Part 33 (1/2)
My disappointment was great. I had come to admire, not expecting magnificent scenery, gorgeous costumes, or transcendent acting, but a spirit of reverence for the immortal creation of a great poet. At that time I was not sufficiently familiar with provincial art in England to be able to picture a performance of Shakespeare except under conditions such as prevail in the best of London theatres. I had read accounts, however, of strolling companies and their doings, but I doubt whether the humblest would have been guilty of such utter iconoclasm in the spirit as well as in the letter as I witnessed that night. It was not comic, it was absolutely painful. It was not the glazed calico doing duty for brocade, that made me wince; it was not the anti-maca.s.sar replacing lace that made me gasp for breath: it was the miserable failure of those behind the footlights, as well as of those in front, to grasp the meaning of the simplest line. They had been told that this play was an indictment, not against a libertine king, but against generations and generations of rulers to whom debauch was as the air they breathed. And, in order to make the lesson more striking, Saint-Vallier was represented as an old dotard, Triboulet as a pander, the king as an amorous Bill Sykes, and Triboulet's daughter as an hysterical young woman who virtually gloried in her dishonour. I had seen ”Orphee aux Enfers,” ”La Belle Helene,” and ”La Grande d.u.c.h.esse;” I had heard Schneider at her best and at her worst; I had heard women of birth and breeding t.i.tter, and gentlemen roar, at allusions which would make a London coalheaver blush;--I had never seen anything so downright degrading as this performance. And when, at last, the _dramatis personae_ gathered round a bust of Hippocrates--the best subst.i.tute for one of Victor Hugo they could find,--and one of them recited ”Les Chatiments,”
I left, hoping that I should never see such an exhibition again. It was one of the first deliberately planned lessons in ”king-hatred” I had heard. The disciples looked to me very promising, and the Commune, when it came, was not such a surprise to me, after all. Before then, I had come to the conclusion that the _barbarians_ outside the gates of Paris were less to be feared than those inside--the former, at any rate, believed in a chief; the motto of the others was, ”Ni Dieu, ni maitre.”
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. b.u.t.ter 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, anaemia, 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 ca, monsieur,” she said, with a wan smile. ”Andre 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, ”Flaner est une science, c'est la gastronomie de l'oeil.” Seeing that it is the only gastronomy they can enjoy under the circ.u.mstances, 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.
”Ventre affame a des oreilles pour sur,” says a bystander.[85]
[Footnote 85: The proverb is, ”Ventre affame n'a pas d'oreilles.”--EDITOR.]
”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 h.o.a.rd.
Greed, that abominable feature in the character of the French middle-cla.s.ses, showed itself again and again under circ.u.mstances which ought to have suspended its manifestations for the time being.
I have already noted that one member of the Academie 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 gelatine, a la chair preferant les os, Veut desormais que chacun dine 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 pa.s.sion 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 Cuisiniere 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 circ.u.mstances; I beg to append a rider, excluding cooks, but especially female ones. ”C'est comme si on essayait d'enseigner le patinage a 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.
”What do you mean?” I remarked, pointing to the cover, displaying a young woman bending over stew-pans.
”This is More's 'Utopia,' to me at present. It speaks of things which will never be realized; supreme de volaille, tournedos a la poivrade, and so forth. The book wants another chapter,” he went on, ”a chapter treating of the food of besieged cities. The Dutch might have written it centuries ago: at Leyden they were on the point of eating their left arms, while defending themselves with their right; they could have told us how to stew the former. If one could add a chapter to that effect, the book might go through a hundred new editions, and the writer might make a fortune. It would not do him much good, for he would be expected to live up to his precepts, and not touch a morsel of that beautiful kangaroo or elephant I saw yesterday on the Boulevard Haussmann.”
At that moment a mutual acquaintance came in. He had been a lieutenant in the Foreign Legion, and lost his right foot before Constantine.