Others of the former demons who howled in the Commune mobs are now doing the congenial work of thievery which they did before the Commune days, and especially during them.  They are not the worst-looking of the demons.  A thief is generally a rather sleek-looking person in his station.  Rich thieves treat themselves to the best of broadcloth and the shiniest of tall hats.  Poor thieves usually at least shave their faces, and try to look unforbidding.  If they wear a blouse, it is because they belong on a social scale which does not dream of wearing a coat.  The blousard of Paris may be either a thief or a working-man:  he is always the one or the other, and sometimes he is both.

The great mass of those who rioted in the Commune—­the rank and file of that turbulent army—­may be found wherever there are blouses in Paris.  Occasionally, arrests are made, even now, of men who were prominently active, unduly noisy, in that terrible time:  the French police has got a list of such, and will go on tracking them down and bringing them to punishment for years to come, or until the next revolution arrives.  In a most respectable street in the Faubourg St. Germain, where I lived, a quiet wine-seller next door to me was arrested and his business broken up nearly two years after the war was over, his only offence being that he had been too active a Communist.  Later, an industrious blousard of my acquaintance was arrested at his work, and sent to prison for the same offence:  he was a carriage-maker.  In the Rue de Provence an old woman who begged very assiduously with a drugged baby, and whom I used to watch from my window by the half hour, fascinated by her practical methods of doing business, was hauled up one day on the same charge, and went her way with the gendarme, to be seen no more.  A meeker-looking old creature I never saw as she leaned against the wall over the way, and collected sous industriously from the passers-by, and hid them in a pocket in the small of the poor baby’s back; but I was told she displayed tremendous energy as a petroleuse in those other days when robbery was a better trade than even beggary.  You may have observed, when you have been returning home from the opera some night in Paris, in the gloom succeeding midnight, a dusky figure moving along by the paved gutter in the shadow of a large square lantern which he carries.  The lantern has a light only in front, and catches your eye as it glides along two or three inches above the paving-stones, so that you see the figure in the shadow behind it but dimly.  Close down to the stones it throws its glare for two or three feet about, and into that glare-emerges a hook—­an iron hook—­which pokes and prods at>out in the gutters, and now and then fastens like a finger on a wisp of paper and disappears behind the lamp.  Following the hook with your eye, you see that it deposits the wisps of paper in a deep basket fastened on the back of a man.  The is shaggy, dirty and begrimed.  He wears a hat which he has at some fished out of a gutter, a ragged blue blouse, a raggeder apron, which was in its brighter days a coffee-sack, and wooden shoes upon his feet.  A short pipe, sometimes alight, but more often empty, is in a corner of his mouth.  No one needs to be told who he is or what his calling.  In the argot of the blousards he is known as the Chevalier of the Hook.