Half documentary and half staged with actors, this film takes us to the poor in Pathé’s own city, Paris. «Poverty, which – usually in the person of a scary tramp – haunts so many contemporary tales, has now ceded its place to wretchedness of a very different character. Some of these images give us the same kind of little shock at seeing reality as one might when holding a cheap colour print up against a photograph by Jean Eugène Atget.» (Roland Cosandey, Welcome Home, Joye! “Film um 1910”, 1993, p. 62)