The Little World In The
Upper Part Of The City Is Probably The Most Brilliant To Be Found Anywhere
In So Small A Compass.
But there is a world below, another nation, seldom
mentioned in the aristocratic quarter of St. Louis, where vice, crime,
poverty, and misery jostle each other, as pleasure and politics do in the
upper town.
This is the suburb of St. Roch, in whose tall dark houses and
fetid alleys those are to be found whose birthright is toil, who spend
life in supplying the necessities of to-day, while indulging in gloomy
apprehensions for to-morrow - who have not one comfort in the past to cling
to, or one hope for the future to cheer.
St. Roch is as crowded as the upper town, but with a very different
population - the poor, the degraded, and the vicious. Here fever destroys
its tens, and cholera its hundreds. Here people stab each other, and think
little of it. Here are narrow alleys, with high, black-looking, stone
houses, with broken windows pasted over with paper in the lower stories,
and stuffed with rags in the upper - gradations of wretchedness which I
have observed in the Cowgate and West Port at Edinburgh. Here are shoeless
women, who quiet their children with ardent spirits, and brutal men, who
would kill both wives and children if they dared. Here are dust-heaps in
which pigs with long snouts are ever routing - here are lean curs,
wrangling with each other for leaner bones - here are ditches and puddles,
and heaps of oyster-shells, and broken crockery, and cabbage-stalks, and
fragments of hats and shoes.
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