The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  The fat was in the fire. At the end of December, Bismarck, having read Labouchere’s comment, wrote to Washburne complaining that he had abused the American mail privileges. Washburne replied with cold dignity that the U.S. Legation ‘had endeavoured honorably to discharge our duties as neutrals; that we had acted according to the best of our judgments under this sense of duty; that we proposed to continue to act as we had done; and that if the German authorities could not trust us, they had better stop the bag altogether….’ He concluded with a pointed reminder of what he had done to look after Bismarck’s precariously placed compatriots in Paris. In due course Bismarck apologized; but Washburne had meanwhile instructed his opposite number in London to cease sending The Times, so as to avoid any further such accusations from the besieging camp. Labouchere now grumbled (with little enough reason) that, since his ticking-off by Bismarck, Washburne mounted a ‘grim guard’ over his reading matter, and Washburne himself noted being ‘daily violently assailed’ by a portion of the Paris Press as a “Prussian representative” and a “Prussian sympathizer” because of his secretiveness. In fact, thus deprived of his English newspapers, he was to end the Siege little better informed on external events than the average Parisian.

  * * *

  Apart from this one source of friction, in Parisian eyes the American image remained indisputably more popular than that of the British; for which there were several contributory reasons. First the distant and introversive United States of 1870 were never expected to take a position on European affairs; so there was no sense of disappointment here. Secondly, with the American residents in Paris so outnumbered by the British, they were less likely to aggravate sensibilities with their presence, or expose themselves to the charges of ‘useless mouths’. Thirdly, there was the very solid and impressive presence of Washburne himself. But perhaps above all the popularity of the Americans stemmed from the demonstrative usefulness of the American Ambulance during the Siege.

  When it was all over, even Ducrot himself was forced to admit the grave shortcomings of the French medical organization. After Sedan, there had been only 6,000 hospital beds available in Paris, which was ‘far from being sufficient’. By the beginning of the Siege this had been raised to 13,000, and eventually to 37,000. The various religious bodies had formed ‘ambulances’ on their premises, as had the railway companies on the sites of their disused stations. Inside the Théâtre français, a nostalgic Gautier found ‘wounded lying about in the foyer, where once the critics used to pace about’. Schools and courtrooms had also been turned into hospitals, and the biggest occupied the floors beneath Labouchere in the Grand Hôtel; while the Société de la Presse itself operated a highly active ambulance.

  On the surface the results seemed imposing; but only on the surface. In September the Government had ordained two kinds of ‘ambulance’; the first category comprised of properly constituted hospitals capable of receiving the most severely wounded; and the second, ‘ambulances privées’ which could only partially fulfil requirements and were allowed to take in the lightly wounded. The latter formed a particular source of abuse. The authorities had little or no control over them; Ducrot claimed that when his soldiers got into them they could no longer be located—‘their stay prolonged itself indefinitely, and they never reappeared in their units’. The ‘private ambulances’ provided an attractive source of occupation for the grandes dames of Paris; ‘The wounded soldier has become an object of fashion’, recorded Goncourt. They also offered refuges for able-bodied men dodging active service; until the police were ordered to arrest anyone wearing a Red Cross who was unable to produce his certificate as an infirmier. With some relish Labouchere watched a petit crevé1 ‘arrayed in a suit of velvet knickerbockers, with a red cross on his arm borne off to prison, notwithstanding his whining protests’.

  Rivalry for patients among the ‘private ambulances’ was acute; Goncourt relates of one rich man who had converted his house into a hospital, then, distressed to find he had no inmates, paid a local hospital 3,000 francs for a casualty! At the beginning of the siege, Louis Péguret of the National Guard wrote his mother that ‘Madame Massieux [a liquor-vendor] has urged me to have myself brought to her if I am wounded; she has transformed her boutique into an ambulance, and she has assured me that I shall lack nothing. I accepted her offer with great pleasure, hoping that Providence will do me the favour of giving my place to some other unfortunate.’ Everywhere Red Cross flags were to be seen flying from private domiciles; from his window in the Grand Hôtel alone, Labouchere could count fifteen. There were, criticized O’Shea, ‘too many toy ambulances in Paris, and too few serious ones’.

  The proliferation of ambulances of various kinds led to bitter internecine squabbles (‘There never existed in this world such unhappy families as these humane societies are now in Paris’, claimed Tommy Bowles at the beginning of January); which in turn led, on the battlefield, to appalling chaos. According to Ducrot, their arrival on the scene frequently ‘paralyzed’ the work of the divisional and corps ambulances. Among several similar blunders, a British voluntary ambulance worker, Felix Whitehurst, records how on one occasion the Ambulance de la Presse received orders to send two hundred waggons to collect wounded at St.-Denis:

  Rather astonished, they got together as many conveyances as they could, and went off to the last resting-place of French kings. When they got there they found that wrong directions had been given; the wounded had been carried into Paris by the Intendance Militaire, and instead of two hundred carriages being required, it was intended to say there were about two hundred wounded.

