The Three Cities Trilogy: Rome | Page 6

it
during those two years which distracted his whole being! In that Ste.
Marguerite district of Paris, in the very heart of that Faubourg St.
Antoine, so active and so brave for work, however hard, he discovered
no end of sordid dwellings, whole lanes and alleys of hovels without
light or air, cellar-like in their dampness, and where a multitude of
wretches wallowed and suffered as from poison. All the way up the
shaky staircases one's feet slipped upon filth. On every story there was
the same destitution, dirt, and promiscuity. Many windows were
paneless, and in swept the wind howling, and the rain pouring
torrentially. Many of the inmates slept on the bare tiled floors, never
unclothing themselves. There was neither furniture nor linen, the life
led there was essentially an animal life, a commingling of either sex

and of every age--humanity lapsing into animality through lack of even
indispensable things, through indigence of so complete a character that
men, women, and children fought even with tooth and nail for the very
crumbs swept from the tables of the rich. And the worst of it all was the
degradation of the human being; this was no case of the free naked
savage, hunting and devouring his prey in the primeval forests; here
civilised man was found, sunk into brutishness, with all the stigmas of
his fall, debased, disfigured, and enfeebled, amidst the luxury and
refinement of that city of Paris which is one of the queens of the world.
In every household Pierre heard the same story. There had been youth
and gaiety at the outset, brave acceptance of the law that one must work.
Then weariness had come; what was the use of always toiling if one
were never to get rich? And so, by way of snatching a share of
happiness, the husband turned to drink; the wife neglected her home,
also drinking at times, and letting the children grow up as they might.
Sordid surroundings, ignorance, and overcrowding did the rest. In the
great majority of cases, prolonged lack of work was mostly to blame;
for this not only empties the drawers of the savings hidden away in
them, but exhausts human courage, and tends to confirmed habits of
idleness. During long weeks the workshops empty, and the arms of the
toilers lose strength. In all Paris, so feverishly inclined to action, it is
impossible to find the slightest thing to do. And then the husband
comes home in the evening with tearful eyes, having vainly offered his
arms everywhere, having failed even to get a job at street-sweeping, for
that employment is much sought after, and to secure it one needs
influence and protectors. Is it not monstrous to see a man seeking work
that he may eat, and finding no work and therefore no food in this great
city resplendent and resonant with wealth? The wife does not eat, the
children do not eat. And then comes black famine, brutishness, and
finally revolt and the snapping of all social ties under the frightful
injustice meted out to poor beings who by their weakness are
condemned to death. And the old workman, he whose limbs have been
worn out by half a century of hard toil, without possibility of saving a
copper, on what pallet of agony, in what dark hole must he not sink to
die? Should he then be finished off with a mallet, like a crippled beast
of burden, on the day when ceasing to work he also ceases to eat?

Almost all pass away in the hospitals, others disappear, unknown,
swept off by the muddy flow of the streets. One morning, on some
rotten straw in a loathsome hovel, Pierre found a poor devil who had
died of hunger and had been forgotten there for a week. The rats had
devoured his face.
But it was particularly on an evening of the last winter that Pierre's
heart had overflowed with pity. Awful in winter time are the sufferings
of the poor in their fireless hovels, where the snow penetrates by every
chink. The Seine rolls blocks of ice, the soil is frost-bound, in all sorts
of callings there is an enforced cessation of work. Bands of urchins,
barefooted, scarcely clad, hungry and racked by coughing, wander
about the ragpickers' "rents" and are carried off by sudden hurricanes of
consumption. Pierre found families, women with five and six children,
who had not eaten for three days, and who huddled together in heaps to
try to keep themselves warm. And on that terrible evening, before
anybody else, he went down a dark passage and entered a room of
terror, where he found that a mother had just committed suicide with
her five little ones--driven to it by despair and hunger--a tragedy of
misery which for