Crime is abundant in this city: the lazar-house, the prison, the brothel, and the dark alley, are rife with all kinds of enormity; in the same way as the palace, the mansion, the clubhouse, the parliament, and the parsonage, are each and all characterised by their different degrees and shades of vice. But wherefore specify crime and vice by their real names, since in this city of which we speak they are absorbed in the multi-significant words—Wealth and Poverty?
Crimes borrow their comparative shade of enormity from the people who perpetrate them: thus is it that the wealthy may commit all social offences with impunity; while the poor are cast into dungeons and coerced with chains, for only following at a humble distance in the pathway of their lordly precedents.
From this city of strange contrasts branch off two roads, leading to two points totally distinct the one from the other.
One winds its tortuous way through all the noisome dens, of crime, chicanery, dissipation, and voluptuousness: the other meanders amidst rugged rocks and wearisome acclivities, it is true, but on the wayside are the resting-places of rectitude and virtue.
Along those roads two youths are journeying.
They have started from the same point; but one pursues the former path, and the other the latter.
Both come from the city of fearful contrasts; and both follow the wheels of fortune in different directions.
Where is that city of fearful contrasts?
Who are those youths that have thus entered upon paths so opposite the one to the other?
And to what destinies do those separate roads conduct them?