BEGGARS MIGRATE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 231, 30 September 1929, Page 17

BEGGARS MIGRATE.

LITRE OF SEASIDE. BUSINESS LAGS IN CITIES. Had the gentle Charles Lamb been able to visit modern Paris it is practically certain that his lament upon the decay of beggars would never have been given to the world, for mendicancy under sundry thin disguises is quite a flourishing business in the French capital, states an exchange. Beggars, like other people, must have their holidays, and this fact accounts for a curious phenomenon. Most of those mendicants who are known to the police and Parisians in general as regulars disappeared during the summer. They left for seaside resorts and watering-places, where they stayed throughout the summer season, their places in Paris being taken by others. These latter mostly specialise on following the tide of foreign tourists. They do well in Pane during the holiday months, while those mendicants who are familiar figures in Paris do equally well at fashionable resorts. One who is well known to all frequenters of the Grands Boulevards as a vendor of post-cards, maps, and other trifles went to Deauville on the. instructions.of an employer who furnished him with those things which no one wants, but which are bought in a spirit of charity. He had his travelling expenses paid, fed and lodged, and received 20fr. a day, plus commission, for pretending to be a paralytic imbecile. He would loiter • wherever pleasure-seekers congregate and levy a kind of blackmail upon them. ' I