Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1

by H. Sutherland Edwards

CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE RAG-PICKER OF PARIS.

The Chiffonnier, or Rag-picker—His Methods and Hour of Work—His Character—A Diogenes—The Chiffonnier de Paris.

PERHAPS the most distinct type of character in Paris is the chiffonnier. Every evening, towards eight o’clock in the summer, and somewhat earlier in the winter, the streets of the capital are scoured by a class of individuals of both sexes, clad in sordid garments, who carry on their back a wicker basket, in their left hand a lantern, and in their right a stick with an iron hook at the end. A provincial or a foreigner might ask with curiosity what part these persons, so strangely armed, play in the social system; but Parisians, to whom they have long been familiar, and to whom they are indeed historical, know them as the chiffonniers or rag-pickers. An observer, if he follows one of these wretched adventurers, will see him stop at every dust-heap lying along the thoroughfares, previously to their being cleared away by the city scavengers. He rummages in these heaps, turning their contents over and over, and with the aid of his stick picks up and thrusts into his basket whatever objects will find a sale in his peculiar market. Not content with collecting those rags or chiffons from which he seems to have derived his name, he gathers up old papers, corks, bones, nails, broken glass, human hair, and even cats and dogs, which, contrary to the regulations, have been flung dead into the streets. Some of the more enterprising of these explorers will, in defiance of the law, strip the walls or hoardings of their placards. Occasionally it happens that the rag-picker finds objects of value, silver spoons, jewels, or even bank-notes, which have accidentally got swept into the rubbish. In these cases he is obliged, under the severest penalties, to surrender the treasure-trove to the nearest commissary of police. The old papers and rags are employed in the manufacture of paper and cardboard; the glass is melted again; the bones are turned into animal black; the nails are thrown in with old iron; the cats and dogs are stripped of their skins, and the hair reappears—according to a vivacious, and, let us hope, imaginative writer—upon the heads of the fashionable, in waving tresses or other elegant forms of coiffure. But this human ferret, who may be seen every night at work in the corners of the Paris streets, is only the emissary of a more exalted chiffonnier: the lord of the iron crook, who does not quit his palace, but simply purchases the nightly harvests, which he afterwards “tests,” sorts, and classifies, so as to sell {361} again to the various trades which may have a use for such merchandise. Everything picked up serves some commercial purpose; each of those vile objects unearthed from the dust-heaps is a chrysalis to which industrial science will give an elegant form and transparent wings. The prices paid by manufacturers of paper and cardboard, who are the chief buyers of rag-pickers’ produce, vary from something under a sou per pound for dirty old rags and papers, to five sous for rags of the very best description.

The rag-picker does not exercise too nice a faculty of discrimination whilst filling his basket. The sifting is the business of the “tester,” a special functionary employed to classify the harvest. He evolves order from the chaos of disgusting rubbish which the opulent rag merchant will presently convert into odourless gold. The professional “testers” enjoy but a short career. The scents exhaled by the accumulated abominations which they handle are so many virulent poisons. It is said that even the lamps go out in the horrible dens where they toil.

The chiffonnier who scours the streets is always a miserable object; the master chiffonnier who buys the contents of his basket is often a millionaire, and splashes with his carriage wheels as he returns from the theatre those wretches who next day will go and sell to him what the city has thrown into the gutter.

Upon the rag-pickers of Paris the law, as might be imagined, keeps an eye; and sundry ordinances regulating their profession have at different periods been issued. The oldest of these forbade them to wander in the Paris streets except by daylight, so that they might not be suspected of participation in night robberies and brawls. In the present day the chiffonnier is required, whilst exercising his profession, to wear an official docket, duly numbered, and attached conspicuously to his indispensable basket. The municipal law prohibits him from walking the streets between midnight and five in the morning. As the reaping of the gutter harvest begins at 8 p.m., and the scavengers do not clear the rubbish away till between 7 and 9 a.m., those rag-pickers who have been carried by their explorations too far from home are obliged to pass the interdicted hours in such filthy hovels as are left open for them.

The chiffonniers of Paris can boast a history. They have played a part in their time, and once they were even invested with civil functions, though these functions were of a sad nature. In 1826 M. Delavan commissioned them to kill in the streets all dogs they could find {362} attached to bakers’ and greengrocers’ carts; and they executed the order with downright ferocity. In 1832, when the cholera invaded Paris, they figured amongst the licensed murderers who massacred those luckless persons whom ignorance and superstition had accused of poisoning the fountains. At the same period they smashed a number of newly-invented dust-carts, intended to clear the streets instantly of rubbish, so that they could only explore it at the depôt where it was shot. The rag-pickers won the day. The authorities yielded before their violence and projected the relegated reforms into the future.

No one would expect to find among the Paris chiffonniers a high moral standard; their work can scarcely have other than a degrading influence upon them. Their numbers are recruited as a rule from the most infamous regions of the capital, and from a social stratum only just above that of the vilest criminality. It has often been said that counts and marquises have sunk, by means of wine, cards, and so forth, into the ranks of the chiffonniers, even as a certain fraction of the English aristocracy are popularly supposed, after driving recklessly through life four-in hand, to end their career on the perch of a hansom cab. In London, it is true, such things have happened, and men of title have been known to adopt even less heroic methods of livelihood than that of driving a hackney vehicle for hire; they have—there is at least one contemporary instance—ground barrel-organs. But these are the very rarest exceptions; and in Paris, although it is not theoretically impossible for an aristocrat to find himself reduced to the basket and crook of the rag-picker, such a case would be an exception infinitely rarer still. So disgusting an occupation would be absolutely the last to which a ruined gentleman would resort.