standing menace to the health of the city, but also the shocking state
of the rooms, which the unhappy lodgers are obliged to put up with. The
owners of the property are, as happens in other places besides Paris,
unscrupulous and grasping to the last degree, and have not only divided
and subdivided the accommodation wherever possible, but have even raised
the rental in nearly all cases. Whole families are crowded into a small
apartment, icy cold in winter, an oven in summer, the only air and
daylight which reaches the interior coming from a window which looks on
to a dirty staircase or a still fouler court reeking with sewage. There
are at the present time in Paris 3,000 lodgings which have neither stove
nor chimney; over 5,000 lighted only by a skylight; while in 4,282 rooms
there are four children in each below 14 years of age; 7,199 with three
children; and 1,049 with four beds in each. The Parisian population has
augmented only 15 per cent. in seven years; but the district of poor
lodging houses has increased by twenty per cent., and the number of
lodgings by about 80 per cent. It is true that a law was passed in 1850
to provide for the sanitary supervision of this class of property; but
in Paris the law is a dead letter, and, although it is now active in the
provinces and in places like Marseilles, Lyons, Bordeaux, and Nantes, it
is applied, even there, in a jerky and intermittent manner.

Perhaps the worst of the abominable dogkennels called houses was the
group known as the Cite des Kroumirs, in the 13th arrondissement, which,
by a strange irony, was built on land belonging to the Department of
Public Assistance, which was let out by that body to a rich tenant, who
sublet it to these lodging-house owners. This veritable den of infection
and misery has now been demolished; but there are plenty of others quite
as bad. Notably, there is the Cite Jeanne d'Arc (a poor compliment to
have named it after that sturdy heroine), an enormous barrack of five
stories, which contains 1,200 lodgings and 2,486 lodgers. No wonder that