The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

Of course, the laws against these abandonments were promptly enforced—the unfortunate women were easily punished. A girl who killed her offspring was hung, and others who were caught leaving children in solitary places were whipped and disgraced in the cities and villages where they lived.

By an edict of Henry II., under penalty of punishment, a woman enceinte was obliged to declare her condition; and to add to this bungling legislative effort, she was obliged to tell who the guilty man was, the maxim creditur virgini being accepted everywhere. The attempts at curing the ills failed, for, while the intentions of the legislators were undoubtedly honest, they only exposed shameless conditions, made the unfortunate suffer even more, brought ruin to many honest families, and gain to shameless women only. The number of children abandoned and murdered in defiance of the regulations increased instead of decreasing.

At this time there came an individual effort to better things, by a woman whose name is not even known and whose efforts at a noble work have, owing to the actions of her servants, been much misinterpreted.

Living in a house in the Cité de Saint-Landry, Paris, with two servants, she received every morning the infants that the soldiers (or police) had collected during the night. So many were eventually turned over to her, that she was unable to feed them, and many died in her own house for lack of food. In the crowded conditions we are also told a selection[429] was made and some of the children were exposed again, or at least they were turned over to some charitable or interested person who would accept them. The care of the children devolving finally on the two servants, many of them are said to have perished from the drugs they were given to keep them quiet. The availability of children as beggars led the servants to look on them as a means of money making, and they were sold for various cruel and evil purposes, a condition that eventually led to the reform undertaken by Vincent de Paul.

The fact that they frequently fell into the hands of magicians, mountebanks, and pedlars, who deformed them in order to make them of assistance in earning a livelihood, is attested by the biographer of Vincent.

“Returning from one of his missions,” says Maury, “Vincent de Paul, whom I have dared to call almost the visible angel of God, found under the walls of Paris one of these infants, in the hands of a beggar, who was engaged in deforming the limbs of the child. Although almost overcome with horror, he ran to the savage with that intrepidity with which the virtuous man always attacks crime.

“‘Barbarian,’ he cried, ‘how you deceive me—from a distance I took you for a man!’

“He snatched the victim from its persecutor, carried it in his arms across Paris, gathered a crowd about him and called on them to witness the brutality of the day and place in which they lived. A few days later he had founded his first institution for children, and the cause of children had enrolled one of its noblest champions.”

In order to thoroughly understand the situation, a number of charitable women under the guidance of Madame Legas, niece of the Lord Chancellor Marillac,[430] went to the house in the Cité de Saint-Landry and studied the question from the inside of the house. Their horror at the things they saw led them to declare that the children massacred by Herod were fortunate in comparison with the condition of the orphans of Paris.[431] As it was impossible to take charge of all the children then in the Cité de Saint-Landry twelve children were taken, and in 1638, under the care of Madame Legas and some charitable women, a house was opened for them in the Faubourg Saint-Victor. As they were able to enlarge the scope of their institution, more and more children were taken care of; the enthusiasm of these women ran so high under the glowing example of Vincent, that even in the dead of night in the cold corners, they would be found going about the streets of Paris, into the worst and least lighted sections, doing police duty, gathering the unfortunate victims, and carrying them to the house in the Faubourg Saint-Victor.[432]