“But this young lady,” replied the girl, “according to what I learned from her weeping maid, was taken last evening to a lunatic asylum:  it appears she is mad.”

“Mad!  Oh! it is horrible for her, and for us also—­for now there is no hope.  What will become of us without my son?  Oh, merciful heaven!” The unfortunate woman hid her face in her hands.

A profound silence followed this heart-rending outburst.  Rose and Blanche exchanged mournful glances, for they perceived that their presence augmented the weighty embarrassments of this family.  Mother Bunch, worn out with fatigue, a prey to painful emotions, and trembling with cold in her wet clothes, sank exhausted on a chair, and reflected on their desperate position.

That position was indeed a cruel one!

Often, in times of political disturbances, or of agitation amongst the laboring classes, caused by want of work, or by the unjust reduction of wages (the result of the powerful coalition of the capitalists)—­often are whole families reduced, by a measure of preventive imprisonment, to as deplorable a position as that of Dagobert’s household by Agricola’s arrest—­an arrest, which, as will afterwards appear, was entirely owing to Rodin’s arts.

Now, with regard to this “precautionary imprisonment,” of which the victims are almost always honest and industrious mechanics, driven to the necessity of combining together by the In organization of Labor and the Insufficiency of Wages, it is painful to see the law, which ought to be equal for all, refuse to strikers what it grants to masters—­because the latter can dispose of a certain sum of money.  Thus, under many circumstances, the rich man, by giving bail, can escape the annoyance and inconveniences of a preventive incarceration; he deposits a sum of money, pledges his word to appear on a certain day, and goes back to his pleasures, his occupations, and the sweet delights of his family.  Nothing can be better; an accused person is innocent till he is proved guilty; we cannot be too much impressed with that indulgent maxim.  It is well for the rich man that he can avail himself of the mercy of the law.  But how is it with the poor?

Not only has he no bail to give, for his whole capital consists of his daily labor; but it is upon him chiefly that the rigors of preventive measures must fall with a terrible and fatal force.

For the rich man, imprisonment is merely the privation of ease and comfort, tedious hours, and the pain of separation from his family—­distresses not unworthy of interest, for all suffering deserves pity, and the tears of the rich man separated from his children are as bitter as those of the poor.  But the absence of the rich man does not condemn his family to hunger and cold, and the incurable maladies caused by exhaustion and misery.

For the workman, on the contrary, imprisonment means want, misery, sometimes death, to those most dear to him.  Possessing nothing, he is unable to find bail, and he goes to prison.  But if he have, as it often happens, an old, infirm father or mother, a sick wife, or children in the cradle?  What will become of this unfortunate family?  They could hardly manage to live from day to day upon the wages of this man, wages almost always insufficient, and suddenly this only resource will be wanting for three or four months together.