An Englishman in Paris: Notes and Recollections

by Albert D. Vandam

"L'héroïque Paris brave les Prussiens;
Il ne sera jamais vaincu par la famine!
Quand il aura mangé la race chevaline
Il mangera ses rats, et ses chats, et ses chiens."

The proprietor of a cookshop in the Rue de Rome had confined himself to prose, but prose which, to those who could read it aright, was much cleverer than the poetry of his transpontine fellow-tradesman.

"VIN À DIX-HUIT SOUS
ET EAU-DESSUS,
Rosse Beef.
Rat Goût de Mouton."[90]

Personally, I have eaten the flesh of elephants, wolves, cassowaries, porcupines, bears, kangaroos, rats, cats, and horses. I did not touch dog's-flesh knowingly after I had been warned by our ex-lieutenant. The proprietor of the English butcher-shop, M. Debos, who was not an Englishman at all, supplied most of these strange dishes; for he bought nearly all the animals from the Zoological Gardens at tremendous prices. These were only the animals from the Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois, which had been sent as guests to the Jardin des Plantes. The elephants belonged to the latter establishment, and were sold to M. Debos for twenty-seven thousand francs. In January I was elected a member of the Jockey Club, but I had dined there once before by special invitation. I give the menu as far as I remember:—

"Soupe au Poireau.
Aloyau de Bœuf.
Poule au Riz.
Flageolets aux Jus.
Biscuits de Reims glacés.
Charlotte aux Pommes."

In spite of the hope that Paris would escape being shelled, minute instructions how to act, in the event of such a calamity, had been posted on the walls. In fact, if speechifying and the promulgation of decrees could have saved the city, Trochu first, and the rest afterwards, would have so saved it. But I have solemnly promised myself at the outset of these notes not to be betrayed into any criticism of the military operations, and I will endeavour to keep my promise to myself.

The first and foremost result of those directions on the part of the Government was a display of water-butts, filled to the brim, in the passage, and of sand-heaps in the yard of every building. As the months went by, and there was no sign of a bombardment, the contents of the casks became so much solid ice, and the sand-heaps disappeared beneath the accumulated snow, to be converted into slush and mire at the first thaw, which gave us, at the same time, a kind of miniature deluge, because, as a matter of course, the barrels had sprung leaks which were not attended to at the time.

And when, early on the 5th of January, the first projectiles crashed down upon some houses in the south of Paris, the people were simply astonished, but still deluded themselves into the belief that it was a mistake, that the "trajectory" had been miscalculated, and the shells had carried farther than was intended. To a certain extent they had good grounds for their supposition. They had heard the big cannon boom and roar at frequent intervals ever since the morning of the 27th of December, and been given to understand that it was merely a big artillery duel for the possession of the plateau d'Avron, between the positions of Noisy-le-Grand and Gournay on the enemy's side, and the forts of Nogent, Rosny, and Noisy on that of the French. They were, furthermore, under the impression that the shelling of the city would be preceded by a final summons to surrender: they had got that notion mostly from their military dramas and popular histories. But there were men, better informed than the majority of the masses, who made sure that, if not the Parisians themselves, the foreign consuls and the aliens under their charge would receive a sufficiently timely notice, in order to leave the city if they felt so minded.

The 5th of January was a bitterly cold day; it had been freezing hard during the whole of the night, and, as I wended my way across the Seine, about noon, the mist, which had been hanging over the river, was slowly rising in banked and jagged masses, with only a rift here and there for the pitilessly glacial sun to peer through and mock at our shivering condition. When I got to the Boulevard Montparnasse, I met several stretchers, bearing sentries who had been absolutely frozen to within an ace of death.

I know nothing of the military import of a bombardment, but have been told that even the greatest strategists only count upon the moral effect it produces upon the besieged inhabitants. I can only say this: if Marshal von Moltke took the "moral effect" of his projectiles into his calculations to accelerate the surrender of Paris, he might have gone on shelling Paris for a twelvemonth without being one whit nearer his aim; that is, if I am to judge by the scene I witnessed on that January morning, before familiarity with the destruction-dealing shells could have produced the proverbial contempt. At the risk of offending all the sensation-mongers, foreign and native, with pen or with pencil, I can honestly say that a broken-down omnibus and a couple of prostrate horses would have excited as much curiosity as did the sight of the battered tenements at Vaugirard, Montrouge, and Vanves. On the Chaussée du Maine, the roadway had been ploughed up for a distance of about half a dozen yards by a shell; in another spot, a shell had gone clean through the roof and killed a woman by the side of her husband; in a third, a shell had carried away part of the wall of a one-storied cottage, and the whole of the opposite wall: in short, there was more than sufficient evidence that life was no longer safe within the fortifications, and yet there was no wailing, no wringing of hands, no heart-rending frenzied look of despair, either pent up or endeavouring to find vent in shrieks and yells, nay, not even on the part of the women. There was merely a kind of undemonstrative contempt—very unlike the usual French way of manifesting it—blended with a considerable dash of badauderie,—for which word I cannot find an English equivalent, because the Parisian loafer or idler is unlike any of his European congeners. To grasp the difference between the former and the latter, one must have had the good fortune to see the same incident in the streets of Paris, London, Madrid, Florence, and Rome, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, not to mention Brussels, the Hague, Amsterdam, Munich, and Dresden. The "Monsieur Prudhomme" of Charles Monnier shows but one facet of the Paris badaud's character. The nearest approach to him is the middle-class English tourist on the Continent, who endeavours to explain to his wife and companions things he does not know himself, and blesses his stars aloud for having made him an Englishman.