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And when the gold and silver workers stirred up strife because the rag-pickers would come into the union, did not the kurios point out that, under an autocracy of masters they themselves might be picking rags on the morrow? But the actors and fun-makers have not yet wrangled.
It is now one of the dirtiest streets of the Twelfth Arrondissement, the poorest quarter of Paris, that in which two-thirds of the population lack firing in winter, which leaves most brats at the gate of the Foundling Hospital, which sends most beggars to the poorhouse, most rag-pickers to the street corners, most decrepit old folks to bask against the walls on which the sun shines, most delinquents to the police courts.
Acrobats practising their tours de force, tragedians with tense faces declaiming in a high falsetto to imaginary audiences, rag-pickers sorting their fulsome wares with iron-pointed sticks, herds of coarse, black swine being bought and sold, while in the shelter of the enormous buttresses archers erect paper targets some eight inches square and exercise their art with solemn dignity, elaborate posturing and considerable dexterity.
"Rag-pickers collect all the rags and old linen of Europe," the printer concluded, "and buy any kind of tissue. The rags are sorted and warehoused by the wholesale rag merchants, who supply the paper-mills.
If youth is the hope of the country, the sight was encouraging, for children were in the gutters, on the house steps, at all the windows. The houses seemed bursting with humanity, and in nearly every room of the packed tenements, whether the inmates were sick or hungry, some sort of industry was carried on. In the damp basements were junk-dealers, rag-pickers, goose-pickers.
You put on ze stone: 'Marie Dubois, ze beloved daughter of Georges and Marianne Dubois, rag-pickers of Paris. That will be a last leetle joke, hein?" "It's as you wish," he said coldly. He forced back the natural questions that came to him.
Men who are kept by a commonplace-book go about raking everywhere for glittering scraps, which they carry home to be sorted in their æsthetic junk-shop. Any portable bit that strikes the fancy is a thought. There are literary rag-pickers of every degree of ability; and a great deal of judgment can be shown in finding the scrap or nail you want in a heap of rubbish.
A quiet carelessness of other people's opinions formed part of his effect of poise; the opinions of dukes would have affected him as little as those of rag-pickers, unless they recommended themselves to that judicial spot in his brain at which he tried them.
"The devil he was!" said Dumoulin, somewhat out of countenance, though in general not over-scrupulous in the choice of his bottle-companions: but, after the first surprise, he resumed, with the most charming amenity: "There are some rag-pickers very high by scent I mean descent!"
News-boys, street-sweepers, rag-pickers, begging girls filled the galleries of these places of amusement.
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