Even the Odeon Music-Hail, the place where aristocratic concerts
are given, is so badly constructed with respect to ventilation that
when crowded, as it generally is, women frequently faint away, while
many persons avoid going there entirely through dread of the
discomfort and fear of its effects. So, too, the theatres show a
shameful negligence of the health and comfort of the audiences as to
this particular, the Royal Theatre especially becoming almost a "Black
Hole of Calcutta" by the end of a six hours' Wagner opera. The close
air of the crowded lecture-rooms of the Polytechnic School is a source
of positive injury to the students, and the same may be said of the
halls appropriated to pupils in the Academy of Art.
With respect to bathing, there is no danger of the people of Munich
being mistaken for an amphibious race. The tiny bowls and pitchers
that furnish an ordinary German washstand, and the absence of
slop-pail and foot-bath, are sufficient proof that only partial
ablutions are expected to be performed in the bed-chamber; while the
lack of a bath-room in even genteel houses, and the smallness and
rarity of bathing establishments, show that the practice is by no
means frequent or general among the better classes. The fiercest
radical who should find himself for a time in the midst of a crowd of
the populace would scarcely hesitate (supposing him to be possessed of
delicate olfactories) to bestow upon them the epithet of "The Great
Unwashed.
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