The Mont-de-Piété is a civil institution, which exists for the benefit of the needy. It is not in the least like our pawn-offices, for here no usury is practised, and the town benefits by any profits that accrue. The central house is in the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, and there are four large branch offices. Money is advanced on the objects offered, and when the sum is brought back, interest is charged, and the objects are restored. If no claim is put in at the end of eighteen months, the objects are sold, and the profits are handed over to the Assistance Publique. All classes of society in straitened circumstances have recourse to the Mont-de-Piété which is a most useful institution.
Turn now to the latest public edifice for the poor under the Third Republic. The late Baroness de Hirsch, a Jewess, was one of the several founders—all of them women—of this splendid hospital, attached to the Pasteur Institute. Here each patient has a room to himself free on the raised ground-floor or on the story above. Below there are bath-rooms and douches; there is a workshop for the carding of mattresses, each patient sleeping on a new mattress, each mattress passing through an immense steriliser. To improve upon the old method, by which doctors and surgeons visit the patient at stated hours, a private house of handsome dimensions has been built expressly for the doctor, who must
