New Orleans Republican. [volume] (New Orleans, La) 1867-1878, 1871-01-26
PARTISAN HORRORS.
What the People Subsist on. and What 1t
Costs - Extracts from Balloon
Letter.

What the People Subsist on. and What 1t
Costs - Extracts from Il Balloon
Letter.
From the st. LOWS DemocratJ
NEW YORK. january "a balloon letter
from Paris, dated December %, says: Our
stock Of horses is fast diminishing. Eight
hundred horses are slaughtered daily-two
hundred for the army and six hundred for
the civil population. Eggs are forty to fifty
cents each; butter 81 IA pound: turkeys and
geese SIG to $l8 apiece, and worthless even
at this price: chickens S. EACH and getting
very carce; pigeons 81 apiece. This morn
ing gave 81 30 for one pound of salt beef.
Rats are eighty cents each. Nearly every
restaurant in Paris is closed. Those which
remain open half the time vow every night
that they will not open the next morning.
Onions, carrots and trrnips are from five to
eight cents apiece. Packets of soup herbs,
which from time immemoriai have cost three
cents, cost now from forty to fifty cents.
Everybody has been burying string beans.
put up greens in tin cans, and although two
or three times the old prices was asked for
them they have all disappeared Peas and
other vegetables prepared in the same way
are quite abundant, but nobody buys them,
for we have no means of cooking them.
Calico print sizing, made of the whites of
eggs, dried here during the summer, to be
sent to the manufacturing townsville siege
preventing their transMiSSon-are now on
sale as articles of food.
IntOxicatiOn has been so prevalent since
the commencement of the siege, that the
supply of wines and spirits, sufficient to last
eight months, will be exhausted in four.
There are bread panics daily, but they
are merely local, still they are important as
indications of increasing embarrassmcnts.
While there Is wheat enough. there is not
Hour in sufficient quantities, and the mills
are unable to turn out an adequate supply.
Then there is the question of fuel, for mills
and bakeries, which is daily becoming more
difficult of solution Bread is cheaper than
oats or barley, and horses and cows are fed
on bread.
The supply Of medicines is becoming very
low, and there are rumors that the govern
ment intends to contiscate all of them for
the military hospitals
Laundries refuse work, for there is no
starch, little soap, no hot water, and no
means of heating irons.
In some quarters of the town there is an
insufficient supply of water.
A great many wealthy families are obliged
to do their own washing, and dry the linen
in dining rooms. Wood is now five cents il
pound, and dealers require retail buyers to
pay for saving and carriage home. which
makes the cost, etc. about ten cents pound.
| lose hours daily hunting for something
to eat. occasionally get something which
makes me i'll with nausea for six or eight
hours. More than one meat pie have bought
has made me i'll. physician told pe this
morning that he advised all his friends to
drink daily wine glass of quinine and wine
to counteract the general debility from the
want Of food in sufficient quantities. Many
people will die.
1t is painful to see the wan, pnched and
furnishing faces i'll the string of people
stretched in front of the butchers, and
especially of the public kitchens. l stepped
Off one this morning as l walked by it, and
found it two hundred and ten yards long.
Some of the wretched women had skeleton |
babies sucking.
Typhus and hospital fever sweep to the
grave large number of persons every day. |
There have been % 600 deaths in Paris since |
the siege commenced.
Smallpox continues its ravagcs with |
scarcely any abatement. There are many |
suicides and there is good deal of insanity |
There never was SO much drunkenness in |
Paris. 1t has large share in the increasing
mortality.