An Englishman In Paris Part 33

My disappointment was great. I had come to admire, not expecting magnificent scenery, gorgeous costumes, or transcendent acting, but a spirit of reverence for the immortal creation of a great poet. At that time I was not sufficiently familiar with provincial art in England to be able to picture a performance of Shakespeare except under conditions such as prevail in the best of London theatres. I had read accounts, however, of strolling companies and their doings, but I doubt whether the humblest would have been guilty of such utter iconoclasm in the spirit as well as in the letter as I witnessed that night. It was not comic, it was absolutely painful. It was not the glazed calico doing duty for brocade, that made me wince; it was not the anti-maca.s.sar replacing lace that made me gasp for breath: it was the miserable failure of those behind the footlights, as well as of those in front, to grasp the meaning of the simplest line. They had been told that this play was an indictment, not against a libertine king, but against generations and generations of rulers to whom debauch was as the air they breathed. And, in order to make the lesson more striking, Saint-Vallier was represented as an old dotard, Triboulet as a pander, the king as an amorous Bill Sykes, and Triboulet's daughter as an hysterical young woman who virtually gloried in her dishonour. I had seen "Orphee aux Enfers," "La Belle Helene," and "La Grande d.u.c.h.esse;" I had heard Schneider at her best and at her worst; I had heard women of birth and breeding t.i.tter, and gentlemen roar, at allusions which would make a London coalheaver blush;--I had never seen anything so downright degrading as this performance. And when, at last, the _dramatis personae_ gathered round a bust of Hippocrates--the best subst.i.tute for one of Victor Hugo they could find,--and one of them recited "Les Chatiments,"

I left, hoping that I should never see such an exhibition again. It was one of the first deliberately planned lessons in "king-hatred" I had heard. The disciples looked to me very promising, and the Commune, when it came, was not such a surprise to me, after all. Before then, I had come to the conclusion that the _barbarians_ outside the gates of Paris were less to be feared than those inside--the former, at any rate, believed in a chief; the motto of the others was, "Ni Dieu, ni maitre."

Meanwhile, the long winter nights have come. The stock of gas is pretty well exhausted, or tantamount to it; wood, similar to that I have described already, has risen to seven francs fifty centimes the hundredweight. Beef and mutton have entirely disappeared from the butchers' stalls. Rats are beginning to be sold at one franc apiece, and eggs cost thirty francs a dozen. b.u.t.ter has risen to fifty francs the half-kilogramme (about seventeen ozs., English). Carrots and potatoes fetch, the first, forty francs, the second, twenty francs, the peck (English). I am being told that milk is still to be had, but I have neither tasted nor seen any for ten days. Personally, I do not feel the want of it; but in my visits to some of the poor in my neighbourhood I am confronted by the fact of little ones, between two and three years of age, being fed on bread soaked in wine, and suffering from various ailments in consequence.

I am pursuing some inquiries at the various mairies, and find that the death-rate for October has reached nearly three thousand above the corresponding month of the previous year. I am furthermore told that not a third of this increase is due to the direct results of the siege--that is, to death on the battle-field, or resulting from wounds received there; typhus and low fever, anaemia, etc., are beginning to ravage the inhabitants. Worse than all, the authorities have made a mistake with regard to the influx of strangers. The seventy-five thousand aliens and Parisians who have left at the beginning of the siege have been replaced by three times that number, so that Paris has virtually one hundred and fifty thousand more mouths to feed than it counted upon. "All the women, children, and old men," says one of my informants, "ought to have been removed to some provincial centre; it would have cost no more, and would have left those who remained free for a more energetic defence. And you will scarcely believe it, monsieur, but here is the register to prove it; there have been nearly four hundred marriages celebrated during the past month. It looks to me like tying the Gordian knot with a vengeance."

One thing I cannot help remarking amidst all this suffering; the Parisian never ceases to be witty. Among my pensioners there was the wife of a hard-working, frugal upholsterer, whose trade was absolutely at a standstill. He was doing his duty on the fortifications; she was keeping the home together on the meagre pittance allowed to her husband by the Government, and the rations doled out to her every morning. The youngest of her three children was barely four weeks old. One morning, to my great surprise, I found two infants in her lap. "C'est comme ca, monsieur," she said, with a wan smile. "Andre found it on a doorstep in the Rue Mogador, and he brought it home, saying, 'It won't make much difference; Nature laid the table for two infants.'"

