Les affreux tonneaux de la voirie" are the carriages used to empty cesspools, often used by Baudelaire. The word voirie has several meanings: the public highway, the administration that maintains it or the places where garbage is stored. Hugo coined the adjective "immonditiel" to describe it, while François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine and Eugène Sue describe it as a place where corpses are dragged and eaten by dogs. On an 1830 map of Paris, a roadway runs through the heart of "Little Poland", the setting for many of the chapters in Les Mystères de Paris. To the east, the most famous is the grand voirie de Montfaucon. Horses and small animals are also received here and put to death. Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont describes the enclos Saint-Jean-de-Latran, opposite the Collège de France, a hangout for vagrant bohemians badly hit by successive cholera epidemics, and destroyed in 1854. The ragpicker's realm was the street in all its senses; in 1826, he even served as an auxiliary to the administration, knocking out the dogs pulling the carts.
Near the garbage warehouses, we come across dead animals like Baudelaire's "Charogne", and the corpses of small animals pile up on the corners of the bollards. Privat d'Anglemont describes a ragpicker specializing in the extermination of the feline race, "père Matagatos". Baudelaire himself had a reputation for cruelty to cats - Champfleury set out to exonerate him. Claude Bernard used cats for vivisection, certainly sourcing them from the Saint-Jean-de-Latran enclosure; his master François Magendie sourced rats from Montfaucon. Bernard's wife became an animal rights activist and eventually left him, taking their two daughters with her. The story was recounted by Marie Huot in La Revue socialiste in 1887. In February 1856, Bernard reported a thought by Magendie comparing his scientific activity to that of a ragpicker, but Bernard favors the hypothetico-deductive method.
The ordinary sight of a decomposing cat or dog would not have shocked the young woman in "Une charogne"; it must have been a donkey or a horse. A rare photograph by Charles Nègre shows an injured or dead horse on the Quai de Bourbon, provoking a crowd. There are two poems entitled "Le Cheval mort" (The Dead Horse): one by Aloysius Bertrand, the other by Marie Huot, in which only a ragpicker is moved to compassion by the sight. In "Une charogne", several signs indicate that the scene takes place beyond the fences, where the animals were collapsing on their way to the rendering plant. Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet uses the term "carrion" exclusively to refer to the horse's corpse. In the opening of L'Âne mort, Janin describes in detail the horror of the rendering plant and the animal fights at Montfaucon, where a lame donkey is delivered alive to a bulldog. Gautier recounts a similar scene at a Magny dinner. Baudelaire often evokes such ferocious dogs and, like Parent-Duchâtelet, he insists on the stench, the flies, the larvae. When Les Fleurs du mal was published, Montfaucon had just closed, but Alcide Dussolier considers the last stanzas worthy of a Montfaucon knacker.
