18 years, fresh and gay, arriving from Reims, wishes to make the acquaintance of several gentlemen curious to talk over news of the war and Prussian behaviour. Letters to Mlle. H—— B—— in care of this newspaper.
In addition to all these more or less individual appeals, there is, of course, a plethora of “mulheres da vida”—“women of the life,” as they are called in Brazil, “who,” complains a lone pulchritudinous editorial voice, “are gradually invading all the arteries of the city.” This class has almost completely usurped the first half mile or more of dwellings along the Beira Mar, facing the bay and one of the most gorgeous views in the western hemisphere; yet the citizens of Rio think no more of protesting against this invasion than of striving to hinder the usurpers from drumming up trade from dusk until daylight by repeated trips along the first section of the “Botanical Garden Line.” I am not of those who believe implicitly in our American custom of playing ostrich and concealing our heads in the sand of Mrs. Grundy’s garden, but there is such a thing as overdoing frankness, of making temptation too accessible, of chloroforming public opinion out of its legitimate consciousness; and the ways of Rio and the average Brazilian city do not indicate that perfect candor is any improvement over our own secretive and hypocritical treatment of the same subject.
There are other and more amusing things to be found among the “want ads” of Rio newspapers. Beggars frequently run appeals for assistance:
POOR BLIND WOMAN
Francisca de Barros of Ceará, blind in both eyes, crippled in one hand, ill, and without resources, begs an alms of all good charitable souls, whom the good God will recompense. It may be sent in care of this paper.
BY THE WOUNDS OF CHRIST!
A lady who is ill and unable to work, with a medical certificate to prove it, a tubercular daughter, and without resources to sustain herself, suffering from the greatest necessities, comes to beg of charitable persons, by the Sacred Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, an alms for her sustenance, which God will recompense to all. Rua Senhor de Mattosinhos 43.
If all such beggars were actually ailing or incapacitated, it would be less surprising to find respectable newspapers running their advertisements. But it has often been amply demonstrated that many of them are the most brazen frauds. The editors of the same sheets which run these alms-seeking petitions admit editorially that “Mendicants of the aristocratic variety, who live well, eat well, and except at work dress well, may be found in any street of the city going from door to door, imperiously clapping their hands to call the attention of the residents.” At a fixed stop of all “Botanical Garden” cars a young woman of slight African taint and rumpled garments, with several children quite evidently borrowed for the occasion and frequently changed, canvassed every car, always with profitable results; yet at her home in the outskirts of Ipanema she dressed and lived like an heiress. There are deserving cases, or at least unfortunate ones, among Rio’s indigent army, but the church and Iberian custom have trained the Cariocas to accept begging as natural, inevitable, and in no way reprehensible, and the medieval conception of charity, that the bestowing of largess on able-bodied loafers is to lay up favor in heaven, causes the giver to lose little thought on the worthiness of the case so long as the heavenly bookkeepers duly record his action.
The announcements of “Spiritualist Somnambulists,” who can “diagnose the future in time to permit applicants to change theirs before it is too late,” are legion. One man ran permanently this long-winded assertion:
CURE BY GOD