The Parisian is a born lounger. Balzac had said, "Flaner est une science, c'est la gastronomie de l'oeil." Seeing that it is the only gastronomy they can enjoy under the circ.u.mstances, the Parisians take to it with a vengeance during those months of October and November, and their favourite halting-places are the rare provision-shops that have still a fowl, or a goose, or a pigeon in their windows. The sight of a turkey causes an obstruction, and the would-be purchaser of a rabbit is mobbed like the winner of a great prize in the lottery. Nine times out of ten the negotiations do not go beyond the preliminary stage of inquiring the price, because vendors are obstinate, though polite.

"How much for the rabbit?" says the supposed Nabob, for the very fact of inquiring implies wealth.

"Forty-five francs, monsieur."

"You are joking. Forty-five francs! It's simply ridiculous," protests the other one.

"I am not joking, monsieur; and I cannot take a farthing less."

The would-be diner goes away; but he has scarcely gone a few steps, when the dealer calls him back. "Listen, monsieur," he cries.

Hope revives in the other's breast. His fancy conjures up a savoury rabbit-stew, and he leaps rather than walks the distance that separates him from the stall.

"Ventre affame a des oreilles pour sur," says a bystander.[85]

[Footnote 85: The proverb is, "Ventre affame n'a pas d'oreilles."--EDITOR.]

"Well, how much are you going to take off?"

"I am not going to take off a penny, but I thought I might tell you that this rabbit plays the drum."

Some of the jokes, though, were not equally innocent, and revealed a callousness on the part of the perpetrators which it is not pleasant to have to record. True, they did not affect the very poor, whose poverty was, as it were, a guarantee against them; but it is a moot point whether the well-to-do should be shamelessly robbed by the well-to-do tradesmen for no other reason than to increase the latter's h.o.a.rd.

Greed, that abominable feature in the character of the French middle-cla.s.ses, showed itself again and again under circ.u.mstances which ought to have suspended its manifestations for the time being.

I have already noted that one member of the Academie des Sciences had insisted upon the benefits to be derived from the extraction of gelatine from bones. A great number of equally learned men simply scouted the idea as preposterous, notably Dr. Gannal, the well-known authority on embalming. His opposition went so far as to prompt him to submit his family and himself to the "ordeal," as he called it. At the end of a week, all of them were reduced to mere skeletons; and then, but then only, Dr. Gannal sent for his learned colleagues to attest the effects.

The drowning man will proverbially cling to a straw; consequently, some Parisians took to gelatine, undeterred by the clever lampoons, one of which I quote:

"L'inventeur de la gelatine, a la chair preferant les os, Veut desormais que chacun dine Avec un jeu of dominos."

They, however, did so with their eyes open, and as a last resource; not so those who were imposed upon, and induced to part with their money for cleverly imitated calves' heads, which, as a matter of course, merely left a gluish substance at the bottom of the saucepan, to the indignation of anxious housewives and irate cooks, one of whom took her revenge one day by clapping the saucepan and its contents on the head of the fraudulent dealer, and, while the latter was in an utterly defenceless state, triumphantly stalking away with two very respectable fowls. The shopkeeper had the impudence to seek redress in a court of law. The judge would not so much as listen to him.

Another curious feature of the siege was the sudden pa.s.sion developed by cooks for what I must be permitted to call culinary literature. As a rule, the French cordon-bleu, and even her less accomplished sisters, do not go for their recipes to cookery-books; theirs is knowledge gained from actual experience: but at that period such works as, "Le Livre de Cuisine de Mademoiselle Marguerite," "La Cuisiniere Pratique," etc., were to be found on every kitchen table. The cooks had simply taken to them in despair, not believing a single word of their contents, but on the chance of finding a hint that might lend itself to the provisions placed at their disposal. I refrain from giving their criticisms on the authors: the forcibleness of their language could only be done justice to by such masters of realism as M. Zola. I have spoken before now of the uniform good temper of the Parisians under the most trying circ.u.mstances; I beg to append a rider, excluding cooks, but especially female ones. "C'est comme si on essayait d'enseigner le patinage a la femme aux jambes de bois du boulevard," said the ministering angel to one of my bachelor friends. One day, to my great surprise, on calling on him I found him reading. He was not much given to poring over books, though his education had been a very good one.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I am reading More's 'Utopia,'" he said, putting down the volume.

