How wretched are critics! They have no fire in winter and no ice in summer—they’re always either freezing cold or boiling hot. They suffer a constant torment of listening, and then they must perform a perpetual dance on eggs, terrified of breaking some by a false step in the direction of either praise or censure. Not nightingales’ eggs—they’re far too rare these days— just heaps of owls’ and turkeys’ eggs, which they’d dearly love to trample with both feet. And at the end of the day they can’t even hang up their weary pens on the willow trees by the rivers of Babylon, and sit down and weep at leisure on the bank!

There’s a gloom-laden lithograph which I cannot help lingering over whenever I pass the shop where it is displayed. It shows a troop of unfortunates clothed in damp and muddy rags, their leader sporting a brigand’s headdress, plodding in filthy worn-out boot-tops tied to their legs with straw. Most have one swollen cheek, all have hollow stomachs. Their teeth are rotten and they are dying of hunger. There is no form of sore or affliction they don’t have. Their sparse hair sticks lankly to their scrawny temples. They carry shovels and brooms, or rather fragments of shovels and stumps of brooms, tools fit for such threadbare labourers. In torrential rain they flounder along dejectedly in the dismal sink of Paris, and in front of them a sort of warder, armed with a formidable stick, peremptorily waves his arm, like Napoleon at Austerlitz showing his soldiers the sun, and shouts at them, with squinting eye and twisted mouth, “Come on, men, look lively!” They’re street sweepers… .

Poor devils! Where do these unfortunate creatures come from? On what butcher’s block will they meet their end? What reward does municipal munificence allot them for thus cleaning (or dirtying) the pavements of Paris? At what age are they sent to the glue factory? What becomes of their bones (their skin is good for nothing)? Where does this one spend the night? Where does that one go to feed himself during the day? What does he feed on? Does this one have a mate, or any young?