to a variety of those misshapen fungi from the under side of civilization.
Those beings, who were not very lavish with their countenances, were not among the men whom one sees passing along the streets. Fatigued by the wild nights which they passed, they went off by day to sleep, sometimes in the lime-kilns, sometimes in the abandoned quarries of Montmatre or Montrouge, sometimes in the sewers. They ran to earth.
What became of these men?
They still exist.
They have always existed. Horace speaks of them:
Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, mendici, mimae; and so long as society remains what it is, they will remain what they are.
Beneath the obscure roof of their cavern, they are continually born again from the social ooze. They return, spectres, but always identical; only, they no longer bear the same names and they are no longer in the same skins. The individuals extirpated, the tribe subsists.
They always have the same faculties.
From the vagrant to the tramp, the race is maintained in its purity.
They divine purses in pockets, they scent out watches in fobs.
Gold and silver possess an odor for them.
There exist ingenuous bourgeois, of whom it might be said, that they have a "stealable" air.
These men patiently pursue these bourgeois.
They experience the quivers of a spider at the passage of a stranger or of a man from the country.