The woman of the people thinks she cannot do too much to lower the grocer's wife to her own level." Thus reduced to its dregs through the withdrawal of its tolerably honest recruits, the faction now comprises none but the scum of the populace, first, "subordinate workmen who look upon the downfall of their employers with a certain satisfaction," then, the small retailers, the old-clothes dealers, plasterers, "those who offer second-hand coats for sale on the fringes of the market, fourth-rate cooks who, at the cemetery of the Innocents, sell meat and beans under umbrella tops,"[3391] next, domestics highly pleased with now being masters of their masters, kitchen helpers, grooms, lackeys, janitors, every species of valet, who, in contempt of the law, voted at the elections[3392] and at the Jacobin club form a group of "silly people" satisfied "that they were universal geographers because they had ridden post once or twice," and that they were politicians "because they had read 'The Four Sons of Aymon.'"[3393]--But, in this mud, spouting and spreading around in broad daylight, it is the ordinary scum of great cities which forms the grossest flux, the outcasts of every trade and profession, dissipated workmen of all kinds, the irregular and marauding troops of the social army, the class which, "discharged from La Pitie, run through a career of disorder and end in Bicetre."[3394] "From La Pitie to Bicetre" is a well known popular adage.

Men of this stamp are without any principle whatever.

If they have fifty francs they live on fifty, and if they have only five they live on five; spending everything, they are always out of pocket and save nothing.

This is the class that took the Bastille,[3395] got up the 10th of August, etc.

It is the same class which filled the galleries in the Assembly with all sorts of characters, filling up the groups," and, during all this time it never did a stroke of work.
Consequently, "a wife who owns a watch, ear-rings, finger-rings, any jewels, first takes them to the pawnbrokers where they end up being sold.