and all-powerful source of interest
had entered into it, and by degrees he became the old priest's passionate
helper. It was a long way from Neuilly to the Rue de Charonne, and at
first he only made the journey twice a week. But afterwards he bestirred
himself every day, leaving home in the morning and not returning until
night. As the three rooms no longer sufficed for the asylum, he rented
the first floor of the house, reserving for himself a chamber in which
ultimately he often slept. And all his modest income was expended there,
in the prompt succouring of poor children; and the old priest, delighted,
touched to tears by the young devoted help which had come to him from
heaven, would often embrace Pierre, weeping, and call him a child of God.

It was then that Pierre knew want and wretchedness--wicked, abominable
wretchedness; then that he lived amidst it for two long years. The
acquaintance began with the poor little beings whom he picked up on the
pavements, or whom kind-hearted neighbours brought to him now that the
asylum was known in the district--little boys, little girls, tiny mites
stranded on the streets whilst their fathers and mothers were toiling,
drinking, or dying. The father had often disappeared, the mother had gone
wrong, drunkenness and debauchery had followed slack times into the home;
and then the brood was swept into the gutter, and the younger ones half
perished of cold and hunger on the footways, whilst their elders betook
themselves to courses of vice and crime. One evening Pierre rescued from
the wheels of a stone-dray two little nippers, brothers, who could not
even give him an address, tell him whence they had come. On another
evening he returned to the asylum with a little girl in his arms, a
fair-haired little angel, barely three years old, whom he had found on a
bench, and who sobbed, saying that her mother had left her there. And by
a logical chain of circumstances, after dealing with the fleshless,
pitiful fledglings ousted from their nests, he came to deal with the
parents, to enter their hovels, penetrating each day further and further
into a hellish sphere, and ultimately acquiring knowledge of all its
frightful horror, his heart meantime bleeding, rent by terrified anguish
and impotent charity.

Oh! the grievous City of Misery, the bottomless abyss of human suffering
and degradation--how frightful were his journeys through it during those
two years which distracted his whole being