In a burst of moral indignation, the city fathers of Paris once ordered a roundup of vagrants. The police herded together a motley crowd of itinerant peddlers, rag and iron merchants, sidewalk salesmen. Loaded down with their bundles, dragging handcarts behind them, they straggled past Montmartre, cut through the Porte de Clignancourt and onto the plain of Saint-Ouen, where the army occasionally held maneuvers. Here the evicted peddlers settled down, offered their trinkets for sale to passersby. When the army seemed not to object, they put up awnings over their merchandise, built flimsy...
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