“Let’s go up and have a lark,
Let’s go up to the Barrier!”
There used to be a good deal of deep drinking at the Barriers, and violent quarrels not infrequently marked the close of the festive day. Sometimes a drunkard would roll down and lie at full length along the octroi wall. In the ordinary way he would have gone to sleep and woke up comparatively sober. But one of a class of pickpockets who haunted the Barriers was sure to approach him, and, under pretext of lifting him on to his feet, carefully relieve the bewildered victim of the few sous which remained to him. These thieves, who passed their days and nights on the confines of the city, and who, detesting work, lived at the expense of their honest neighbours, were often inveterate malefactors of the worst kind, and the abolition of the Barriers had the highly desirable effect of exterminating them as a class.
THE OCTROI BARRIERS OF PETIT-CHÂTEAU AND GRAND-BERCY.
It may not be inopportune, at this point, to take a view of the criminal population of Paris in general. They afford a study which excites no small degree of combined interest and regret. The number is large in Paris of those who, having repudiated all restraint and banished the last vestige of self-respect, live aloof from society and never touch it except for purposes of injury. Despite the incessant surveillance of which they are the object, despite the laws which hedge them about, accuse and punish them, they remain in the great capital, like an unsubdued tribe, always in revolt, bent upon evil, and often accomplishing it with audacity. They seem to float over civilisation like scum, or to lie at the bottom of it like dregs of a liquid.
Idleness, or at least the instinctive hatred of all regular occupation, desperate want, and a passion for gross pleasures, are among the causes of that vagabondage in Paris which is characterised by defiance of the law, theft, and sometimes murder. Stupidity and irreflection may often have a good deal to do with the matter; but as a rule the Parisian rascal, subsisting by fraud and larceny, expends more ingenuity and energy in the conception and execution of his schemes than would be necessary to make him prosper in some lucrative trade.
VERSAILLES: THE FAÇADE AND THE GREAT FOUNTAIN.