French Beggars.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 208, 25 June 1887, Page 7

French Beggars.

We hear a good deal in these days of depression about the increase in mendicancy, but from various Parisian records of two centuries or so ago it would appear that mendicants were as numerous and as importunate then as now, and that the devices and means they adopted for extorting charity have scarcely changed in character from that time to this. The usual number of beggars resident in Paris was greatly increased at this period by bands of peasants and villages whose dwellings had been devastated and crops destroyed by the Fronde quarrels. Oppressed alternately by the opposing and victorious party, when little short of starvation remained for them in the country, they came, a motley crowd, to join the company of Paris mendicants, in harassing and waylaying street passengers by night and day. " Ruined farmers, day labourers, needy old men, unpaid soldiers, country bandits, workmen possessing nothing but their souls, which they could not sell, flocked into the capital, where hunger awaited them still." Such is the description fiven by the eyewitness Falon, in his lemoires of these events. Another authority, Douet de Romp Croissant, states that in the course of the year 1642 three hundred and forty-men were assassinated by night in Paris ; and Boileau affirms that after sunset any wood was a Elace of safety compared with the streets. ome of these beggars demanded alms sword in hand ; and in the Cour dcs Miracles nob only were they au fait in tho matter of simulating deformity— loss of limbs, &c.~ but lessons in the art of feigning epileptic fits, with the assistance of a piece of soap in the mouth, were given then,as they now are, in many a court of less imposing name. This sudden affluence of beggars induced Bellievre, President of the Parliament, to solicit earnestly the taking of mendicants into custody. Mazarin was pleased with the project, and the king signed an edict to that effect in April, 1656. They were not, however, to be kept under restraint necessarily as offenders against the law, but as homeless outcasts in need of temporal and spiritual assistance.

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