Awful in winter time are the sufferings of the poor in their fireless hovels, where the snow penetrates by every chink.

The Seine rolls blocks of ice, the soil is frost-bound, in all sorts of callings there is an enforced cessation of work.

Bands of urchins, barefooted, scarcely clad, hungry and racked by coughing, wander about the ragpickers' "rents" and are carried off by sudden hurricanes of consumption.

Pierre found families, women with five and six children, who had not eaten for three days, and who huddled together in heaps to try to keep themselves warm.

And on that terrible evening, before anybody else, he went down a dark passage and entered a room of terror, where he found that a mother had just committed suicide with her five little ones--driven to it by despair and hunger--a tragedy of misery which for a few hours would make all Paris shudder! There was not an article of furniture or linen left in the place; it had been necessary to sell everything bit by bit to a neighbouring dealer.