the hands of young girls or the bony fingers of age, courses towards
the aristocracy, where it will become a blazing, expansive stream.
But, before leaving the four territories upon which the utmost wealth
of Paris is based, it is fitting, having cited the moral causes, to
deduce those which are physical, and to call attention to a
pestilence, latent, as it were, which incessantly acts upon the faces
of the porter, the artisan, the small shopkeeper; to point out a
deleterious influence the corruption of which equals that of the
Parisian administrators who allow it so complacently to exist!

If the air of the houses in which the greater proportion of the middle
classes live is noxious, if the atmosphere of the streets belches out
cruel miasmas into stuffy back-kitchens where there is little air,
realize that, apart from this pestilence, the forty thousand houses of
this great city have their foundations in filth, which the powers that
be have not yet seriously attempted to enclose with mortar walls solid
enough to prevent even the most fetid mud from filtering through the
soil, poisoning the wells, and maintaining subterraneously to Lutetia
the tradition of her celebrated name. Half of Paris sleeps amidst the
putrid exhalations of courts and streets and sewers. But let us turn
to the vast saloons, gilded and airy; the hotels in their gardens, the
rich, indolent, happy moneyed world. There the faces are lined and
scarred with vanity. There nothing is real. To seek for pleasure is it
not to find _ennui_? People in society have at an early age warped
their nature. Having no occupation other than to wallow in pleasure,
they have speedily misused their sense, as the artisan has misused
brandy. Pleasure is of the nature of certain medical substances: in
order to obtain constantly the same effects the doses must be doubled,
and death or degradation is contained in the last. All the lower
classes are on their knees before the wealthy, and watch their tastes