The rooms
were searched, the charge denied, and no proof elicited to warrant
further action; and here the matter would have ended in any other
country. But the police agent entrusted with the inquiry raked over the
contents of a pigsty in the courtyard, and discovered a square inch of
thin bone, which he exhibited to an anatomist, who pronounced it a
fragment of a new-born infant's skull; the hogs were instantly killed,
the contents of their stomachs examined, and small portions of the body
found. The question then arose whether the child was born alive; pieces
of the lungs were placed in a basin of water, and the fact that they
floated on its surface proved, beyond a doubt, that the child had
breathed; the crime of infanticide was then charged upon the unhappy
mother, who, appalled by this evidence of her guilt, confessed.
In the gray of the dawn a watchful observer may behold the two extremes
of Paris life ominously hinted;--a cloaked figure stealthily dropping a
swathed effigy of humanity, just 'sent into this breathing world,' in
the rotary cradle of the asylum for _enfants trouves_, and a cart full
of the corpses of the poor, driven into the yard of a hospital for
dissection.
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