week. The rats had devoured his face.

But it was particularly on an evening of the last winter that Pierre's
heart had overflowed with pity. Awful in winter time are the sufferings
of the poor in their fireless hovels, where the snow penetrates by every
chink. The Seine rolls blocks of ice, the soil is frost-bound, in all
sorts of callings there is an enforced cessation of work. Bands of
urchins, barefooted, scarcely clad, hungry and racked by coughing, wander
about the ragpickers' "rents" and are carried off by sudden hurricanes of
consumption. Pierre found families, women with five and six children, who
had not eaten for three days, and who huddled together in heaps to try to
keep themselves warm. And on that terrible evening, before anybody else,
he went down a dark passage and entered a room of terror, where he found
that a mother had just committed suicide with her five little
ones--driven to it by despair and hunger--a tragedy of misery which for a
few hours would make all Paris shudder! There was not an article of
furniture or linen left in the place; it had been necessary to sell
everything bit by bit to a neighbouring dealer. There was nothing but the
stove where the charcoal was still smoking and a half-emptied palliasse
on which the mother had fallen, suckling her last-born, a babe but three
months old. And a drop of blood had trickled from the nipple of her
breast, towards which the dead infant still protruded its eager lips. Two
little girls, three and five years old, two pretty little blondes, were
also lying there, sleeping the eternal sleep side by side; whilst of the
two boys, who were older, one had succumbed crouching against the wall
with his head between his hands, and the other had passed through the
last throes on the floor, struggling as though he had sought to crawl on
his knees to the window in order to open it. Some neighbours, hurrying
in, told Pierre the fearful commonplace story; slow ruin, the father
unable to find work, perchance taking to drink, the landlord weary of