"What do you mean?" I remarked, pointing to the cover, displaying a young woman bending over stew-pans.

"This is More's 'Utopia,' to me at present. It speaks of things which will never be realized; supreme de volaille, tournedos a la poivrade, and so forth. The book wants another chapter," he went on, "a chapter treating of the food of besieged cities. The Dutch might have written it centuries ago: at Leyden they were on the point of eating their left arms, while defending themselves with their right; they could have told us how to stew the former. If one could add a chapter to that effect, the book might go through a hundred new editions, and the writer might make a fortune. It would not do him much good, for he would be expected to live up to his precepts, and not touch a morsel of that beautiful kangaroo or elephant I saw yesterday on the Boulevard Haussmann."

At that moment a mutual acquaintance came in. He had been a lieutenant in the Foreign Legion, and lost his right foot before Constantine.

Noticing our host's doleful looks, he inquired the cause, and we got another spoken essay on the difficulties of the situation as connected with the food supply. I may add that, wherever a few men were gathered together, this became invariably the absorbing topic of conversation.

The ex-lieutenant laughed outright. "You are altogether labouring under a mistake; there is plenty of food of a kind left, though I admit with you that the Parisian does not know how to prepare it."

"Will you teach them?" was the query.

"I will not, because they would simply sneer at me. Feeding is simply a matter of prejudice; and, to prove it to you, I will give you a breakfast to-morrow morning which you will appreciate. But I am not going to tell you of what it consists, nor will I do so until two days after the entertainment."

We accepted the invitation, though I must confess that I was not eager about it. Nevertheless, next day, about one, we were seated at the hospitable board of our ex-lieutenant, who, three weeks before, had dismissed his female servant and was waited upon by an old trooper, with one arm. Though perfectly respectful, Joseph received us with a broad grin, which, as the repast progressed, was contracted into a proud smile. He had evidently co-operated with his master in the concoction of the dishes, all of which, I am bound to say, were very savoury. In fact, I was like that new tenant of the house haunted by a laughing ghost. But for the knowledge that there was something uncanny about it, I would have been intensely gratified and amused. Our host told us, with great glee, that Joseph had been up since a quarter-past four that morning; and that before five he was at the Halles. As we could distinctly taste the onions in the stew that served as an entree, and as the potatoes round the next dish were visible to the naked eye, we concluded that the old trooper had got up so early to buy vegetables, and were correspondingly grateful. There was no mystery whatsoever about the fish, and about the entremets. The first was dry cod--but with a sauce such as I had never tasted before or have since. The latter was a delicious dish of sweet macaroni, fit to set before a prince. I repeat, but for my knowledge that there was something uncanny about that meal, I would have asked permission to come every day. Yet I felt almost equally convinced that, with regard to one dish, we had been doubly mystified--that they were larks, which our host had managed to procure somehow, though I missed the bones.

True to his word, our Amphitryon revealed the real ingredients of the menu forty-eight hours after. The entree had been composed of very small mice--field-mice, I think we call them in England; the second dish was rat. Not a single ounce of b.u.t.ter or lard had been used in the sauces or for the macaroni. The dried cod was still plentiful enough to be had at any grocer's or salted provision shop. Instead of b.u.t.ter, Joseph used horse-marrow. The horse-butchers sold the bones ridiculously cheap, not having the slightest idea what to do with them. The mice, Joseph caught round about the fortifications, whither he went almost every day. The rats he caught in the cellarage of the Halles. He had a cousin there in a large way of business, and access to the underground part of the market was never refused to him.

