_Mardi 19th._
... The death-rate in St. Pierre is now between three hundred and fifty
and four hundred a month. Our street is being depopulated. Every day men
come with immense stretchers,--covered with a sort of canvas awning,--to
take somebody away to the _lazaretto._ At brief intervals, also, coffins
are carried into houses empty, and carried out again followed by women
who cry so loud that their sobbing can be heard a great way off.
... Before the visitation few quarters were so densely peopled: there
were living often in one small house as many as fifty. The poorer
classes had been accustomed from birth to live as simply as
animals,--wearing scarcely any clothing, sleeping on bare floors,
exposing themselves to all changes of weather, eating the cheapest and
coarsest food. Yet, though living under such adverse conditions, no
healthier people could be found, perhaps, in the world,--nor a more
cleanly. Every yard having its fountain, almost everybody could bathe
daily,--and with hundreds it was the custom to enter the river every
morning at daybreak or to take a swim in the bay (the young women here
swim as well as the men).... But the pestilence, entering among so dense
and unprotected a life, made extraordinarily rapid havoc; and bodily
cleanliness availed little against the contagion. Now all the bathing
resorts are deserted,--because the lazarettos infect the bay with
refuse, and because the clothing of the sick is washed in the Roxelane.
... Guadeloupe, the sister colony, now sends aid;--the sum total is less
than a single American merchant might give to a charitable undertaking:
but it is a great deal for Guadeloupe to give. And far Cayenne sends
money too; and the mother-country will send one hundred thousand francs.