The food trusts, by means of the most daring chemical syntheses, produced artificial wines, meat, milk, fruit, and vegetables, and the diet thus imposed gave rise to stomach and brain troubles.

The multi-millionaires were bald at the age of eighteen; some showed from time to time a dangerous weakness of mind.

Over-strung and enfeebled, they gave enormous sums to ignorant charlatans; and it was a common thing for some bath-attendant or other trumpery who turned healer or prophet, to make a rapid fortune by the practice of medicine or theology.

The number of lunatics increased continually; suicides multiplied in the world of wealth, and many of them were accompanied by atrocious and extraordinary circumstances, which bore witness to an unheard o perversion of intelligence and sensibility.
Another fatal symptom created a strong impression upon average minds.
Terrible accidents, henceforth periodical and regular, entered into people's calculations, and kept mounting higher and higher in statistical tables.

Every day, machines burst into fragments, houses fell down, trains laden with merchandise fell on to the streets, demolishing entire buildings and crushing hundreds of passers-by.
Through the ground, honey-combed with tunnels, two or three storeys of work-shops would often crash, engulfing all those who worked in them.
S.2 In the southwestern district of the city, on an eminence which had preserved its ancient name of Fort Saint-Michel, there stretched a square where some old trees still spread their exhausted arms above the greensward.