Part 9 (1/2)
There are wages for every child; and he sees this, and does not so well see that they earned also at home, and had some things that the factory stops, for always.
”For me, I am weaver of ribbons, and I love them well, all the bright, beautiful colors. I look at the windows of my St. Etienne and feel the color like a song in my heart, and while I weave I see them always, and could even think that I spin them from my own mind.
”That is a fancy that has rest when the days are long, and the sound of the mill in my ears, and the beat of the machines, that I feel sometimes are cruel, for one can never stop, but must go on always. I think in myself, as I see the children, that I shall never let mine stand with them, and indeed there is no need, since we are all earning, and there is money saved, and this is all true for long. The children are come.
Three boys are mine; two with Armand's eyes, and one with mine, whom Armand loves best because of this, but seeks well to make no difference, and we call him Etienne for my saint and my church. And, madame, I think often that more heaven is in him than we often know, and perhaps because I have prayed always under the window where the lights are all at last one glory, and the color itself is a prayer, Etienne is so born that he must have it, too. I take him there a baby, and he stretches his hands and smiles. He does not shout like the others, but his smile seems from heaven. He is an artist. He draws always with a bit of charcoal, with anything, and I think that he shall study, and, it may be, make other beautiful things that may live in a new St. Etienne, or in some other place in this Paris that I love; and I am happy.
”Then comes the time, madame, that one remembers and prays to forget, till one knows that it may be the good G.o.d's way of telling us how wrong we are and what we must learn. First it is Armand, who has become revolutionary,--what you call to-day communist,--and who is found in what are called plots, and tried and imprisoned. It was not for long. He would have come to me again, but the fever comes and kills many; he dies and I cannot be with him,--no, nor even see him when they take him to burial. I go in a dream. I will not believe it; and then my father is hurt. He is caught in one of those machines that my mother so hates, and his hand is gone and his arm crushed.
”Now the children must earn. There is no other way. For Armand and Pierre I could bear it, since they are stronger, but for Etienne, no. He comes from school that he loves, and must take his place behind the loom. He is patient; he says, even, he is glad to earn for us all; but he is pale, and the light in his eyes grows dim, save when, night and morning, he kneels with me under my window and feels it as I do.
”Then evil days are here, and always more and more evil. Month by month wages are less and food is more. My mother is dead, too, and my father quite helpless, and my brother that has never been quite as others, and so cannot earn. We work always. My boys know well all that must be known, but at seventeen Armand is tall and strong as a man, and he is taken for soldier, and he, too, never comes to us again. I work more and more, and if I earn two francs for the day am glad, but now Etienne is sick and I see well that he cannot escape. 'It is the country he needs,'
says the doctor. 'He must be taken to the country if he is to live;' but these are words. I pray,--I pray always that succor may come, but it comes not, nor can I even be with him in his pain, since I must work always. And so it is, madame, that one day when I return, my father lies on his bed weeping, and the priest is there and looks with pity upon me, and my Etienne lies there still, and the smile that was his only is on his face.
”That is all, madame. My life has ended there. But it goes on for others still and can. My father has lived till I too am almost old. My brother lives yet, and my boy, Pierre, who was shot at Balaklava, he has two children and his wife, who is _couturiere_, and I must aid them. I remain weaver, and I earn always the same. Wages stay as in the beginning, but all else is more and more. One may live, but that is all. Many days we have only bread; sometimes not enough even of that.
But the end comes. I have always my St. Etienne, and often under the window I see my Etienne's smile, and know well the good G.o.d has cared for him, and I need no more. I could wish only that the children might be saved, but I cannot tell. France needs them; but I think well she needs them more as souls than as hands that earn wages, though truly I am old and it may be that I do not know what is best. Tell me, madame, must the children also work always with you, or do you care for other things than work, and is there time for one to live and grow as a plant in the suns.h.i.+ne? That is what I wish for the children; but Paris knows no such life, nor can it, since we must live, and so I must wait, and that is all.”
CHAPTER XIX.
IN THE RUE JEANNE D'ARC.
”No, madame, unless one has genius or much money in the beginning, it is only possible to live, and sometimes one believes that it is not living.
If it were not that all in Paris is so beautiful, how would I have borne much that I have known? But always, when even the hunger has been most sharp, has been the sky so blue and clear, and the sun s.h.i.+ning down on the beautiful boulevards, and all so bright, so gay, why should I show a face of sorrow?
”I have seen the war, it is true. I have known almost the starving, for in those days all go hungry; most of all, those who have little to buy with. But one bears the hunger better when one has been born to it, and that is what has been for me.
”In the Rue Jeanne d'Arc we are all hungry, and it is as true to-day, yes, more true, than in the days when I was young. The charitable, who give more and more each year in Paris, will not believe there is such a quarter, but for us, we know. Have you seen the Rue Jeanne d'Arc, madame? Do you know what can be for this Paris that is so fair?”
This question came in the square before old Notre Dame, still the church of the poor, its gray towers and carved portals dearer to them than to the Paris which counts the Madeleine a far better possession than this n.o.blest of all French cathedrals. Save for such reminder this quarter might have remained unvisited, since even philanthropic Paris appears to have little or no knowledge of it, and it is far beyond the distance to which the most curious tourist is likely to penetrate.
On by the Halle aux Vins, with its stifling, fermenting, alcoholic odors, and then by the Jardin des Plantes, and beyond, the blank walls of many manufactories stretching along the Seine,--this for one sh.o.r.e.
On the other lies La Rapee, with the windows of innumerable wine shops flaming in the sun, and further on, Bercy, the s.h.i.+p bank of the river, covered with wine-casks and a throng of drays and draymen; of _debardeurs_, whose business it is to unload wood or to break up old boats into material for kindling; and of the host whose business is on and about the river.
They are of the same order as the London Dock laborers, and, like the majority of this cla.s.s there and here, know every extremity of want. But it is a pretty picture from which one turns from the right, pa.s.sing up the noisy boulevard of the Gare d'Orleans, toward the quarter of the Gobelins. This quarter has its independent name and place like the ”City of the Sun.” Like that it knows every depth of poverty, but, unlike that, suns.h.i.+ne and s.p.a.ce are quite unknown. The buildings are piled together, great ma.s.ses separated by blind alleys, some fifteen hundred lodgings in all, and the owner of many of them is a prominent philanthropist, whose name heads the list of directors for various charitable inst.i.tutions, but whose feet, we must believe, can hardly be acquainted with those alleys and stairways, narrow, dark, and foul. The unpaved ways show gaping holes in which the greasy mud lies thick or mingles with the pools of standing water, fed from every house and fermenting with rottenness.
The sidewalks, once asphalted, are cracked in long seams and holes, where the same water does its work, and where hideous exhalations poison the air. Within it is still worse; filth trickles down the walls and mingles under foot, the corridors seeming rather sewers than pa.s.sages for human beings, while the cellars are simply reservoirs for the same deposits. Above in the narrow rooms huddle the dwellers in those lodgings; whole families in one room, its single window looking on a dark court where one sees swarms of half-naked children, ma.s.sed together like so many maggots, their flabby 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 subst.i.tute. 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 pa.s.sages 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 right arm, and there were two children who must be fed.
”What to do! what to do!” he cried; and then, as he saw the tears running down Madame Agathe's cheeks, he in turn, with the ease of his nation, wept also.