ses can they have? They have everything,
everything that one can have: diseases of children and diseases of
men. The fruit of vice and poverty, they bring into the world hideous
phenomena of heredity at their very birth. This one has a perforated
palate, and this great copper-coloured patches on the forehead, all
of them rickety. Then they are dying of hunger. Notwithstanding the
spoonfuls of milk, of sweetened water, which are forced down their
throats, notwithstanding the feeding-bottle employed now and then,
though against orders, they perish of inanition. These little
creatures, worn out before birth, require the most tender and the most
strengthening food; the goats might perhaps be able to give it, but
apparently they have sworn not to suck the goats. And this is what
makes the dormitory mournful and silent, not one of those little
clinched-fisted tempers, one of those cries showing the pink and firm
gums in which the child makes trial of his lungs and strength; only a
plaintive moaning, as it were the disquiet of a soul that turns over
and over in a little sick body, without being able to find a comfortable
place to rest there.

Jenkins and the director, who have seen the bad impression produced on
their guests by this inspection of the dormitory, try to put a little
life into the situation, talk very loudly in a good-natured, complacent,
satisfied way. Jenkins shakes hands warmly with the superintendent.

"Well, Mme. Polge, and how are our little nurslings getting on?"

"As you see, M. le Docteur," she replies, pointing to the beds.

This tall Mme. Polge is funereal in her green dress, the ideal of
dry-nurses. She completes the picture.

But where has Monsieur the Departmental Secretary gone? He has stopped
before a cot which he examines sadly, as he stands nodding his head.

"_Bigre de bigre!_" says Pompon in a low voice to Mme. Polge. "It is the
Wallachian."

The little blue placard hung over the cot, as in the foundling
hospitals, states the child's nationality: "Moldo, Wallachian." What a
piece of ill-luck that Monsieur the Secretary's attention should have
been attracted to that particular child! Oh, that poor little head lying
on the pillow, its linen cap askew, with pinched nostrils, and mouth
half opened by a quick, panting respiration, the breathing of the newly
born, of those also who are about to die.

"Is he ill?" asked Monsieur the Secretary softly of the director, who
has come up to him.