  But worst of all was the picture in the base hospitals in Paris. There were insufficient doctors, nurses were untrained,1 methods primitive and conditions appallingly unhygenic. Juliette Lambert noted being deeply disturbed by the terrible cries of the wounded having limbs amputated in the Palais de l’Industrie, and later in the Siege she was shocked to see ‘one of our great surgeons weep in telling me that, in his hospital, he had not saved a single amputation case’. The deadly killer was septicaemia, often complicated by gangrene, for which—in their practical application—Lister’s principles of antisepsis had not yet produced a remedy. Most hospitals had a ‘death shed’ into which any man that contracted septicaemia was immediately removed; ‘The simple reason’, explained an American surgeon, ‘was that their presence under the same roof with their comrades would mean certain death for all.’ The situation in the Grand Hôtel, the biggest ‘ambulance’ in Paris, which housed five hundred wounded moved there from the Palais de l’Industrie, was particularly atrocious; even though, according to Labouchere, the size of its staff outnumbered the patients. It was reputed that a man could not cut his finger in the germ-ridden atmosphere of the Grand Hôtel and reach the door alive. When Bowles visited it, he found the wounded

  packed three, four, and five in each of the little rooms which the company was wont to let to single travellers at high prices. Ventilation cannot be said to be imperfect, for there is none; and the dead, as many as fifty at a time, are placed, ‘packed like biscuits’, in the centre of a gallery into which the rooms open. The stench is something terrible, and only last night a French gentleman said to me, ‘To be taken there is death’.

  All in all, the state of the Parisian ‘ambulances’ showed little advance over what Lord Raglan’s men had suffered in the Crimea. And the nearest resemblance to any Florence Nightingale upon the scene lay in the presence of the American Ambulance, which owed its existence to Dr. Thomas Evans, the handsome and enterprising dentist who had assisted the Empress Eugénie to flee from Paris. After the Great Exhibition of 1867, Evans had (for no very clear reason) bought up the whole collection of up-to-date medical equipment of the American Civil War exhibited in Paris, and when war broke out he had organized an ambulance and presented all this equipment to it, plus 10,000 francs. In charge of the American Ambulance was Dr. Swinburne, as Chief Surgeon, who based his work on Civil War experiences. There it had been proved that th
e most effective way of combating septicaemia was by ensuring perfect ventilation. To the astonishment of the French with their native horror of courants d’air, the American Ambulance housed its two hundred wounded in draughty tents, kept warm only by a stove placed in a hole in the ground which dried and heated the earth beneath the tent. The results were miraculous: whereas four out of every five died in the purulent confines of the Grand Hôtel, four out of five of Swinburne’s amputation cases survived.

  The British correspondents were constantly singing Swinburne’s praises, and even Dr. Alan Herbert, working in Wallace’s British Ambulance, had to admit that its American counterpart was ‘one of the shows of today’. On any battlefield the American Ambulance was always (according to Tommy Bowles) the first to arrive; at the Great Sortie it brought in eighty wounded men, one of them dying in the arms of Washburne’s son; and at a later engagement its field clearing-station was actually hit by Prussian shells. Its fame spread fast; Labouchere said, ‘It is the dream of every French soldier, if he is wounded, to be taken to this ambulance.1 They appear to be under the impression that, even if their legs are shot off, the skill of the Aesculapii of the United States will make them grow again’. It may have been a mild exaggeration, but certainly there was no mistaking the efficacy of Evans’s and Swinburne’s team; nor the Parisian gratitude which their work of mercy gained for the United States.

