The Sun.
London, England, 1870-10-15 00:00:00

INSIDE PARIS.

This is the very dullest and most monotonous of sieges.
Not a shell to enliven us ; not a shower of rain or a
cloudy sky to breck the serene brightness of uninter-
rupted sunshine by day and clear moonshine by night ;
nothing in the shape of serious fighting to raise our
hopes or plunge us into deeper despair ; not an
attempted emeute to carry us out to Belleville, or
make us fancy that blood will be shed in the his-
torical Faubourg St. Antoine ; not a single man, civil or
military, who stands out from the ruck of his gasconading
fellow-citizens ; not a newspaper—with, perhaps, the ex-
ception of the DJbats—which writes words of truth and
soberness. Food may be still obtained with ease by the
rich—without extraordinary difficulty by the poor, to whom
at all times meat is an unusual delicacy. I have
read that the city of London consumes daily as much
meat as all the urban populations of France put together.
The French are notoriously great economists of animal
food, and, with their skill and thrift in cooking, they
contrive to utilise and make soup and ragouts out of
bones and bits of gristle which our poorest
cottier's wife would throw into the pig-trough.
Given a population of two millions in Paris, and
it is probable that they would exist longer upon
short commons without murmuring than half the
same number of souls in London. One thing,
at least, we are promised—to wit, that neither
wine, oil, bread, nor sardines will fail us. I
have a very shrewd suspicion that long before
the month of October shall have run its course,
beef will be a curiosity, and mutton an exception ;
while horse and ass will be our staple of general food.
The Liberte the other night announced that a butcher
upon the Buttes Montmartre had for sale two quarters of
an ass, on one of which was written, " Ane nomme Bis-
marck, fig des trois ans." " It is notorious," adds the same
journal, " that ass is one of the most delicate of meats.
Pamphlets were published during the seventeenth
century which establish that a saddle of ass was held by
the refined gourmands of that age to be the most exqui-
site of dishes." Butter has.long passed out of sight; every
kind of grease and lard, qualified to serve as a culinary
substitute for butter, has been eagerly bought up, and is
hardly to be got for love or money. Rice, macroni, ver-
micelli, split peas, arrowroot, Indian corn flour, essence of
meat, cheese, potted meat s, all kinds of salt
and dried meat, such as hams and bacon—tea,
coffee, sugar, dried fruits and many other simi-
lar condiments, are objects of universal research.
It is curious to remark how generally even the poorest
French householders have laid in a little store of provi-
sions wherewith they may hold hunger at bay. " Lone
women," who, if they had been English, would never
have owned a billet de banque for 100 f. in their lives,
have a little treasure of flour and macaroni
garnered away somewhere in their cupboards, and
will be able to hold out- stoutly to the last, unless
there shall arrive a day of wrath, with which we are
threatened by many croakers and pessimists—a day when
starving gamins, followed by starving women and chil-
dren, shall swarm into every inhabited building, and
ransack it from cellar to roof in the hope of finding
food. But there is also no inconsiderable alarm lest,
in addition to the absence of food, we may soon find
ourselves without the means of cooking it. Most of the
French cooks employ wood charcoal as their fuel for culi-
nary purposes. The siege had hardly begun before an
outcry was raised in the poorer quarters of the town
against the " marchands de bois et de charbon " for raising
the price of their charcoal to an extravagant and
impossible figure. Most of these charbonniers
are natives of Auvergne—a province generally re-
garded as furnishing Paris with sons and daughters who
have a wonderfully keen eye to the main chance. Im-
pelled by the general indignation expressed in the
newspapers, and by the voice of the streets, against
these greedy and predatory dealers in charcoal,
the municipal authorities of Paris seized in some
instances the whole store of that precious
commodity, owned by men who were pointed
out by the cry of the mob as having specially raised their
prices at a moment when patriotism required that
they should sacrifice themselves for the public
good. The charbonniers, who are a very sullen,
mulish race, resented this high-handed procedure
of the Parisian municipality, and in many cases
shut up shop altogether. What with the high price
of charcoal when it is to be bought at all, and with the
closing of many shops which once used to retail it, I am
not at all sure that, before the end of October, there will
not be as great a dearth of charcoal for the cooking of
our meat, as there will be of flesh itself to lay upon the
glowing and smokeless coals of fire which are so admirably
adapted for the display of culinary skill.— Correspondent of
Telegraph, October 6.