mistress, Want, empty
in pocket yet always a _grand seigneur_.

However, Pierre was struck by the great difference between the want and
wretchedness of Rome and Paris. In Rome the destitution was certainly
more complete, the food more loathsome, the dirt more repulsive. Yet at
the same time the Roman poor retained more ease of manner and more real
gaiety. The young priest thought of the fireless, breadless poor of
Paris, shivering in their hovels at winter time; and suddenly he
understood. The destitution of Rome did not know cold. What a sweet and
eternal consolation; a sun for ever bright, a sky for ever blue and
benign out of charity to the wretched! And what mattered the vileness of
the dwelling if one could sleep under the sky, fanned by the warm breeze!
What mattered even hunger if the family could await the windfall of
chance in sunlit streets or on the scorched grass! The climate induced
sobriety; there was no need of alcohol or red meat to enable one to face
treacherous fogs. Blissful idleness smiled on the golden evenings,
poverty became like the enjoyment of liberty in that delightful
atmosphere where the happiness of living seemed to be all sufficient.
Narcisse told Pierre that at Naples, in the narrow odoriferous streets of
the port and Santa Lucia districts, the people spent virtually their
whole lives out-of-doors, gay, childish, and ignorant, seeking nothing
beyond the few pence that were needed to buy food. And it was certainly
the climate which fostered the prolonged infancy of the nation, which
explained why such a democracy did not awaken to social ambition and
consciousness of itself. No doubt the poor of Naples and Rome suffered
from want; but they did not know the rancour which cruel winter implants
in men's hearts, the dark rancour which one feels on shivering with cold
while rich people are warming themselves before blazing fires. They did
not know the infuriated reveries in snow-swept hovels, when the guttering
dip burns low, the passionate need which then comes upon one to wreak
justice, to revolt, as from a sense of duty, in order that one may save
wife and children from consumption, in order that they also may have a
warm nest where life shall be a possibility! Ah! the want that shivers
with the bitter cold--therein lies the excess of social injustice, the
most terrible of schools, where the poor learn to realise their
sufferings, where they are roused to indignation, and swear to make those