flesh a dirty white, their faces
prematurely aged and with a diabolical intelligence in their sharp eyes.
The children are always old. The old have reached the extremity of
hideous decrepitude. One would say that these veins had never held
healthy human blood, and that for young and old pus had become its
substitute. To these homes return many of the men who wait for work on
the quays, and thus this population, born to crime and every foulness
that human life can know, has its proportion also of honest workers,
whose fortunes have ebbed till they have been left stranded in this
slime, of a quality so tenacious that escape seems impossible. Many of
the lodgings are unoccupied, and at night they become simply dens of
wild beasts,--men and boys who live by petty thieving climbing the
walls, stealing along the passages and up the dark stairways, and
sheltering themselves in every niche and corner. Now and then, when the
outrages become too evident, the police descend suddenly on the
drinking, shouting tenants at will, and for a day or two there is peace
for the rest.

But the quarter is shut in and hedged about by streets of a general
respectable appearance, and thus it is felt to be impossible that such a
spot can exist. It is, however, the breeding-ground of criminals; and
each year swells the quota, whose lives can have but one ending, and who
cost the city in the end many times the amount that in the beginning
would have insured decent homes and training in an industrial school.

It is only the dregs of humanity that remain in such quarters. The
better elements, unless compelled by starvation, flee from it, though
with the tenacity of the Parisian for his own _quartier_, they settle
near it still. All about are strange trades, invented often by the
followers of them, and unknown outside a country which has learned every
method of not only turning an honest penny, but doing it in the most
effective way. Among them all not one can be stranger than that adopted
by Madame Agathe, whose soft voice and plaintive intonations are in
sharpest contrast with her huge proportions, and who began life as one
of the great army of _couturieres_.

With failing eyesight and the terror of starvation upon her, she went
one Sunday, with her last two francs in her pocket, to share them with a
sick cousin, who had been one of the workmen at the Jardin des Plantes.
He, too, was in despair; for an accident had taken from him the use of
his r