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. Butter 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, anæmia, 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 The seventy-five thousand aliens and Parisians who have left at the beginning of the siege have been replaced by three times that number, so that Paris has virtually one hundred and fifty thousand more mouths to feed than it counted upon.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 ça, monsieur," she said, with a wan smile. "André 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, "Flâner est une science, c'est la gastronomie de l'œil." Seeing that it is the only gastronomy they can enjoy under the circumstances, 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.