An important division of the army of blousards is that composed of the street-sweepers of Paris.  They share the Rue Mouffetard and the Place Maubert with the ragpickers, and, like them, are scattered about in various poorer quarters of the city.  Ever-picturesque argot has given them a name of ridicule, and calls them les peintres and their brooms their inspired brushes.  Every tourist has seen those unhappy wretches at work, sometimes alone, sometimes in gangs of three or four, men and women together.  There is no distinction of sex in this branch of industry, as indeed there is in none of the lowest fields of labor in Paris.  Women and girls are quite often ragpickers; among the street-sweepers they form a good half of the force; they are also street—­peddlers, dragging cartloads of vegetables about and crying aloud their wares; they are porters, lugging bundles on their backs; they are oyster-openers, hacking away with iron knife at coarse shells; they even drive drays and big market-wagons; they split wood and shovel coal, and in a hundred ways confound and confuse those theorizers who pretend that male bone and muscle is by nature brawnier than female.  The female scavengers are quite as strong, quite as coarse, quite as dirty, and can smoke their pipes with quite as much gusto as their male compeers.

The scavengers are six thousand in number, and are employed by contractors, who pay them at the rate of four to eight sous per hour.  They use up seventy thousand brooms a year, and the filth they gather is rotted in pits and sold for manure, yielding about seven hundred thousand dollars a year.  Until the rubbish of New York streets is made to yield a profit in a similar manner our streets will never be cleaned as they should be.  But I fear it is hopeless to expect that New York streets will ever be cleaned as they are in Paris, from lack of the human element that does the work in the French capital.  A hard ten hours’ work would yield the Paris scavenger forty to eighty sous, and on this sum he would be rich, for he can clothe and feed himself on a sum which would scarcely buy a New York laborer what drink he needs alone, to say nothing about food and clothing.  But the Paris scavenger is rarely privileged to work ten hours a day, and his earnings the year round will barely exceed on an average twenty-five cents a day.  For this sum he can have sufficient food, and as for clothing, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he never buys any.  At various stages in his career he becomes possessed by a stroke of fortune of some article of cast-off clothing, which he wears, as it were, for life.  Ordinarily, the poorest blousard has a new blouse once in five or ten years, and a new pair of wooden shoes in the same time; but the scavenger’s apparel is for ever old, and he never lays it off.  I have seen thousands of men and women in Paris of whom it would be mere idle dreaming to suppose that they undressed themselves at night.