Living in a house in the Cité de Saint-Landry, Paris, with two servants, she received every morning the infants that the soldiers (or police) had collected during the night. So many were eventually turned over to her, that she was unable to feed them, and many died in her own house for lack of food. In the crowded conditions we are also told a selection[429] was made and some of the children were exposed again, or at least they were turned over to some charitable or interested person who would accept them. The care of the children devolving finally on the two servants, many of them are said to have perished from the drugs they were given to keep them quiet. The availability of children as beggars led the servants to look on them as a means of money making, and they were sold for various cruel and evil purposes, a condition that eventually led to the reform undertaken by Vincent de Paul. The fact that they frequently fell into the hands of magicians, mountebanks, and pedlars, who deformed them in order to make them of assistance in earning a livelihood, is attested by the biographer of Vincent. “Returning from one of his missions,” says Maury, “Vincent de Paul, whom I have dared to call almost the visible angel of God, found under the walls of Paris one of these infants, in the hands of a beggar, who was engaged in deforming the limbs of the child. Although almost overcome with horror, he ran to the savage with that intrepidity with which the virtuous man always attacks crime. “‘Barbarian,’ he cried, ‘how you deceive me—from a distance I took you for a man!’ “He snatched the victim from its persecutor, carried it in his arms across Paris, gathered a crowd about him and called on them to witness the brutality of the day and place in which they lived. A few days later he had founded his first institution for children, and the cause of children had enrolled one of its noblest champions.”