For clothing we spend, according to our means, from four to fourteen pounds a year. Half of us have no coat in addition to the blouse. Before the crisis of eighteen hundred and forty-eight, one sixth of us had money in savings’ banks, and one man in every two was a member of some benefit society. The benefit societies were numerous, each generally containing some two or three hundred members; but even our singing clubs are now suppressed, and we must not meet even to transact the business of a benefit society without giving notice of our design to the police, and receiving into our party at least two of its agents as lookers-on. The result has been the decay of all such societies, and the extinction of most of them. Where they remain, the average monthly subscription is fifteen-pence, which insures the payment of twenty-pence a day during sickness, with gratuitous advice and medicine from the doctor. The funds of such societies are lodged either in savings’ banks, or in the _Mont de Pieté_; which, though properly a pawnbroking establishment, has also its uses as a bank. The imperial fist presses everywhere down upon us. It has forced us out of sick clubs, because we sometimes talked in them about the state of the nation: it would build us huge barracks to live in, so that we may be had continually under watch and ward; and it has lately thrust in upon us a president of its own at the head of our _Conseil de Prud’hommes_, the only tribunal we possess for the adjustment of our internal trade disputes.
Of our pleasures on a Sunday afternoon the world has heard. We devote that to our families, if we have any; Monday, too often, to our friends. There are on Sundays our feats of gymnastics at open-air balls beyond the barriers, and our dancing saloons in the city; such as the Prado, the Bal Montesquieu, and the Dogs’ Ball. There are our pleasant country rambles, and our pleasant little dinners in the fields. There are our games at poule, and dominoes, and piquet; and our pipes with dexterously blackened bowls. There are our theatres, the Funambule and the Porte St. Martin. Gamblers among us play at bowls in the Elysian fields, or they stay at home losing and winning more than they can properly afford to risk at _écarté_.