clock, he was arrested and
taken to prison.'"

Though the orphans took no part in this melancholy conversation, the
sorrow and anxiety depicted in their countenances, showed how much they
felt for the sufferings of Dagobert's wife.

"But the young lady?" cried Frances. "You should have tried to see her,
my good Mother Bunch, and begged her not to abandon my son. She is so
rich that she must have influence, and her protection might save us from
great calamities."

"Alas!" said Mother Bunch, with bitter grief, "we must renounce this last
hope."

"Why?" said Frances. "If this young lady is so good, she will have pity
upon us, when she knows that my son is the only support of a whole
family, and that for him to go to prison is worse than for another,
because it will reduce us all to the greatest misery."

"But this young lady," replied the girl, "according to what I learned
from her weeping maid, was taken last evening to a lunatic asylum: it
appears she is mad."

"Mad! Oh! it is horrible for her, and for us also--for now there is no
hope. What will become of us without my son? Oh, merciful heaven!" The
unfortunate woman hid her face in her hands.

A profound silence followed this heart-rending outburst. Rose and Blanche
exchanged mournful glances, for they perceived that their presence
augmented the weighty embarrassments of this family. Mother Bunch, worn
out with fatigue, a prey to painful emotions, and trembling with cold in
her wet clothes, sank exhausted on a chair, and reflected on their
desperate position.

That position was indeed a cruel one!

Often, in times of political disturbances, or of agitation amongst the
laboring classes, caused by want of work, or by the unjust reduction of
wages (the result of the powerful coalition of the capitalists)--often
are whole families reduced, by a measure of preventive imprisonment, to
as deplorable a position as that of Dagobert's household by Agricola's
arrest--an arrest, which, as will afterwards appear, was entirely owing
to Rodin's arts.

Now, with regard to this "precautionary imprisonment," of which the
victims are almost always honest and industrious mechanics, driven to the
necessity of combining together by the In organization of Labor and the
Insufficiency of Wages, it is painful to see the law, which ought to be
equal for all, refuse to strikers what it grants to masters--because the
latter can dispose of a certain sum of money. Thus, under many
circ