At last Busbec the great traveller, because he was an ambassador from the Emperor, was allowed to enter a kind of charnel-house, and to see what had been the lovely gaily-painted vellums lying squalidly piled in heaps.
"The Great Book-Collectors"
Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
To have just left a party at the house of Cambaceres, where life was so large, where minds could expand, where the splendor of the Imperial Court was so vividly reflected, and to be dropped suddenly into a sphere of squalidly narrow ideas-was it not like a leap from Italy into Greenland?
"A Second Home"
Honore de Balzac
The poor woman, who is said to have been very pretty, is punished for her sins, for she is now squalidly hideous if she is still anything at all.
"Cousin Betty"
Honore de Balzac