The Three Classes of Pauperdom

Guest-blogger Honoré de Balzac weighs in with an outline of "the three classes of pauperdom" in Paris:

First, there is the poverty of the man who keeps up appearances now but whose future is secure: the poverty of young men, artists and society people who are temporarily embarrassed. The signs of this poverty are only visible to the most practised observer and even then a microscope is required. These people make up the equestrian class of paupers, they will go around in cabs. In the second class of the order are old men who have ceased to care about anything, and who wear the cross of the Legion of Honour over an alpaca coat in June. Theirs is the poverty of old retired people, ageing clerks whose home is at Sainte-Périne, people who are hardly concerned any more about how they dress. Finally, there is the poverty that goes about in rags, the pauperdom of the working class; this is poverty in its most poetical form, admired and painted (especially at carnival time) by Callot, Hogarth, Murillo, Charlet, Raffet, Gavarni, Meissonier and artists generally.

Honoré de Balzac, The Black Sheep 120

(Penguin Paperback ed. 1970)

Comments: we can pass over class one as really not pauperdom at all--the right wing press makes much of this class in arguig that today's poverty problem is exaggerated. Cl,ass two has been greatly reduced by Social Security and Medicare (recall that the old used to be the poorest class in the United States; now they are, by many measures, the richest). Re class three--is there any genre of art that treats them as quaint or diverting, as they seem to have been in Balzac's day?

Note that Balzac is writing in and about the early 19th Century. What other classes of pauperdom do we encounter that Balzac did not (or that he did not notice?)?