In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo writes:
"Those heaps of garbage on the corner of the bollards, those tumblers of mud bumped up and down the streets at night, those dreadful roadside barrels [...], do you know what they are? It's meadow in bloom, it's green grass, [...], it's joy, it's life."
It's the first of these three expressions that is addressed in this lecture. At "le coin des bornes" (the corner of the bollards), we used to deposit our garbage before the invention of dustbins, against which the ragpickers protested in 1883, until they were allowed to sort it on a canvas before putting it back into their containers. The fixed phrase "le coin de bornes" is a euphemism for rubbish: garbage was deposited there in heaps, according to detailed regulations. In Charles Marville's photographs, they are immaculate, having just been cleaned. The ragpicker is often depicted beside them, sometimes satisfying his needs. Attestations of the "corner of the bollards" are everywhere in the French literature of the century, from Louis-Sébastien Mercier to Charles Péguy. In Les Mystères de Paris, the two heroes are born "au coin de la borne", the place of the foundling, and the Chourineur imagines himself "dying" there. In Notre-Dame de Paris, the bollard and its "heap of garbage" provide "one of those poor man's pillows"; in Les Châtiments, we find a more metaphorical and polemical use. In Champfleury's Les Aventures de mademoiselle Mariette, a painter finds half an earthenware piece on the corner of a bollard, while a ragpicker finds the other half and sells it to him.
The bollard is the site of prostitution. In L'Âne mort, the young woman moves from the salon to the bollard. In the collective collection Vers (1843), a poem by Ernest Prarond, long attributed to Baudelaire, recounts the typical fate of young Thérèse (whose name recalls that of La Païva), a grisette turned ragpicker. A third of the ragpickers were women, half of them former prostitutes. In La Fanfarlo, Samuel Cramer is "[one of those men] to whom any opportunity is good, even an impromptu acquaintance at the corner of a tree or a street, - even a ragpicker - to stubbornly develop their ideas". The phrase may bring to mind the ragpicker-philosopher Liard, who knew both Greek and Latin.
Finally, bollards are the place for drunkenness, and the ragpicker is the drunkard par excellence, as in "Le Vin de l'Assassin" or in "Les Litanies de Satan", but also in Larousse and in caricatures. He's said to spend every penny he earns, at night in the bouges of Les Halles, on Sundays behind the octroi gates.
