The Man Who Laughs
Copyright© 2025 by Victor Hugo
Chapter 4: QUESTIONS
What kind of band was it which had left the child behind in its flight?
Were those fugitives Comprachicos?
We have already seen the account of the measures taken by William III. and passed by Parliament against the malefactors, male and female, called Comprachicos, otherwise Comprapequeños, otherwise Cheylas.
There are laws which disperse. The law acting against the Comprachicos determined, not only the Comprachicos, but vagabonds of all sorts, on a general flight.
It was the devil take the hindmost. The greater number of the Comprachicos returned to Spain—many of them, as we have said, being Basques.
The law for the protection of children had at first this strange result: it caused many children to be abandoned.
The immediate effect of the penal statute was to produce a crowd of children, found or rather lost. Nothing is easier to understand. Every wandering gang containing a child was liable to suspicion. The mere fact of the child’s presence was in itself a denunciation.
“They are very likely Comprachicos.” Such was the first idea of the sheriff, of the bailiff, of the constable. Hence arrest and inquiry. People simply unfortunate, reduced to wander and to beg, were seized with a terror of being taken for Comprachicos although they were nothing of the kind. But the weak have grave misgivings of possible errors in justice. Besides, these vagabond families are very easily scared. The accusation against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other people’s children. But the promiscuousness caused by poverty and indigence is such that at times it might have been difficult for a father and mother to prove a child their own.
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