"Ventre affamé a des oreilles pour sûr," says a bystander.[85]
"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 hoard. Greed, that abominable feature in the character of the French middle-classes, showed itself again and again under circumstances which ought to have suspended its manifestations for the time being.
I have already noted that one member of the Académie 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 gélatine,
À la chair préférant les os,
Veut désormais que chacun dîne
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 passion 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 Cuisinière 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 circumstances; I beg to append a rider, excluding cooks, but especially female ones. "C'est comme si on essayait d'enseigner le patinage à 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.