But humanitarian feeling was growing; and people were beginning to be proud of being thoughtful and kind. It was no longer a mark of superiority to be lustful of blood. Botterays, in a Latin poem on Paris,[426] spoke of the splendid way in which the orphan children of Paris were brought up, referring to the Hospital of Saint Esprit and the House of the Enfants-Dieu. After long years of nominal acquiescence in its teachings, the barbarians of the North were really beginning to accept the Christianity of Christ. CHAPTER XXI CRUELTY TO CHILDREN IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURY—ATTEMPT AT REGULATION—DEFORMING CHILDREN FOR MOUNTEBANK PURPOSES—ANECDOTE OF VINCENT DE PAUL—HIS WORK AND HIS SUCCESS. From Datheus to Vincent de Paul the general history of the child in Europe moves as from one mountain peak to another with a long valley of gloom in between. Datheus has received no credit; Vincent de Paul has been justly recognized as a deserving contemporary of that list of brilliant men who went to make up the Golden Age of France. Golden Age that it was, with its highly polished manners, there, under the reign of the elegant Mazarin and the delicate Anne of Austria, it was no uncommon sight to see a child lying dead on the pavements, while others died of misery and hunger under the very eyes of the passers-by. Not a day passed, say the chroniclers, when the men who had charge of the sewers or the police did not draw out at least the body of one child. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Europe, and France especially, was war-ridden. During the sixteenth century, the religious and charitable impulses had suffered, first through the national war, then by the factional wars, and finally by religious wars. “The religious war,” said the historian of Languedoc,[427] “almost entirely destroyed the Hospital of Montpellier ... and even the order of Saint Esprit was dying out throughout France.” It was a curious and disjointed society, that of the France of that day. Kingdoms there were within the royal domain; the laws of the large city frequently clashing with those of the province within which it was located; here and there provinces following their own laws rather than the laws of the kingdom itself. In some provinces the Church dominated; in others the nobles; elsewhere, the two classes were beginning to melt into the body of the nation which occasionally overrode both.[428] At Aix, for instance, it was the custom to place the abandoned child in a religious home where, as in the rest of Provence, the unknown bastard was charged to the nearest hospital. Practically the same law was observed in Bretagne. At Poitiers, a decree on September 15, 1579, “condemning the provision by which religious orders nourished infants found at their door,” ordered that the monasteries and ecclesiastic chapters of the place should be called on to regulate their contributions to the support of the children.