"From what you have tasted at my rooms," concluded the ex-lieutenant, "you will easily see that our vaunted superiority as cooks is so much humbug. The dish of cod I gave you, and which you liked so much, may be seen on the table of the poorest household in Holland and Flanders at least once, sometimes twice, a week, especially in North-Brabant, where the good Catholics scarcely ever eat anything else on Fridays. The sauce, which they call a mustard-sauce, would naturally be better if made with b.u.t.ter, but you could not taste the difference if the cook takes care to sprinkle a little saffron in her fat or marrow. Saffron is a great thing in cooking, and still our best chefs know little or nothing about it. But for the saffron, you would have detected a slight odour of musk in the entree you took to be larks. You may almost disguise anything with saffron, except dog's-flesh. Listen to what I tell you, and in a month or so, perhaps before, you'll admit the truth of my words. The moment horseflesh fails, the Parisians will fall back upon dogs, turning up their noses at cats and rats, though both are a thousand times superior to the latter. In saying this, I am virtually libelling the cat and the rat; for 'the friend of man,' be he cooked in ever so grand a way, is always a detestable dish. His flesh is oily and flabby; stew him, fry him, do what you will, there is always a flavour of castor oil about him. The only way to minimize that flavour, to make him palatable, is to salt, or rather to pepper him; that is, to cut him up in slices, and leave them for a fortnight, bestrewing them very liberally with pepper-corns. Then, before 'accommodating' them finally, put them into boiling water for a while, and throw the water away.

"No such compromises are necessary with 'the fauna of the tiles,' who, with his larger-sized victim, the rat, has been the most misprized and misjudged of all animals, from the culinary point of view. Stewed puss is by far more delicious than stewed rabbit. The flesh of the former tastes less pungent than that of the latter, and is more tender. As for the prejudice against cat, well, the Germans have the same prejudice against rabbit, and while I was in the Foreign Legion there was a Wurtemberger, a lieutenant, who would not touch bunny, but who would devour grimalkin. Those who have not tasted couscoussou of cat, prepared according to the Arabian recipe--though the Arabs won't touch it--have never tasted anything."[86]

[Footnote 86: The Arab _kuskus_ generally consists of a piece of mutton baked in a paste with the vegetables of the season, flavoured with herbs; and the addition of half a dozen hard-boiled eggs. The whole of the flesh is boned.--EDITOR.]

Our friend said much more, notably with regard to rat and horseflesh; and then he wound up: "But what is the good? Those who might benefit by my advice are not here, and, if they were, they would probably scorn it; I mean the very poor. The only item of animal food which cannot be adequately replaced by something else yielding as much or nearly as much nourishment is milk. But, unless an adult be in delicate health or suffering from ailments to the alleviation and cure of which milk is absolutely necessary, he may very well go without it for six months. Not so children. I am only showing you that the poor, with their slender resources--and Heaven knows they are slender enough--might do better than they are doing, for cats and rats must still be very plentiful, only they won't touch them."

The reference to the very poor and their slender resources recurred more than once that evening, but I knew that the authorities were trying to do all they could in the way of relieving general and individual distress, and that they were admirably seconded by private charity, which not only placed comparatively large sums at their disposal, but bestirred itself by means of specially appointed committees and visitors. The rations of meat (horsemeat) and bread distributed were not sufficient. The first had already fallen to forty-five grammes per day per head, the second to three hundred and fifty grammes;[87] they were to fall much lower. Tickets were also distributed for set meals, with and without meat. There was, furthermore, a distribution of fuel, albeit that there was really no more fuel to distribute. All the wooden seats in the public thoroughfares, the scaffoldings before the half-finished buildings had disappeared. At one of my friend's apartments there was none but the outer door left, all the others had been replaced by curtains. They had been chopped up to keep his family warm. The fear of the terrible landlord may have prevented the poor from imitating this proceeding. At any rate, I noticed no absent doors in my visits to any of them. A further supply of meat or bread, even if they had the money, was out of the question for them; because, though some shops remained open and their owners were compelled to sell according to the tariff set forth by the munic.i.p.ality, they had nothing to sell. I remember being in the Rue Lafayette one morning, near one of those shops, when I saw the whole of the crowd, that had been waiting there for hours probably, turn away disappointed. The a.s.sistant had just told them that "this morning we have nothing to sell but preserved truffles."

[Footnote 87: Five hundred French grammes make seventeen ounces English, and a fraction.--EDITOR.]

