It cost the king a million a year to support them, and God knows how they were bedded and fed!  Water, straw, bread, and two ounces of salted grease, the whole at an expense of five sous a day; and, as the price of provisions for twenty years back had increased more than a third, the keeper who had them in charge was obliged to make them fast or ruin himself. — With respect to the mode of filling the depots, the police are Turks in their treatment of the lower class; they strike into the heap, their broom bruising as many as they sweep out.  According to the ordinance of 1778, writes an intendant,[34]

“the police must arrest not only beggars and vagabonds whom they encounter but, again, those denounced as such or as suspected persons.  The citizen, the most irreproachable in his conduct and the least open to suspicion of vagabondage, is not sure of not being shut up in the depot, as his freedom depends on a policeman who is constantly liable to be deceived by a false denunciation or corrupted by a bribe.  I have seen in the depot at Rennes several husbands arrested solely through the denunciation of their wives, and as many women through that of their husbands; several children by the first wife at the solicitation of their step-mothers; many female domestics pregnant by the masters they served, shut up at their instigation, and girls in the same situation at the instance of their seducers; children denounced by their fathers, and fathers denounced by their children; all without the slightest evidence of vagabondage or mendicity. . . .  No decision of the provost’s court exists restoring the incarcerated to their liberty, notwithstanding the infinite number arrested unjustly.”

Suppose that a human intendant, like this one, sets them at liberty:  there they are in the streets, without a penny, beggars through the action of a law which proscribes mendicity and which adds to the wretched it prosecutes the wretched it creates, still more embittered and corrupt in body and in soul.

“It nearly always happens,” says the same intendant, “that the prisoners, arrested twenty-five or thirty leagues from the depot, are not confined there until three or four months after their arrest, and sometimes longer.  Meanwhile, they are transferred from brigade to brigade, in the prisons found along the road, where they remain until the number increases sufficiently to form a convoy.  Men and women are confined in the same prison, the result of which is, the females not pregnant on entering it are always so on their arrival at the depot.  The prisons are generally unhealthy; frequently, the majority of the prisoners are sick on leaving it;”

and many become rascals on coming in contact with rascals.-Moral contagion and physical contagion, the ulcer thus increasing through the remedy, centers of repression becoming centers of corruption.

And yet with all its rigors the law does not attain its ends.