The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (34 page)

Filet de cheval rôti

Bœuf et cheval salés froids

From that moment, horse became very much
à la mode
, establishing a taste which still provides the principal source of revenue of many a Parisian butcher. To a ‘
belle
’ who (exceptionally) had refused to dine with him, a frustrated Victor Hugo wrote:

Je vous aurais offert un repas sans rival:

J’aurais tué Pégase et je l’aurais fait cuire

Afin de vous servir une aile de cheval.
¹

As belts were tightened, many a superb champion of the turf ended its days in the casserole; among them were the two trotting horses presented by the Tsar to Louis-Napoleon at the time of the Great Exhibition, originally valued at 56,000 francs, now bought by a butcher for 800. But it was from mid-November when Paris first realized the supplies of fresh meat were exhausted (though the shock was largely absorbed by the excitement at Gambetta’s triumph at Coulmiers), whence originated the exotic menus with which the Siege is immortally coupled. It was then that the signs ‘Feline and Canine Butchers’ made their debut. Although it was known that carnivores at the zoo were being nurtured on stray dogs, at first the idea of slaughtering domestic pets for human consumption provoked great indignation; a member of the Rafinesque family recorded how ‘the cart of a dog-and-cat butcher from which emanated lamentable barks and miaows was assailed by a crowd which was moved and perhaps disgusted. In the scuffle that followed five dogs escaped at the gallop whilst the crowd cheered.’ But soon necessity bred familiarity, and by mid-December Labouchere was reporting in a matter-of-fact way, ‘I had a slice of spaniel the other day’ (though it made him ‘feel like a cannibal’), and recounting without comment a week later how a man he had met was fattening up a huge cat which he meant to serve up on Christmas Day, ‘surrounded with mice, like sausages’. As more and more of the two traditional domestic enemies became reconciled in the cooking-pot, Gautier claimed that they seemed to grow instinctively aware of their peril:

Soon the animals observed that man was regarding them in a strange manner and that, under the pretext of caressing them, his hand was feeling them like the fingers of a butcher, to ascertain the state of their
embonpoint
. More intellectual and more suspicious than dogs, the cats were the first to understand, and adopted the greatest prudence in their relations.

Next it was the turn of the rats. Although, together with the carrier-pigeon, the rat was to become the most fabled animal of the Siege of Paris, and from December on a good rat-hunt was one of the favourite pastimes of the National Guard, the number actually consumed was relatively few.
¹
Apart from the (probably exaggerated) fear of the diseases they carried, on account of the lavish preparation of sauces required to make them palatable rats were essentially a rich man’s dish; hence the famous menus of the Jockey Club, featuring
such delicacies as
salmi de rats
and ‘rat pie’. With the passage of time menus grew even more exotic as the zoos were forced to surrender their most precious inmates. Hugo was sent some joints of bear, deer, and antelope by the curator of the Jardin des Plantes; kangaroo was consumed at Goncourt’s favourite haunt, Chez Brébant; and at a butcher’s on the fashionable Faubourg St. Honoré O’ ‘Shea found the carcases of wolves on display. Because of the danger involved in killing them, the lions and tigers survived; as did the monkeys, protected apparently by the exaggerated Darwinian instincts of the Parisians, and the hippopotamus from the Jardin des Plantes, for whose vast live-weight no butcher could afford the reserve price of 80,000 francs. Otherwise no animal was exempt. By the end of December, even the pride of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, two young elephants called Castor and Pollux, were dispatched after several disgracefully inept attempts with explosive bullets. Like most of the bigger animals the poor creatures were bought by Roos, the opulent proprietor of the Boucherie Anglaise. Visiting his premises on New Year’s Eve, Goncourt describes how ‘in the midst of nameless meats and unusual horns, a boy was offering some camel kidneys for sale’; while on the wall ‘hung in a place of honour, was the skinned trunk of young Pollux’ which the butcher was pressing upon a group of women for 40 francs a pound. “You think that’s dear? But I assure you I don’t know how I’m going to make anything out of it. I was counting on three thousand pounds of meat and he has only yielded two thousand three hundred!”’ Obviously shocked at the price, Goncourt concluded, ‘I fell back on a couple of larks’.

