RKS French Literature: The Court of Miracles in Paris (Victor Hugo)

The poor poet cast his eyes around him. He was in fact in that same Court of Miracles where no honest man has ever penetrated at such an hour – a magic circle in which the officers of the Châtelet and the sergeants of the provostry when they ventured thither, disappeared in morsels – the city of thieves – a hideous wart on the face of Paris – a sink from whence escaped every morning, and to which to stagnate every night, that stream of vice, mendicity and vagrancy which ever flows through the streets of a capital – a monstrous hive, into which all hornets of society returned each evening with their booty – a lying hospital. In which the gypsy, the unfrocked monk, the abandoned scholar – the worthless of every nation, Spaniards, Italians, Germans – of every religion, Jews, Christians, Mahometans, Idolaters- covered with painted sores, beggars in the daytime, transformed themselves at night into robbers – in short an immense cloak-room in which dressed and undressed at that period all the actors in that everlasting drama which robbery, prostitution and murder enacted on the pavements of Paris.

Victor Hugo, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”