PUBLIC ASSISTANCE
The children's ordeal
(From our special correspondent)

Château-Chinon, November 4.
Without opening her lips, the mother saw the blue or pink collar, depending on the sex, riveted to the neck of her newborn, three days or three weeks old, and she left the Abandonment Office. The irreparable is complete. Public Assistance registers its 3,000th foundling of the year. It will raise it according to its rigid administrative method, without a nursery, without a drop of milk, without a consultation of infants. It gets rid of it, rather, and sends it to the countryside.
--There is a law for that, she said, and it is perfect... That is enough for her.

In execution of this inviolable law, therefore, the provincial inspector instructs, on the 13th of each month, Madame the conveyor to go with a batch of wet nurses to take delivery of three, four, five, seven, ten orphans in Paris.

The wet nurse must breastfeed, says the law.
But there is no law that obliges French women, even peasants, to have milk, nor candidates to be mothers for at least seven months; and, well-off people being hardly tempted to raise kids for 120 francs a month, the inspector took what he could: all dry wet nurses, except one. The little bastard has only to manage.
Each equipped with a "dress", a month's wages and the whining baby, these ladies leave and take the terrible "wet nurse train". The one whose warm, swollen breast gives the baby a suckle. The others calm the desperate cries of their frail living burden with boiled water, during the long, interminable journey in 3rd class, in the jolts, the smoke and the noise with several changes of trains. Only the lucky one who suckles is still wriggling on arrival. The others, the three, four, five or ten others, are dying of thirst and hunger.

We just have time to "change" them at the Depot, before they leave again, to go to the end of the ordeal at the end of the road, in the mountain. This Depot! Ah! it does not have, it, the proud facade of the avenue Victoria where 40,000 children are administered, according to a perfect law, nor the severe aspect of the hospice of the Assisted Children, rue Denfert-Rochereau!
It is, in a remote street, a poor hovel that sweats misery. It smells of damp burnt wood, a smell that will permeate everywhere, from now on, the lost child, in this hilly and bushy country, where the rich "cultivate" the Nivernais beef with its clear white coat, which sells so dearly, and the poor "the seed of bedwood"
Four or five twin beds in a low room, a "big" simpleton in "clothing" to care for "her brothers and sisters", and, not far away, the cemetery. Many do not go any further. A few expire near their nurse, before her next monthly trip to Paris "to restock". Two thirds of the children succumb before the first month's wages are earned...
The gravedigger hastily digs a hundred-sous grave for them. They come there to sleep their innocent sleep under wooden crosses striped in white with a name and a date: So-and-so, 1924.
That's all. They were not born on a known day. They leave under the label that was stuck on them. And no one, in these November days that cover the funereal hillside with a sumptuous autumnal gold, no one comes to flower these graves where miserable little anonymous bodies disintegrate. They are abandoned. Without caresses, without kisses, without a mother, they have barely lived the space of a morning.
The Administration thus limits its expenditure...

Emmanuel Bourcier.

THE DEADLY NURSERY
Mme Rachilde is kind enough to send us the letter below, which on returning to Paris I find with those of other readers, on the same subject. We join our protest to that of the eminent writer. E. B.

Paris, October 30. Sir and dear colleague, I buried, this morning, with the desolate parents, a little boy of two months, one of the thirty poorly cared for babies of the nursery of Mrs. Doré Antoine, living at 28, rue de la Marne, in Perreux, of whom you spoke in the Œuvre of last October 25.
The child died, it seems, of exhaustion and, when he was taken to Trousseau, he was covered in vermin.
I went to the director of this nursery whom I did not meet. It is very fortunate for her. But, now, will you allow me to ask, publicly, what punishment they intend to inflict on him?
Yours sincerely,

RACHILD