The Toy of the Poor
-- Charles Baudelaire
I want to suggest an innocent diversion. So few amusements
involve no guilt!
When you go out in the morning, determined only to wander up
and down the highways, fill your pockets with little gadgets that cost
no more than a sou—like the flat puppet worked by a single string,
the blacksmith beating on an anvil, the rider and his horse, with a
tail that works as a whistle—and in front of taverns, or under the
trees, give them out as gifts to the unknown poor children you
encounter. At first, they won’t dare to take them; they won’t believe
their good fortune. But then their hands will eagerly snatch up
the present, and off they will flee, as cats do when they go far away
to eat the morsel you have given them, having learned to distrust
people.
Down one road, behind the gate of an enormous garden, at the
back of which could be seen the whiteness of a pretty chateau struck
by the sun, stood a fine and fresh child, dressed in those country
clothes that are so coyly attractive.
Luxury, the absence of worry, and the habitual spectacle of wealth
make these children so pretty that one would think them made from
a different mold than the children of mediocrity or poverty.
Next to him on the grass lay a splendid toy, as fresh as its master,
gleaming and gilded, wearing a purple outfit, covered with little
feathers and glass beads. But the child was not playing with his
favorite toy; instead, this is what he was watching:
On the other side of the gate, on the road, among the thistles and
nettles, there was another child, dirty, puny, soot-covered, one of
those pariah-animals in which an impartial eye would detect beauty
if, like the eye of the connoisseur detecting an ideal painting beneath
a layer of varnish, he could wash off the repulsive patina of poverty.
Through this symbolic barrier separating two worlds, that of the
highway and that of the chateau, the poor child was showing his
own toy to the rich one, who examined it eagerly as if it were some
rare and unknown object. Now, this toy that the dirty little child was
provoking, tossing and shaking in a box with a grate—was a live rat!
The parents, through economy no doubt, had taken the toy directly
from life itself.
And the two children laughed with each other fraternally, smiling
with teeth of an equal whiteness.
-- Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen
