Before we reached the hotel, we turned aside into one of the bath-houses. We stood inhaling a sickly steam in a large, close hall, which was wholly occupied by a huge vat, across which low partitions, with bridges, ran, dividing it into four compartments. When we entered, we were assailed with yells in many languages, and howls in the common tongue, as if all the fiends of the pit had broken loose. We took off our hats in obedience to the demand; but the clamor did not wholly subside, and was mingled with singing and horrible laughter. Floating about in each vat, we at first saw twenty or thirty human heads. The women could be distinguished from the men by the manner of dressing the hair. Each wore a loose woolen gown. Each had a little table floating before him or her, which he or she pushed about at pleasure. One wore a hideous mask; another kept diving in the opaque pool and coming up to blow, like the hippopotamus in the Zoological Gardens; some were taking a lunch from their tables, others playing chess; some sitting on the benches round the edges, with only heads out of water, as doleful as owls, while others roamed about, engaged in the game of spattering with their comrades, and sang and shouted at the top of their voices. The people in this bath were said to be second class; but they looked as well and behaved better than those of the first class, whom we saw in the establishment at our hotel afterward.
It may be a valuable scientific fact, that the water in these vats, in which people of all sexes, all diseases, and all nations spend so many hours of the twenty-four, is changed once a day. The temperature at which the bath is given is ninety-eight. The water is let in at night, and allowed to cool. At five in the morning, the bathers enter it, and remain until ten o'clock,--five hours, having breakfast served to them on the floating tables, “as they sail, as they sail.” They then have a respite till two, and go in till five. Eight hours in hot water! Nothing can be more disgusting than the sight of these baths. Gustave Dore must have learned here how to make those ghostly pictures of the lost floating about in the Stygian pools, in his illustrations of the Inferno; and the rocks and cavernous precipices may have enabled him to complete the picture. On what principle cures are effected in these filthy vats, I could not learn. I have a theory, that, where so many diseases meet and mingle in one swashing fluid, they neutralize each other. It may be that the action is that happily explained by one of the Hibernian bathmen in an American water-cure establishment. “You see, sir,” said he, “that the shock of the water unites with the electricity of the system, and explodes the disease.” I should think that the shock to one's feeling of decency and cleanliness, at these baths, would explode any disease in Europe. But, whatever the result may be, I am not sorry to see so many French and Italians soak themselves once a year.