Paris beggar with dog, 1846.
I gave three euros to a beggar this morning. I was on my way back from my quarterly blood test, feeling virtuous for having got up early and foregone breakfast, but looking forward to my coffee and the pain aux raisins just purchased at the boulanger.
She was sitting in a doorway on rue Quatre Vents, a plastic tumbler in front of her. On this chilly morning she’d tucked her hands into her armpits and pulled a black scarf over the lower half of her face, so I saw only her eyes.
She was obviously new to the game. Most of her colleagues worked the busier rue de Seine, next to the boulanger, or the street outside our local up-market food hall, the Marché St Germain.
Someone more experienced would also have augmented the mute appeal of the empty cup with one of the traditional point-of-sale additions: the supplicant pose, for instance; kneeling rather than sitting. Or an appeal hand-lettered on a piece of cardboard; “A coin for food”.
The sad-eyed puppy seemed only to work with men, but occasionally one saw a woman with a child. They were more frequent when I first came to Paris in the nineteen-seventies but soon disappeared; an inkling that the authorities supervised beggars as they did buskers, condoning a discreet representation in the interest of local colour but drawing the line at cruelty or deformity.
I never doubted that beggars were equally organised. Why else would the same men and women dressed in the same generic middle-eastern clothing appear on the same street day after day? It could also be no accident that they were most numerous in the central arrondissements well-frequented by tourists.
Such cynicism wasn’t new. In Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, beggars meet in the Cour des Miracles or Miracle Square after the day’s work to let down their hair (not to mention their apparently amputated legs) and, discarding their white canes, magically regain their sight to divvy up the day’s takings. And there’s that Sherlock Holmes story The Man With the Twisted Lip where an actor researching the role of a beggar makes so much money that he takes it up full-time, earning enough to live like a gentleman, with a suburban villa, wife and family.
I’d never thought of begging as a business until I visited India. Besieged by pleading faces and extended hands, I asked a friend how he dealt with it.
“Look,” he said, “a beggar is not just demanding money. He’s selling you something: a sense of having done a good deed; a feeling of generosity, of virtue. So in a way he’s a small businessman. Like him.” He pointed to the shoe shop across the street. ”Do you feel like giving him money?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t need shoes.”
“Exactly! So whenever you see one of these chaps….” He pointed to the importuning hands surrounding us. “….you just need to ask yourself ‘Do I need a beggar today?’”
The more I thought about this model of rational charity, the more attractive it became. But if this good feeling was a commodity, why purchase it piecemeal from small-time vendors on the street? There should be centres where it could be supplied on a fully professional basis and enjoyed in surroundings that maximised the effect…
But hold on! Don’t these exist already? I’ve seen them. Big buildings, with spires, and bells... They call them… No, don’t tell me... It’s on the tip of my tongue…