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.
This man is quite remarkable; and a friend, speaking of him to me, and of his well-known enthusiasm for rag-pickers and their like, told me he once said to her: "See you, when once you get into the heart of that class, you can't endure any other. It becomes a passion." And I can well understand it, from all I have seen of the humbler classes of Paris. There is a fulness of life, of vitality, of inarticulate, unconscious goodness about them that puts you in sympathy with Tolstoiïsm. But instead of the mysticism, the intensity of the Russian character, you have here that irresistible French gaiety, which is not by any means so light as it is said to be. Action is its virtue. Its mental horizon is brightened by a personal charm of character, as a twilight sky is enriched by an arch of radiant colour. In spite of the false romancers, morality is in the air, everywhere about us.
In these humbler walks I refer to, pure girls,
