The ragpicker is the modern avatar of Asmodeus. The poster for La Grande Ville (1842) shows two devils, one lifting the curtain to reveal the scene, the other as a painter. In the two volumes of Le Diable à Paris published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1845-1846), the identification of the devil, the Paris guide and the ragpicker is explicit, notably through the character of Flammèche. This devil no longer limps; he's swapped his crutch for a cane. The association between the devil and the ragpicker can also be found in Balzac's Une double famille. In Le Rhin, while visiting Fribourg Cathedral in Switzerland, Hugo identifies a ragpicker in a medieval allegory of Satan with a pig's head; the basket becomes a hood, the devil's staff a fang. Pigs and ragpickers, feeding on leftovers, are commonplace, as in Lapparent's caricatures of Cochon or Grandville's drawings.
Texier also speaks of the "great ragpicker" as a "merciless reaper" with his "immortal hood", an allegory of Chronos (or even Death, in Berthaud's case). In Le Chiffonnier de Paris, Time is called the "master ragpicker", and Father Jean crosses time without dying. The allegory of the Wheel of Fortune, up and down (as in the Hundred Days), is again present, here in the form of the Wheel of Ixion. However, the ragpicker is also the victim of this eternal curse, so much so that the medieval legend of the wandering Jew, taken up by Edgar Quinet and later Sue and Alexandre Dumas, gives rise to numerous analogies with the ragpicker, "society's wandering Jew" (Brazier) or "crime's wandering Jew" (Pyat). Chodruc-Duclos, Liard's alter ego, also forms a model of the modern wandering Jew, somewhere between the tramp and the ragpicker. In his introduction to the 1867 Paris-Guide, Hugo calls him "the ragpicker of the centuries". The hood itself is a metaphor for time as a whole, representing the hope of the end and eternal waiting, that melancholy fantasy of impossible death analyzed by Jean Starobinski and John E. Jackson in Les Fleurs du mal. We find this image at the end of the poem "Confession" (1853), but also in Hugo's "Jour de fête aux environs de Paris" (1859), or in fragments of La Légende des siècles describing the guillotine as "a ragpicker with a lily-flower hood". Finally, in July 1867, a lithograph by Daumier in Le Charivari depicted Death as a ragpicker.
