They do the heavy work, celebrate the morning masses when everybody is asleep and the late masses when everybody is doing.

It is they who get up at night to take the sacrament to the poor, and who sit up with the corpses of the devout rich and catch cold standing under the dripping church porches at funerals, and get sunstroke or pneumonia in the cemetery.

They do all the dirty work.

For a five or ten franc fee they act as substitutes for colleagues who have good livings and are tired of service.

They are men under a cloud for the most part.