QUEER TRADES IN PARIS.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume VI, Issue 8, 21 January 1905, Page 8 (Supplement)

QUEER TRADES IN PARIS.

Paris is a city of queer industries, and in them is seen that spirit of “minute laborious thrift,” which according to M. de Nevres, who writes in the Pall Mall Magazine, makes France the power she is. Most of the queer trades are carried on at night. Rag-collecting is a trade with several grades, and employs thousands of people. There are six thousand of the lowest class of collectors, who gather anything from a scrap of paper to a dilapidated glove, and make ninepence a day, twenty thousand of the second class, who make fifteenpence a day, and fifteen thousand of the third class, who are licensed dealers, with a definite “beat.” That is to say, forty thousand people, who would go to swell the criminal classes anywhere else, derive nearly <£3ooo daily from i.ie dirt and rubbish of the great city. Why not adopt the same system in London, asks M. de Nevers. It might give employment to some two hundred thousand poor, “but who will ever teach greedy and lazy poverty to get up and help itself?” The quaintest Parisian “night-birds” are the “callers,” and the “guardian angels.” The former earn a livelihood by waking up people whose business it is to be up long before sunrise. Both men and women exercise this trade, but women are-preferred, .owing to their shriller voices and greater patience. A “caller” used to be able to make two francs a day, but alas, competition has brought the tariff down to twopence halfpenny a week per client. The “guardian angel” is a person attached to the establishments of some low barkeepers and certain hotels, to look after the safety of drunken customers. “He accompanies them to their homes, defends them in case of need, as often as not has to put them to bed, and leaves them only when they are without the reach of mischief.” Bravery, strength, honesty, persuasiveness, patience, and above all sobriety, are the necessary qualifications for this delectable job, but the reward for such sterling traits is only two shillings a day at the most. There are “perquisites,” however, and cases are on record in which grateful drunkards have remembered the “angel” in their wills. Then there is the dealer in tobacco manufactured from stumps of cigars and cigarettes picked up in the streets, whom the Government actually taxes on the ground that “he possesses a monopoly.” The man who founded the trade of “second-hand baker,” in which leavings of bread from the restaurants and schools are made into different kinds of dishes for the cheap eating-houses, died worth <£lo,ooo a year, while the woman who first utilised tne other leavings of restaurant tables gave each of her four daughters a dowry of 100,000 francs. You can get a merschaum pipe coloured in Paris for a few pence and twopence worth of tobacco, and should you be unable to solve a puzzle in one of the newspapers, a “diviner” of puzzles attached to one of the cafes or restaurants in the Marais quarter will oolige you. He earns a steady income of GOO francs a month. To supply the wants of the two thousand amateur anglers who are to be seen daily along the Seine, the “bait manufacturer” has arisen with fiis supply of worms. He makes at. the lowest computation £l6O a year.