Working, working, day and night, when they have work to do, practically starving when work is scarce.
The people of the underworld are not squeamish, they talk freely, and as a matter of course about life and death.

Their children are at an early age made acquainted with both mysteries; a dead child and one newly born sometimes occupy a room with other children.
People tell me of the idleness of the underworld and there is plenty of it; but what astonishes me is the wonderful, the persistent, but almost unrewarded toil that is unceasingly going on, in which even infants share.
Come again with me in the day-time, climb with me six dark and greasy flights of stairs, for the underworld folk are sometimes located near the sky.
In this Bastille the passages are very narrow, and our shoulders sometimes rub the slimy moisture from the walls.

On every landing in the semi-darkness we perceive galleries running to right and to left.

On the little balconies, one on every floor, children born in this Bastille are gasping for air through iron bars.
There are three hundred suites of box rooms in this Bastille, which means that three hundred families live like ants in it.

Let us enter No.
250.