Rent being one of the most important and indispensable domestic expenses, the father of a family, pressed by other wants of the first necessity, naturally seeks the least costly habitation. Now, these habitations exist only in certain quarters, and in certain streets of those quarters: they are old, ruined, and filthy. The proprietors, in order to tenant them, let the lodgings very low, and thus attract the poorer families. If these lodgings were healthy, if they were sufficient for all the members of the family, there would be no room for censure; but they are foul, badly lighted, and neither air-tight nor water-tight. They are small, and as parents and children live and sleep in the same room, the overcrowding is both a cause of unhealthiness, and an offence against good morals. Moreover, the bad state and filth of the passages, privies, and sinks, give rise to infectious exhalations, which vitiate the air of these humble abodes, and affect the health of their inhabitants in a manner so much more mischievous that the greater part of them work all the day in crowded and ill-ventilated shops.
It would be worthy of a wise administration to remedy this dangerous complication. The task is doubtless difficult; but why not grapple with it boldly, instead of allowing to subsist in Paris, without any effort to destroy them, so many centres of infection which reduce to the level of the lowest animals the unfortunate beings who seek in them a retreat for the night.
Although the lodgings are not all repulsive, they are all alike open to criticism. Some offend by overcrowding, others by the mode of sleeping; others, lastly, by the absence of all ventilation, and even by a total want of air. Overcrowding is an evil which prevails in all the lodgings of the lowest class, and which aggravates the mischief resulting from the other inconveniences to which they are subject. The twenty-five or thirty thousand workmen employed in house-building, who flock to Paris every year from certain departments, congregate in chambers, and sleep there during the season. Many of these places are kept by countrymen of their own, who attract them by their known probity, and the kindness they entertain for them. These chambers abound principally in the quarter of the Hôtel-de-Ville for the masons, and in the Faubourg Saint-Martin for the carpenters. These excellent workmen, by an exception more peculiar to them than to any others, look only to economy. They bargain with the lodging-house keeper, so as to obtain for six francs a month, besides the room, the washing of a shirt a-week, and a mess of soup every day, for which they themselves provide the bread. All that is not devoted to their slender wants is laid by for the support of their family, or the increase of their little patrimony. The police unanimously testify to the order and concord which reign in their chambers, as well as to their good conduct abroad. Is it not mournful that these fine fellows should sleep thus piled up in little garrets? Accustomed to work in the open air, the smallness of their rooms is more trying to them than to any others. Thus typhus fever is common among them, and sometimes attacks a whole chamber.
The overcrowding and deficient ventilation are still more injurious to workmen employed in manufactures. They pass every day from an infected lodging into a shop which is usually as unwholesome, and they are thus predisposed to contract readily contagious maladies.
Of all the lower orders, the chiffonniers inhabit the most infected and disgusting lodgings. It is vain to expect to descend into the lowest ranks of society,—inequality always appears somewhere. Even the chiffonniers have their notables. There are some a little more economical, a little more raised than the mass, and who enjoy a certain comfort. Those the most elevated occupy one or two small rooms, which they hire for themselves and their families; others possess a pallet, which serves them to sleep on, in the chamber of which they are one occupant among many. But this possession is more often collective than personal; and although shared, it does not fail to excite the envy of the poor wretches who lie in a species of trough, on rags, or on handsful of straw, with which the room is strewed. The police charged with the surveillance of the lodgings inhabited by the chiffonniers give an incredible picture of them. Each occupant keeps by him his basket, sometimes full of filth—and what filth! These savages do not hesitate to comprise dead animals in their gleanings, and pass the night by the side of this stinking prey. When the police go to these places, they experience a suffocating feeling, bordering on asphyxy. They order the windows to be opened when they can be opened, and the severe representations they address to the lodging-house keepers on this horrible mixture of human beings with decayed animal matter does not move them. They answer, that their lodgers are accustomed to it as well as themselves. A trait of manners peculiar to the chiffonniers, and which might be called their pastime, consists in rat-catching in the courts of the houses which they frequent. They entice the rats by the aid of certain substances attached to the rags they gather in the streets. With this view they put heaps of rags near the holes in the walls, and when they think that the rats are buried in the rags, they let loose into the court dogs trained for the purpose, and, in the twinkling of an eye, they make themselves masters of the rats, of which they eat the flesh and sell the skin.
The lodgings which receive at night the scum of society are thorough pest-houses. Those even which are not frequented by chiffonniers become, by the crowding of the inhabitants and their filthy habits, dangerous centres of infection. There are some chambers which contain as many as nine beds, separated by small passages hardly wide enough to get through, and these beds are often occupied by two persons who do not know each other, and have never seen one another. Difference of sex is no obstacle to these nocturnal and fortuitous cohabitations, although the police neglect nothing to prevent disorders. Among the female apartments there is one which is famous for the picture of decrepitude and abjectness which it presents. The women who occupy it are old drunkards, of whom several are suspected of theft. The spectacle of these animated mummies has something sepulchral.
One must bring to social anatomy a serious spirit of investigation, to form a just idea of the population which lives in the concealed recesses of society. The imagination, however fertile and daring, could never reach, in this matter, to the height of the reality: there is a character, a physiognomy, a strangeness, which it is necessary to have seen in order to assume the responsibility of an historian. Let no one tax with romance the traits of manners nor the description of places contained in this chapter. However softened by the reserve I have imposed on myself, they are not less true at bottom. I have sacrificed the coarseness of the outline and colouring out of respect to decency. It is the only infidelity of which I accuse myself. It is impossible not to feel the necessity to provide an efficacious remedy for a state of things so contrary to the rights of humanity and civilization.[[57]]
19.—On the Habitations and Lodgings of the Lower Orders of Paris.
No. 2.
There exist in Paris some thousands of individuals who have no domicile—who sleep to-day in one place, the next day in another—and who have recourse every evening to those houses where, for a payment usually very moderate, they can at least obtain a place to lie in, and a covering for their heads. It is not only strangers living temporarily in Paris who lodge in this manner; a mass of workmen, mostly single men, who have not stirred from the capital for ten, fifteen, and twenty years, prefer this kind of life to the occupation of a separate chamber. It may be affirmed, without fear of contradiction, that this population comprises all that is most drunken and debased in society. It is composed of people without foresight, and without a home, living from day to day, and trusting to the hospitals in the case of sickness or infirmity. It is in the lowest places in these disgusting haunts in which a person is lodged for six, four, and even for two sous, that the greater part of the prostitutes reside, who can scarcely, after purchasing food, lay aside from their daily gains the trifling sum necessary to avert sleeping in the open air. I have visited some of these lodgings, and it was not without a feeling of pain that I have seen human creatures reduced to live in such places, and that in the capital of France. To give a just idea of these abodes, I will extract some passages from the remarkable report which the inspector-general of furnished lodgings addressed to the prefect of police at the time of the cholera. It tells of nothing but houses in ruin, of straw for beds in a state of putrefaction, of darkness, of infectious smells, of filth without example. These are some of the passages:—
“Rue ——, No. —. This house is remarkable for its excessive dirt. It is a genuine centre of infection. It is inhabited solely by thieves, smugglers, beggars, and prostitutes. It is impossible to enter without being suffocated.