scraggy hussy, who, however puny she might look, was a terrible little creature with the eyes and the teeth of a wolf, lived under the bridges, in the depths of the stone quarries, in the dingy garrets of haunts of vice, so that at sixteen she was already an expert thief.  Her fate was similar to Alfred’s; here was a girl morally abandoned, then contaminated by the life of the streets, and carried off to a criminal career.  And, indeed, the uncle and the niece having met by chance, ended by consorting together, their favorite refuge, it was thought, being the limekilns in the direction of Les Moulineaux.

One day then it happened that Alexandre upon calling at Norine’s there encountered Alfred, who came at times to try to extract a half-franc from old Moineaud, his father.  The two young bandits went off together, chatted, and met again.  And from that chance encounter there sprang a band.  Alexandre was living with Richard, and Alfred brought Toinette to them.  Thus they were four in number, and the customary developments followed:  begging at first, the girl putting out her hand at the instigation of the three prowlers, who remained on the watch and drew alms by force at nighttime from belated bourgeois encountered in dark corners; next came vulgar vice and its wonted attendant, blackmail; and then theft, petty larceny to begin with, the pilfering of things displayed for sale by shopkeepers, and afterwards more serious affairs, premeditated expeditions, mapped out like real war plans.

The band slept wherever it could; now in suspicious dingy doss-houses, now on waste ground.  In summer time there were endless saunters through the woods of the environs, pending the arrival of night, which handed Paris over to their predatory designs.  They found themselves at the Central Markets, among the crowds on the boulevards, in the low taverns, along the deserted avenues—­indeed, wherever they sniffed the possibility of a stroke of luck, the chance of snatching the bread of idleness, or the pleasures of vice.  They were like a little clan of savages on the war-path athwart civilization, living outside the pale of the laws.  They suggested young wild beasts beating the ancestral forest; they typified the human animal relapsing into barbarism, forsaken since birth, and evincing the ancient instincts of pillage and carnage.  And like noxious weeds they grew up sturdily, becoming bolder and bolder each day, exacting a bigger and bigger ransom from the fools who toiled and moiled, ever extending their thefts and marching along the road to murder.

Never should it be forgotten that the child, born chancewise, and then cast upon the pavement, without supervision, without prop or help, rots there and becomes a terrible ferment of social decomposition.  All those little ones thrown to the gutter, like superfluous kittens are flung into some sewer, all those forsaken ones, those wanderers of the pavement who beg, and thieve, and indulge in vice, form the dung-heap in which the worst crimes germinate.  Childhood left to wretchedness breeds a fearful nucleus of infection in the tragic gloom of the depths of Paris.  Those who are thus imprudently cast into the streets yield a harvest of brigandage—­that frightful harvest of evil which makes all society totter.