CHAPTER XXIV.
PARIS MARKETS.
The Halles-Centrales—The Cattle Markets—Agriculture in France—The French Peasant.
THE Panthéon, standing on the summit of the mountain of Sainte-Geneviève, and the Luxemburg Palace, surrounded by the galleries and the garden of the same name, dominate the rest of the left bank, which has still, however, one salient point in the Hôtel des Invalides. To the left of the Luxemburg Garden, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, stands the National School of Mines, established in the house which formerly belonged to a religious order. Here, as in so many other of the public establishments of France, the instruction is gratuitous, under the direction of an inspector-general and thirteen professors. The museum contains all kinds of interesting geological and mineralogical specimens, together with a library of 30,000 volumes, which, like the museum, is open to the public.
The Rue de Tournon—to pass from the garden to the front of the palace—has already been mentioned in connection with that Hôtel de l’Empereur Joseph at which Joseph II., visiting his sister Marie Antoinette, elected to stay in preference to putting up at one of the royal palaces. The street owes its name to François de Tournon, cardinal-ambassador under Francis I. At that time the land through which the street was afterwards to run was the site of a large horse market, a sort of annex to the Marché Saint-Germain, and familiarly known as the Muddy Meadow—“le Pré crotté.” Very different were the Paris markets of those days from the system of markets now so perfectly organised. At present, when Paris has expanded so far beyond its ancient “barriers” that it has become one of the greatest cities in the world, the provisioning of its population is a question of the first importance. For breakfast, as for subsequent meals, the French metropolis requires a stupendous quantity of food, which must arrive regularly at a fixed hour, and be delivered promptly at the doors of the numberless beings whose mouths are to be filled.
At some hours before dawn a large number of market-gardeners and other cultivators from the vicinity of Paris enter the city and converge towards the same point. Enormous and noisy drays at the same time bring in to this common centre the consignments of edible produce which arrive by rail daily from the provinces or abroad.
The great market which receives all these goods, known as the Halles-Centrales, is situated opposite the beautiful church of Saint-Eustache, at the end of the Rues Coquillière, Montmartre, Montorgeuil, and Rambuteau. This immense and elegant building, constructed entirely of bricks and iron, consists of twelve pavilions, which shelter the sale of the various descriptions[{167}] of goods. Each pavilion has its speciality. One is a wholesale, another a retail meat-market, a third is devoted to fish, a fourth to eggs and butter, and so on.
Markets are held in various parts of the city; but most of them are fed by the Central Market. Many of them recall the Central Market by the light character of the architecture in brick and iron. Two great cattle-markets are established at Sceaux and at Poissy, and a smaller one at La Chapelle Saint-Denis, connected with the Marché de la Villette, built with the view of absorbing all the smaller meat-markets.
Unlike England, France, in the matter of agricultural products, is self-sufficing. Two-thirds of the population are occupied, as proprietors, farmers, or labourers, with the cultivation of the soil. In England the agricultural classes represent only one-third of the population. In France there are nine millions of small landowners with a slight proportion of large ones; in England the land is in the possession of comparatively few persons. Up to the time of the Revolution the number of proprietors in France did not go beyond 30,000, and the peasantry at that period were in a state of utter poverty, the actual cultivators receiving, according to Alison, only a twelfth part of the produce for their share. “The people’s habitations,” wrote Arthur Young, “are miserable heaps of dirt—no glass, no air; the women and children are in rags—no shoes, no stockings. The proprietors of these badly cultivated lands, all absentees, were worshipping the king at Versailles in the most abject and servile manner, spending their scanty income and getting into scandalous debt.” “The agricultural population,” he says elsewhere, “are 76 per cent. worse fed and worse clad than in England. Impossible to have an idea of the animals who served us at table, called women by courtesy. In reality they are walking dunghills, without stockings, shoes, or sabots.”
All this was changed by the Revolution, when immense numbers of tenants became proprietors of the land they had previously cultivated, as serfs, for their masters. The progress from destitution to comfort was effected in less than twenty years, and since then the condition of the peasantry has been constantly improving. Under the system of small ownerships agriculture, as an art, may not be brought to the highest possible pitch of perfection, but the agriculturists thrive and are happy. France is not a corn-exporting country; and it is quite possible that under a system of large estates the sum of her agricultural produce might be greater than it really is. The peasants, however, under the system of “la petite culture” produce more butter and their fowls more eggs than they need for their own consumption or for sale in France. Accordingly great quantities of eggs and butter are sent to England, France’s best customer for produce of this kind.
The small proprietors, too, keep rabbits and pigeons, many of which find their way not only to the Paris markets but to England. A century ago, until the time of the Revolution, the landholding aristocracy had alone the right of shooting rabbits and keeping pigeons. “The birds,” says M. Nottelle, writing on this subject, “ate the seed of the poor peasants in the neighbourhood and the rabbits ate the corn when it was green. These exclusive privileges were abolished on the celebrated night of the 4th of August, 1789.” Yet it should always be remembered that the noble proprietors gave up their exclusive privileges—doubtless under the influence of the Revolution, but, nevertheless, as a matter of fact—of their own accord. Now everyone can keep pigeons; but the owners are ordered by the mayor to keep them in the pigeon-house during seed-time. If they are allowed to fly at this period they are considered as game, and may be shot. The owner, moreover, is fined. Occasionally in the French market frogs are to be seen, and it is quite possible that in the days before the Revolution the epithet “frog-eating” could be more fitly applied to the generality of Frenchmen than it can now, when the thighs of frogs are only to be met with at certain restaurants, where they are served, equally with snails, as a rare delicacy.