SECTION FOUR (continued) LONDON EXILES OF THE ’FIFTIES
Constance Garnett translation
This fragment follows upon the description of the ‘Mountain Heights of the Exile World’—from their eternally red crags down to their lowest bogs and ‘sulphur mines.’[1] I beg the reader not to forget that in this chapter we are plunging with him below the level of the sea and are concerned exclusively with its slimy bottom, as it was after the tempest of February.
Almost everything here described has changed and vanished; the political dregs of the ’fifties are overlaid by fresh sand and fresh mud. This underworld of agitations and oppressions has ebbed, subsided, died away; all that is left of it is covered by fresh formations. Its surviving figures are becoming a rarity, and now I like to meet them.
Some of the specimens I want to preserve are mournfully grotesque, mournfully ludicrous, but they are all drawn from nature—and they ought not to vanish without a trace.