filthy shoes. Guillaume pointed to him in
silence. Then, a few steps farther on, Pierre in his turn pointed to a
ragged girl, crouching, asleep with open month, in the corner of a
doorway. There was no need for the brothers to express in words all the
compassion and anger which stirred their hearts. At long intervals
policemen, walking slowly two by two, shook the poor wretches and
compelled them to rise and walk on and on. Occasionally, if they found
them suspicious or refractory, they marched them off to the
police-station. And then rancour and the contagion of imprisonment often
transformed a mere vagabond into a thief or a murderer.

In the Rue des Martyrs and the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, the brothers
found night-birds of another kind, women who slunk past them, close to
the house-fronts, and men and hussies who belaboured one another with
blows. Then, upon the grand boulevards, on the thresholds of lofty black
houses, only one row of whose windows flared in the night, pale-faced
individuals, who had just come down from their clubs, stood lighting
cigars before going home. A lady with a ball wrap over her evening gown
went by accompanied by a servant. A few cabs, moreover, still jogged up
and down the roadway, while others, which had been waiting for hours,
stood on their ranks in rows, with drivers and horses alike asleep. And
as one boulevard after another was reached, the Boulevard Poissonniere,
the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, the Boulevard St. Denis, and so forth, as
far as the Place de la Republique, there came fresh want and misery, more
forsaken and hungry ones, more and more of the human "waste" that is cast
into the streets and the darkness. And on the other hand, an army of
street-sweepers was now appearing to remove all the filth of the past
four and twenty hours, in order that Paris, spruce already at sunrise,
might not blush for having thrown up such a mass of dirt and
loathsomeness in the course of a single day.

It was, however, more particularly after following the Boulevard
Voltaire, and drawing near to the districts of La Roquette and Charonne,
that the brothers felt they were returning to a sphere of labour where
there was often lack of food, and where life was but so much pain. Pierre
found himself at home here. In former days, accompanied by good Abbe
Rose, visiting despairing ones, distributing alms, picking up children
who had sunk to the gutter, he had a hundred times perambulated every one