Page 990 - les-miserables

CHAPTER VI

A BIT OF HISTORY

At the epoch, nearly contemporary by the way, when the
action of this book takes place, there was not, as there is to-
day, a policeman at the corner of every street (a benefit which
there is no time to discuss here); stray children abounded in
Paris. The statistics give an average of two hundred and six-
ty homeless children picked up annually at that period, by
the police patrols, in unenclosed lands, in houses in process
of construction, and under the arches of the bridges. One of
these nests, which has become famous, produced ‘the swal-
lows of the bridge of Arcola.’ This is, moreover, the most
disastrous of social symptoms. All crimes of the man begin
in the vagabondage of the child.
Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless.
In a relative measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we
have just recalled, the exception is just. While in any other
great city the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly ev-
erywhere the child left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed
and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the pub-
lic vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the
street boy of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced

990 Les Miserables