Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/322

 were the hue of soot, and her hair was the grey of dust. Her little room, kitchen and sleeping-chamber, was freshly washed and in perfect order. Outside the window clothes hung drying, and below in the courtyard a pile of rubbish lay for sorting. It would be impossible to find anywhere a healthier-looking or a happier creature. Yet this has been her life from the age of twelve: she gets up at four winter and summer, hail or snow; she heats some milk for her dog, boils coffee for herself and her husband, leaves coffee simmering for her three children, who, when she and her husband, with their cart and dog, have gone off on their rag-gathering mission, get up, dress, and go off to school. She paid fifty francs to her fellow-rag-pickers for the whole of the Avenue de Breteuil, which was then only half built upon, and to-*day her practice is worth three hundred francs. I imagined the tax was paid to the town; but no, it is paid to a sort of guild of rag-pickers, who thereby assure her and her husband that they only have the right to the refuse of the avenue. When they have picked up all the refuse, they return and sort it out in the yard. She told me the prices of each thing, and hair is the most valuable,—above all, white hair. The honesty of the Parisian rag-picker is proverbial, and I know something of it, for once a silver spoon of mine was accidentally flung out, and