In Bastia we can see many excellent examples of the Corsican method of building houses. The houses are very tall, and consist of a huge number of flats, with one or more families in every flat. When a Corsican builds a house, he never thinks of occupying the whole of it himself. He lives on the third or fourth floor, and lets the rest of the building out to other tenants. On the ground-floor there is probably a shop. On the top-floor there will be a washerwoman or a gardener. The higher you live, the less rent you have to pay, so that many different classes of society are often gathered together under the same roof. Sometimes the various stories are not let for rent, but are sold outright, and in that case there may be as many landlords as there are flats. In Bastia some of these tall, dirty houses contain over 500 people. They are rarely less than five to six stories high, and from six to nine windows broad. It is just the same in Calvi, Bonifacio, and the other Corsican towns. Even in the villages a man rarely has a whole house to himself. Every room in every flat is about as dirty as it can well manage to be, owing to the lack of a proper water-supply. The only clean thing in the houses, and to the credit of the peasant let it be mentioned, is the bed-linen; that is always as spotless as the visitor could desire. In the rooms there is but little furniture of any kind; in the poorest houses there is often an insufficient supply of beds, and the men-folk sleep on the floor in the clothes they have worn all day long. The kitchen contains small stoves, which are used for cooking; when the cooking is finished, the fire is allowed to go out. Only very rarely are fires used for warmth; the houses are therefore cold and uncomfortable, and as each room has a number of doors that never fit, they are very draughty. The floors are usually of tiles, or even of the bare earth; wooden floors are not common; the chimneys generally smoke. To get from one story to the next, stone staircases are employed. The only light they obtain comes from openings pierced in the outer walls. As the stairs belong to everybody in general, and therefore to nobody in particular, they are rarely repaired, and are rather dangerous to those who are not used to them. A description of a house in Ajaccio, written by a lady who has travelled much in Corsica, will serve to give an idea of many of the dwellings occupied by the poor: “The house consisted of two tiny chambers, the inner one a mere cupboard some 8 by 10 feet, which only received light from the outer room by the communicating door; this acted as bedroom and kitchen combined. On the narrow bed lay four loaves; a small kitchen range and a table crammed with cooking-pots left scarcely space to turn round. In the bigger room stood two beds, on one of which lay what at first sight we took for a crumpled patchwork quilt, but which turned out to be a sick grandmother swathed in rags. The table was occupied by some artichokes and a basket of small fish. A couple of chairs stood on the uncarpeted plank floor, and the only other articles in the room were the lamps, some vases of paper flowers, and the inevitable family photographs upon the mantel-piece.... In this unlovely home live an old woman, her daughter and granddaughter, with the occasional additional presence of the grandson, a young fisherman, who occupied the kitchen during his brief home-comings, his mother and sister then sharing a bed in the next room.”[A]