If Paris gives to our mind some of the most brilliant pictures imaginable, she also gives us some of the most dismal. While her drawing-rooms were light and elegant, her streets were dark and wicked. Among her hungry and ignorant populace, Crime planted its bitter seeds and ripened its bloody crop. Police annals show us that Eugène Sue has not exaggerated the truth in his portraits of the vicious population of the great city. London has its hideous dens of vice, but Paris has, too, its wicked institutions.
Its greatest offences, upon which I can only touch, regard the relations between men and women. Its police regulations bearing upon this point are dishonoring to any Christian community. Its social tone in this respect is scarcely better. Men who have the dress and appearance of gentlemen will show great insolence to a lady who dares to walk alone, however modestly. Marriage is still a matter of bargain and interest, and the modes of conduct which set its obligations at naught are more open and recognized here than elsewhere. The city would seem, indeed, to be the great market for that host of elegant rebels against virtue who are willing to be admired without being respected, and who, with splendid clothes and poor and mean characteristics, are technically called the _demi-monde_, the half-world of Paris.
The corruption of young men and young women which this state of things at once recognizes and fosters is such as no state can endure without grievous loss of its manhood and womanhood. The Turks knew their power when they could compel from the Greeks the tribute of their children, to be trained as Turks, not as Christians. Must not the Spirit of evil in like manner exult at his hold upon the French nation, when it allows him to enslave its youth so largely, consoling itself for the same with a shrug at the inevitable nature of human folly, or with some witty saying which will be at once acknowledgment of and excuse for what cannot be justified?
Gambling has been one of the crying vices of the French metropolis, and the "hells" of Paris were familiarly spoken of in my youth. These were the gambling-houses, in that day among the most brilliant and ruinous of their kind. Government has since then interfered to abolish them. Still, I suppose that much money is lost and won at play in Paris. From this and other irregularities, many suicides result. One sees in numerous places in Paris, particularly near the river, placards announcing "help to the drowned and asphyxiated," a plunge into the Seine, and a sitting with a pan of charcoal being the favorite methods of self-destruction. All have heard of the Morgue, a building in which, every day, the lifeless bodies found in the river are exposed upon marble slabs, in order that the friends of the dead--if they have any--may recognize and claim them. I believe that this sad place is rarely without its appropriate occupants.