Little by little their favourite and most famous citadels have been demolished, their oddly named groups dispersed. There used to be the _Cité des Singes_ and the _Cité des Mousquetaires_, now no longer in existence. The rag-pickers are everywhere, and live just like other citizens. I visited the rag-pickers of my quarter the other day. I found them in an airy quarter of Grenelle, like a quiet little town of the provinces on the edge of a wide river. Who would dream it was Paris, and that broad splash of dull grey, the lively brilliant Seine that flows past the Louvre? When I reached the rag-picker’s dwelling, she was out, and two neighbours from different doors appeared to assist me. If they had known me all their lives they could not have given me a more friendly greeting. One went off in search of the rag-picker, the other pressed me to take a seat in her room. The rag-picker came, one of the jolliest and pleasantest-looking women I ever saw. She spoke admirably, with perfect gesticulation, with inflection of voice, management of eyebrows that would have won her distinction in a _salon_. Her expressive face was clean, but her hands 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 A.M. 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 the next day the rag-picker brought it back to the _concierge_. Her visage shone with a positive radiance of soul. Her cheerfulness was so contagious that it set me wishing to be a rag-picker too. Her devotion to her husband and her children, of whom she spoke in rapturous terms, was hardly more touching than her devotion to a saintly priest, who seems to do an immense deal of good in the neighbourhood.