupt in body and in soul.

"It nearly always happens," says the same intendant, "that the
prisoners, arrested twenty-five or thirty leagues from the depot, are
not confined there until three or four months after their arrest,
and sometimes longer. Meanwhile, they are transferred from brigade to
brigade, in the prisons found along the road, where they remain until
the number increases sufficiently to form a convoy. Men and women are
confined in the same prison, the result of which is, the females not