le and the niece having met
by chance, ended by consorting together, their favorite refuge, it was
thought, being the limekilns in the direction of Les Moulineaux.

One day then it happened that Alexandre upon calling at Norine's there
encountered Alfred, who came at times to try to extract a half-franc
from old Moineaud, his father. The two young bandits went off together,
chatted, and met again. And from that chance encounter there sprang a
band. Alexandre was living with Richard, and Alfred brought Toinette
to them. Thus they were four in number, and the customary developments
followed: begging at first, the girl putting out her hand at the
instigation of the three prowlers, who remained on the watch and drew
alms by force at nighttime from belated bourgeois encountered in dark
corners; next came vulgar vice and its wonted attendant, blackmail;
and then theft, petty larceny to begin with, the pilfering of things
displayed for sale by shopkeepers, and afterwards more serious affairs,
premeditated expeditions, mapped out like real war plans.

The band slept wherever it could; now in suspicious dingy doss-houses,
now on waste ground. In summer time there were endless saunters through
the woods of the environs, pending the arrival of night, which handed
Paris over to their predatory designs. They found themselves at the
Central Markets, among the crowds on the boulevards, in the low
taverns, along the deserted avenues--indeed, wherever they sniffed the
possibility of a stroke of luck, the chance of snatching the bread of
idleness, or the pleasures of vice. They were like a little clan of
savages on the war-path athwart civilization, living outside the pale of
the laws. They suggested young wild beasts beating the ancestral forest;
they typified the human animal relapsing into barbarism, forsaken since
birth, and evincing the ancient instincts of pillage and carnage. And
like noxious weeds they grew up sturdily, becoming bolder and bolder
each day, exacting a bigger and bigger ransom from the fools who toiled
and moiled, ever extending their thefts and marching along the road to
murder.

Never should it be forgotten that the child, born chancewise, and then
cast upon the pavement, without supervision, without prop or help, rots
there and becomes a terrible ferment of social decomposition. All those
little ones thrown to the gutter, like superfluous kittens are flung
into some sewer, all those forsaken ones, those wander