onies which only a miracle upheld. There were crumbling fronts,
shored up with beams; sordid lodgings whose filth and bareness could be
seen through shattered windows; and numerous petty shops, all the
open-air cook-stalls of a lazy race which never lighted a fire at home:
you saw frying-shops with heaps of polenta, and fish swimming in stinking
oil, and dealers in cooked vegetables displaying huge turnips, celery,
cauliflowers, and spinach, all cold and sticky. The butcher's meat was
black and clumsily cut up; the necks of the animals bristled with bloody
clots, as though the heads had simply been torn away. The baker's loaves,
piled on planks, looked like little round paving stones; at the beggarly
greengrocers' merely a few pimentoes and fir-apples were shown under the
strings of dry tomatoes which festooned the doorways; and the only shops
which were at all attractive were those of the pork butchers with their
salted provisions and their cheese, whose pungent smell slightly
attenuated the pestilential reek of the gutters. Lottery offices,
displaying lists of winning numbers, alternated with wine-shops, of which
latter there was a fresh one every thirty yards with large inscriptions
setting forth that the best wines of Genzano, Marino, and Frascati were
to be found within. And the whole district teemed with ragged, grimy
denizens, children half naked and devoured by vermin, bare-headed,
gesticulating and shouting women, whose skirts were stiff with grease,
old men who remained motionless on benches amidst swarms of hungry flies;
idleness and agitation appearing on all sides, whilst cobblers sat on the
sidewalks quietly plying their trade, and little donkeys pulled carts
hither and thither, and men drove turkeys along, whip in hand, and hands
of beggars rushed upon the few anxious tourists who had timorously
ventured into the district. At the door of a little tailor's shop an old
house-pail dangled full of earth, in which a succulent plant was
flowering. And from every window and balcony, as from the many cords
which stretched across the street from house to house, all the household
washing hung like bunting, nameless drooping rags, the symbolical banners
of abominable misery.

Pierre's fraternal, soul filled with pity at the sight. Ah! yes, it was
necessary to demolish all those pestilential districts where the populace
had wallowed for centuries as in a poisonous gaol! He was for demolition
and sanitary improvement,