At the same time, I am bound to note the fact that, at the slightest rumours of peace, the usually empty windows became filled with artistically arranged pyramids of "canned" provisions, at prices considerably below those charged twenty-four hours before, and even below those mentioned in the munic.i.p.al tariff. Frequent attempts were made by the police to discover the hiding-places for this stock, but they failed in every instance. Those hiding-places were far away from the shops, and the shopkeepers themselves were too wary to be caught napping. A stranger might have safely gone in and offered a hundred francs for half a dozen tins of their wares. They would have looked a perfect blank, and told him they had none to sell: and no wonder; their detection would have meant certain death; no earthly power could have saved them from the legitimate fury of the populace. And even those who bought the hidden food at abnormal prices were compelled to preserve silence, at the risk of seeing their supplies cut off. One thing is certain, and I can unhesitatingly vouch for it. My name had become known in connection with several committees for the relief of the poor. On the 25th of January, at 11 a.m., when the negotiations between Bismarck and M. Jules Favre could have been but in the preliminary stage, I received a note, brought by hand, from a grocer in the Faubourg Montmartre, asking me to call personally, as he had something to communicate which might be to the advantage of my proteges. An hour later, I was at his establishment, and he offered to sell me five hundred tins of various provisions and two hundred and fifty boxes of sardines at two francs each. It was something like double the ordinary price. A little more than three weeks before that date, I had sent a letter to the same man, asking him for a similar quant.i.ty of goods, which I intended to distribute as New Year's gifts. The reply was, that he had none, but that he might _possibly_ procure them at the rate of five francs a tin and box. I found out afterwards, that the excellent grocer had a son at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. I need not point out the logical deduction.

I am equally certain that there were large quant.i.ties of horseflesh, salted or fresh, hidden somewhere; for, as I have already noted, it was officially, or at any rate semi-officially stated, that, on the day of the conclusion of the armistice, there were thirty thousand live horses in Paris, and the greater part of these would have been slaughtered by order of the Government, if the measure had been thought expedient, for there is scarcely any need to say that the pretext of their being wanted for military purposes would not hold water. A sixth part of them, or less, would have been amply sufficient for that. In reality, M. Favre and his colleagues were, by this time, fully convinced that all further resistance was useless, but they had not the courage to say so frankly, and they wished to convert the advocates of "resistance to death" to their side by aggravating the scarcity of the food supply, as if it were not bad enough already. The horses confiscated by the Government for food were paid for by them at the rate of between one and two francs per pound, yet there was no possibility of buying a single pound of horseflesh, beyond what was distributed at the munic.i.p.al canteens, for less than seven or eight francs. Whence this difference?

b.u.t.ter could be bought for thirty to thirty-five francs per pound, but such b.u.t.ter! Anything worth eating commanded sixty francs. There was a kind of grease that fetched two francs per pound, but even the poorest shrank from it, and preferred to eat dry bread, which was composed as follows:--

(FOR A LOAF OF 300 GRAMMES.)

75 grammes of wheat.

15 " rye, barley, or peas.

60 " rice.

90 " oats.

30 " chopped straw mixed with starch.

30 " bran.

As for the rest, here are some of the prices--at which, however, things were not always to be had:--

frs.

A dog or a cat 20 A rat, crow, or sparrow 3 or 4 1 lb. of bear's flesh 12 1 lb. of venison 14 1 lb. of wolf's flesh, or porcupine's 8 A rabbit 40 A fowl 40 A pigeon 25 A goose 80 A turkey 100 1 lb. of ham (very rare) 10 1 lb. of bacon (not so rare) 6 Eggs (each) 5 Haricot beans (per litre) 8 Cabbages (each) 16 Leeks (each) 1 Bushel of carrots (2-3/4 gallons) 75 Bushel of potatoes 35 Bushel of onions 80

Still, until the very last, there occurred, as far as I know, no case of actual starvation, and I was pretty well posted up in that respect. The very young and very old suffered most: for the milk that was sold at two francs per litre was simply disgraceful, three-fourths of it was water; and beef-tea, or that worthy of the name, was not to be had at any price. Both commodities were distributed to the poor at the munic.i.p.al canteens, on the certificate of a doctor; but the latter, though by no means hard-hearted, and thoroughly sympathetic with the ills he was scarcely able to alleviate, had to draw the line somewhere. Of bedding, bed-linen, and warm underclothing there was little or no lack; but the cold, for several days, at frequent intervals was severe to a degree.

Our ex-lieutenant's reference to the poor and their slender resources recurred frequently to my mind for several days after the scene described above, and set me wondering how far the poor had parted, finally or temporarily, with their household goods and small valuables in order to obtain some of the quasi-luxuries I have just enumerated. In order to get at the truth of the matter, I determined to pay a visit to the central p.a.w.nbroking office in the Rue des Blancs Manteaux. I provided myself with a letter of introduction to the director, who placed an official at my disposal. This was towards the latter end of December.