of the Rue Denfert-Rochereau, at a short
distance from the former outer Boulevard. A big gray wall stretched out,
the frigid facade of a State establishment, and it was through a quiet,
simple, unobtrusive little doorway at the end of this wall that La
Couteau went in with the child. Mathieu followed her, but he did not
enter the office where a woman received the children. He felt too much
emotion, and feared lest he should be questioned; it was, indeed, as if
he considered himself an accomplice in a crime. Though La Couteau told
him that the woman would ask him nothing, and the strictest secrecy
was always observed, he preferred to wait in an anteroom, which led
to several closed compartments, where the persons who came to deposit
children were placed to wait their turn. And he watched the woman go
off, carrying the little one, who still remained extremely well behaved,
with a vacant stare in his big eyes.

Though the interval of waiting could not have lasted more than twenty
minutes, it seemed terribly long to Mathieu. Lifeless quietude reigned
in that stern, sad-looking anteroom, wainscoted with oak, and pervaded
with the smell peculiar to hospitals. All he heard was the occasional
faint wail of some infant, above which now and then rose a heavy,
restrained sob, coming perhaps from some mother who was waiting in one
of the adjoining compartments. And he recalled the "slide" of other
days, the box which turned within the wall. The mother crept up,
concealing herself much as possible from view, thrust her baby into
the cavity as into an oven, gave a tug at the bell-chain, and then
precipitately fled. Mathieu was too young to have seen the real thing;
he had only seen it represented in a melodrama at the Port St. Martin
Theatre.* But how many stories it recalled--hampers of poor little
creatures brought up from the provinces and deposited at the hospital
by carriers; the stolen babes of Duchesses, here cast into oblivion by
suspicious-looking men; the hundreds of wretched work-girls too who had
here rid themselves of their unfortunate children. Now, however, the
children had to be deposited openly, and there was a staff which took
down names and dates, while giving a pledge of inviolable secrecy.
Mathieu was aware that some few people imputed to the suppression of
the slide system the great increase in criminal offences. But each day
public opinion condemns more and more the attitude of society in former
times, and dis