An Englishman in Paris: Notes and Recollections

by Albert D. Vandam

One thing was certain from the beginning of the siege—whatever else might fail, there was enough wine and to spare to cheer the hearts of men who professed to do and dare more than men. Though the best part of my life had been spent in Paris, I had, curiously enough, never seen the wine and spirit dépôts at Bercy; in fact, I was profoundly ignorant of that, as well as of other matters connected with the food-supply of Paris. So I wrote to a member of the firm which had supplied me for many years with wine and spirits, and he took me thither.

I should think that the "entrepôt-général," as it is called, occupied, at that time, not less than sixty acres of ground, which meant more than treble that area as far as storage was concerned; for there was not only the cellarage, but the buildings above ground, rising, in many instances, to three and four stories. The entrepôt consisted, and consists still, I believe, of three distinct parts: one for wines; another for what the French call "alcohols," and we "spirits;" a third, much smaller, for potable, or, rather, edible oils. The latter wing contains the cellarage of the general administration of the hospitals. The spirit-cellars were absolutely empty at the time of my visit; their contents had been removed to a bomb and shell proof cellarage hard by.

Though I had come to see, I felt very little wiser after leaving the cellars than before; for, truth to tell, I was absolutely bewildered. I had no more idea of the quantity of wine stored there than a child. My guide laughed.

"We'll soon make the matter clear to you," he said, shaking hands with a gentleman who turned out to be one of the principal employés. "This gentleman will tell you almost to a hectolitre the quantity of ordinary wine in store. You know pretty well the number of inhabitants of the capital, and though it has considerably increased during the last few days, and is not unlikely to decrease during the siege, if siege there be, the influx does not amount to a hundred thousand. Now, monsieur, will you tell this gentleman what you have in stock?"

"We have got at the present moment 1,600,000 hectolitres of ordinary wine in our cellars. Ten days ago we had nearly one hundred thousand more, but the wine-shops and others have laid in large provisions since then. The more expensive wines I need not mention, because the quantity is very considerably less, and, moreover, they are not likely to be wanted; though, if they were wanted, they would keep us going for many, many weeks. At a rough guess, the number of 'souls' within the fortifications is about 1,700,000, with the recent increase 1,800,000; consequently, with what the 'liquoristes' have recently bought, one hundred litres for every man, woman, and child. I do not reckon the contents of private cellars, nor those of the wine-merchants, apart from their recent purchases. Nor is ordinary wine much dearer than it was in years of great plenty; it is, in fact, less by twenty-five francs or thirty francs than in the middle of the fifties. I am comparing prices for quarter pipes, containing from two hundred and ten to two hundred and thirty litres. There is no fear of regrating here, nor the likelihood of our having to drink water for some time."

On our homeward journey, we noticed bullocks, pigs, and sheep littered down in some of the public squares and on the outer boulevards. The stunted grass in the former had already entirely disappeared, and it was evident that, with the utmost care, the cattle would deteriorate under the existing circumstances; for fodder would probably be the first commodity to fail; as it was, it had already risen to more than twice its former price. Moreover, the competent judges feared that, in the event of a rainy autumn, the cattle penned in such small spaces would be more subject to epidemic diseases, which would absolutely render them unfit for human food. In view of such a contingency, the learned members of the Académie des Sciences were beginning to put their heads together, but the results of their deliberations were not known as yet.

We returned on foot as we had come; private carriages had entirely disappeared, and though the omnibuses and cabs were plying as usual, their progress was seriously impeded by long lines of vans, heavily laden with neat deal boxes, evidently containing tinned provisions. Very few female passengers in the public conveyances, and scarcely a man without a rifle. They were the future defenders of the capital, who had been to Vincennes, where the distribution of arms was going on from early morn till late at night. In fact, the sight of a working-man not provided with a rifle, a mattock, a spade, or a pickaxe was becoming a rarity, for a great many had been engaged to aid the engineers in digging trenches, spiking the ground, etc.

I did not, and do not, feel competent to judge of the utility of all these means of defense; one of them, however, seemed to be conceived in the wrong spirit: I allude to the firing of the woods around Paris. With the results of Forbach and Woerth to guide them, the generals entrusted with the defence of Paris could not leave the woods to stand; but was there any necessity to destroy them in the way they did? In spite of the activity displayed, there were still thousands of idle hands anxious to be employed. Why were not the trees cut down and transported to Paris, for fuel for the coming winter? At that moment there were lots of horses available, and such a measure would have given us the double advantage of saving coals for the manufacture of gas, and of protecting from the rigours of the coming winter hundreds whose sufferings would have been mitigated by light and heat. Personally, I did not suffer much. From what I have seen during the siege, I have come to the conclusion that shortcomings in the way of food are far less hard to bear, nay, are almost cheerfully borne, in a warm room and with a lamp brightly burning. I leave out of the question the quantities of mineral oil wasted in the attempt to set fire to the woods, because in many instances the attempt failed utterly.

Meanwhile, patriotism was kept at the boiling point, by glowing reports of the heroic defence of General Uhrich at Strasburg. The statue, representing the capital of Alsace on the Place de la Concorde, became the goal of a reverent pilgrimage on the part of the Parisians, though the effect of it was spoiled too frequently by M. Prudhomme holding forth sententiously, to his sons apparently, to the crowd in reality. These discourses reminded one too much of Heine's sneer, that "all Frenchmen are actors, and the worse are generally on the stage." In this instance, however, the amateurs ran the professional very hard. The crowds were not hypercritical, though, and they applauded the speaker, who departed, accompanied by his offspring, with the proud consciousness that he was a born orator, and that he had done his duty to his country by spouting platitudes. It is not difficult to give the general sequel to that amateur performance. Next morning there is a line in some obscure paper, and M. Prudhomme, beside himself with joy, leaves his card on the journalist who wrote it; the journalist leaves his in return, and for the next six months the latter has his knife and fork laid at M. Prudhomme's table. The acquaintance generally terminates on M. Prudhomme's discovery that Madame Prudhomme carried her friendship too far by looking after the domestic concerns of the scribe, at the scribe's bachelor quarters.

The men who did not spout were the Duruys, the Meissoniers, and a hundred others I could mention. The eminent historian and grand-master of the University, though sixty, donned the simple uniform of a National Guard, and performed his garrison duties like the humblest artisan, only distinguished from the latter by his star of grand-officer of the Légion d'Honneur; the great painter did the same. The French shopkeeping bourgeois is, as a rule, a silly, pompous creature; very frequently, he is mean and contemptible besides.