Opinions varied sharply on the merits of these unaccustomed dishes. One Englishman wrote his wife that ‘horseflesh is excellent and the French cooks make the best of it; the flesh of the Mule and Ass is equal to veal….’ On first eating horse in November, Tommy Bowles exclaimed in rapture: ‘How people continue to eat pigs I can’t imagine’, but a few weeks later he had changed his tune: ‘In spite of all attempts, I cannot eat horse’, adding almost enviously that ‘A
franc-tireur
tells me that he made an excellent dinner off crow and dahlia root’. By the first days of January he was recording: ‘I have now dined off camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule and elephant, which I approve in the order in which I have written… horse is really too disgusting, and it has a peculiar taste never to be forgotten.’ Goncourt declared that horsemeat gave him nightmares, while Verlaine recalled how a dinner of burnt horse provoked the second scene of his marriage, ‘and—the first blow’. Juliette Lambert also appeared to agree with Bowles, writing to her daughter at the end of December about the hump of camel she had bought: ‘It was divine! What a dinner!’ As
time went on, people’s palates became more discriminating; there was a noticeable price differential between ‘brewery’ and sewer rats, and Wickham Hoffman of the American Legation declared that among horses light greys were greatly preferable to blacks. Of the zoo animals, he thought elephant was ‘tolerably good’, but reindeer was the best. One French ‘expert’ described dog as being ‘fine, fresh, rosy, covered with very white fat; stimulating to the appetite when well prepared’. Professor Sheppard, another American, made the agreeable discovery that ‘rats, to my surprise, taste somewhat like birds’, while cat ‘tastes something like the American grey squirrel, but is even tenderer and sweeter’. And on the whole most people, ranging from the fastidious Labouchere to the Earl of Carnarvon’s brother, Dr. Alan Herbert, seemed to agree with Sheppard about the superiority of cat; while the robust Edwin Child betrayed little concern about the taste of what he was eating—so long as it was food.

Before the food shortage had reached its full gravity, and to those that could afford them, these bizarre victuals also provided a rich source of humour.
Le Figaro
related how a man was pursued through Paris by a pack of dogs, barking loudly at his heels; he could not understand their interest until he remembered that he had eaten a rat for breakfast. A similar cartoon in one of the illustrated journals depicted, sticking out of a man’s mouth, the tail of a cat which had dived down his throat in pursuit of its natural prey. After a dog dinner at Brébant’s, Hébrard was heard to comment, ‘At our next dinner they’ll be serving us the shepherd’; but in fact the Parisians were never quite reduced to cannibalism.

Some of France’s best scientific brains had been employed to devise additional ways of supplementing the dwindling food supplies. In the latter days of the Siege a bread, named ‘
pain Ferry
’ after the responsible Minister and composed of wheat, rice and straw, made its appearance. One Frenchman said, ‘It seemed to have been made from old Panama hats picked out of the gutters’, while to Professor Sheppard it tasted of ‘sawdust, mud and potato skins’. As a kind of synthetic milk, the Comité Scientifique recommended a nauseous-sounding brew of glucose, albumen (or gelatine), and olive oil; unfortunately there was no olive oil in Paris. One of its more successful developments was the ‘
osseine
’ mentioned earlier, made out of bones and gelatine, which was sold widely in the last days of the Siege for making bouillon, at one franc a kilogram. Unfortunately, in Paris’s anguish speculators were also swift to glimpse opportunity. Appalling concoctions of bogus foodstuffs—above all of milk for desperate mothers—appeared on the market; doctored pumpkins were sold as apricot marmalade, and jams fabricated from horse
gelatine and molasses were sold at 1.40 francs a pound; cooking-grease was adulterated with candles, and Goncourt overheard arsenic being recommended as a good antidote to hunger. Few butchers were above taking advantage of their sudden emergence as the most powerful (and most detested) section of the community; cat, said Professor Sheppard, was frequently sold as ‘an otter, or a rare species of hare, or an extraordinary small and odd kind of sheep’, and a lamb offered to one British correspondent ironically turned out to be a wolf. There were also ingenious rackets whereby valuable racehorses, bought at knackers’ prices, were switched for old hacks of equivalent weight and were somehow kept alive until they made a handsome profit for their new ‘owner’ when the Siege ended.

Despite the quite sensible entreaties of Blanqui and the left wing, no effort was made by the Government to establish proper control of food distribution until too late, and then the measures were ineffectual and unfair. In the earliest days the Government had set up price controls on a number of staple foods, but these were feebly enforced and soon short-circuited by a rampant black market. Meat rationing was introduced in mid-October; it started at 100 grammes per person per day, was reduced in November to 50 grammes, and later to 30—or roughly one ounce—but it encompassed none of the ‘exotic’ meats mentioned above. Restaurants were also instructed in October to serve but one plate of meat to each client; notices were posted up, but little attention paid to them in any place where money could speak. Labouchere noted that ‘in the expensive cafés of the Boulevards, feasts worthy of Lucullus are still served’, and the situation altered little as the months passed. Bread was not rationed until the last days of the Siege, though false rumours of it provoked panic and riots in mid-December. No measures were ever taken to counter hoarding. The prudent well-to-do lived off their own private stocks purchased before the Siege began, but far more reprehensible were the speculators who sat on foodstuffs until prices seemed sufficiently attractive. Some made a killing from beetroots bought in October at 2 centimes a piece, and later sold for 1.75 francs. Panicked by the rumours of premature peace that followed Thiers’ armistice talks, others released some of their butter hoards so that prices dropped by two-thirds with revealing abruptness.

Because it was more profitable to sell ‘under the counter’, but also because the disgracefully inefficient system of distribution meant that often their shops were genuinely bare, traders took to putting up their shutters for long periods. This resulted in endless, heart-breaking food queues; a word that one British correspondent (who would not live long enough to see mid-twentieth-century Britain)
found hard to translate—‘There is no equivalent in English—happily!’ Such a queue, he discovered, was often ‘more than a couple of hundred strong. Its outer edge towards the street was kept by armed
Gardes Nationaux
, who, patrolling like sheepdogs here and there, suppressed with difficulty the almost continual disputes’. Hour after hour the wretched housewives waited (‘to have any certainty of a basketful one had to be on the spot by three in the morning’ claimed O’Shea), often leaving empty-handed, with hatred in their hearts equally for the
petit bourgeois
as represented by the heartless butcher and for the rich bourgeois who could afford to buy without queuing.

Virtually the only effective rationing was achieved by that most unfair of all criteria—by price. Regardless of the Government’s attempts at price controls, the cost of most foodstuffs soared as the weeks went by, as its shown by the following table:
¹

Even this table barely reflects the full extent of price rises, as these had already been substantial by the time the investment of Paris was complete; compared with pre-war days, for instance, the prices of butter had risen by over one-third, and potatoes and rabbits had more than doubled. The price that some people were prepared to
pay for uncontrolled foods seemed limitless. O’Shea recalled that a friend of his had been offered a fat poodle for 100 francs; on December 19th Washburne recorded eating mule meat at ‘2 dollars per pound in gold’; on Christmas Day he saw a goose in a shop being sold for 25 dollars, while Sheppard noted that a turkey which could still have been bought for 100 francs the previous week had had its price pushed up to 180 francs for Christmas (before the war it would have fetched 10 francs). Towards the end of the year, Francisque Sarcey studied a ‘crowd of loiterers huddled around a turkey, just as in other times one used to see them in front of the great jewellers on the Rue de la Paix’. The comparison was hardly exaggerated, and indeed at least one jeweller had found it more profitable to transform his premises into a provision shop, displaying elegantly in the window (according to O’Shea) ‘a dead rabbit… flanked by a plate of minnows and three tiny sparrows; while higher up half-a-dozen hen-eggs were arranged in a circle, like a necklet of pearls’.