  Death of Castor and Pollux

  12. Hunger

  ONCE the bitter disappointment at Ducrot’s failure in the Great Sortie had passed, purely military considerations no longer predominated in Parisian minds. There was now a topic that had become far more grimly immediate. On December 8th, Goncourt noted in his journal: ‘People are talking only of what they eat, what they can eat, and what there is to eat. Conversation consists of this, and nothing more…. Hunger begins and famine is on the horizon.’ Among his circle, Goncourt found Théophile Gautier lamenting ‘that he has to wear braces for the first time, his abdomen no longer supporting his trousers’. Goncourt himself was finding the salted meat distributed by the Government ‘inedible’, and described how he had to kill one of his own chickens. The execution had been carried out ineptly, ‘with a Japanese sabre. It was terrible, the bird escaped from me and fluttered about the garden, without a head’. Minister Washburne, better off than many a Parisian, confided ‘I sigh for the doughnuts and hot rolls at Proctors’, and another American recalled with apparent envy how, at a concert in November, a young lady ‘received, instead of a bouquet, a—piece of cheese’. Cheese, along with butter and milk, was now little more than a memory of the past, and the vast herds of cattle and sheep that in September had filled the Bois, as well as every vacant plot in Paris, had vanished. Fresh vegetables had run out; for one franc a day and at considerable risk to themselves, ‘marauders’ were sent out under the protection of Mobiles to grub about in ‘no-man’s-land’. Augustus O’Shea recalled recognizing one of them, a coloured Martiniquais, who only two months earlier had sold him a pair of gloves in a smart shop of the Rue de la Paix, and whom he now encountered seedily dressed and ‘staggering under a bag-net of cauliflowers’. Before the Siege began, Bismarck had predicted in his cynical fashion that ‘eight days without café au lait’ would suffice to break the Parisian bourgeoisie, and even the Government of National Defence had not seriously reckoned on a blockade lasting more than two months, at most. Now, with Christmas, the hundredth day was already approaching.

  Early in October Paris had begun to eat horsemeat, first introduced by Parisian butchers four years perviously as a cheap provender for the poor. Pour encourager les autres, to create a wider fashion for hippophagy, the Commission Centrale d’Hygiéne et de Salubrité, had treated itself to a sumptuous and well-advertised banquet, the menu of which read:

  Consommé de cheval

  Cheval bouilli aux choux

  Culotte de cheval à la mode

  Côte de cheval braisée

  Filet de cheval rôti

  Bœuf et cheval salés froids

  From that moment, horse became very much à la mode, establishing a taste which still provides the principal source of revenue of many a Parisian butcher. To a ‘belle’ who (exceptionally) had refused to dine with him, a frustrated Victor Hugo wrote:

  Je vous aurais offert un repas sans rival:

  J’aurais tué Pégase et je l’aurais fait cuire

  Afin de vous servir une aile de cheval.1

  As belts were tightened, many a superb champion of the turf ended its days in the casserole; among them were the two trotting horses presented by the Tsar to Louis-Napoleon at the time of the Great Exhibition, originally valued at 56,000 francs, now bought by a butcher for 800. But it was from mid-November when Paris first realized the supplies of fresh meat were exhausted (though the shock was largely absorbed by the excitement at Gambetta’s triumph at Coulmiers), whence originated the exotic menus with which the Siege is immortally coupled. It was then that the signs ‘Feline and Canine Butchers’ made their debut. Although it was known that carnivores at the zoo were being nurtured on stray dogs, at first the idea of slaughtering domestic pets for human consumption provoked great indignation; a member of the Rafinesque family recorded how ‘the cart of a dog-and-cat butcher from which emanated lamentable barks and miaows was assailed by a crowd which was moved and perhaps disgusted. In the scuffle that followed five dogs escaped at the gallop whilst the crowd cheered.’ But soon necessity bred familiarity, and by mid-December Labouchere was reporting in a matter-of-fact way, ‘I had a slice of spaniel the other day’ (though it made him ‘feel like a cannibal’), and recounting without comment a week later how a man he had met was fattening up a huge cat which he meant to serve up on Christmas Day, ‘surrounded with mice, like sausages’. As more and more of the two traditional domestic enemies became reconciled in the cooking-pot, Gautier claimed that they seemed to grow instinctively aware of their peril:

  Soon the animals observed that man was regarding them in a strange manner and that, under the pretext of caressing them, his hand was feeling them like the fingers of a butcher, to ascertain the state of their embonpoint. More intellectual and more suspicious than dogs, the cats were the first to understand, and adopted the greatest prudence in their relations.

  Next it was the turn of the rats. Although, together with the carrier-pigeon, the rat was to become the most fabled animal of the Siege of Paris, and from December on a good rat-hunt was one of the favourite pastimes of the National Guard, the number actually consumed was relatively few.1 Apart from the (probably exaggerated) fear of the diseases they carried, on account of the lavish preparation of sauces required to make them palatable rats were essentially a rich man’s dish; hence the famous menus of the Jockey Club, featuring such delicacies as salmi de rats and ‘rat pie’. With the passage of time menus grew even more exotic as the zoos were forced to surrender their most precious inmates. Hugo was sent some joints of bear, deer, and antelope by the curator of the Jardin des Plantes; kangaroo was consumed at Goncourt’s favourite haunt, Chez Brébant; and at a butcher’s on the fashionable Faubourg St. Honoré O’ ‘Shea found the carcases of wolves on display. Because of the danger involved in killing them, the lions and tigers survived; as did the monkeys, protected apparently by the exaggerated Darwinian instincts of the Parisians, and the hippopotamus from the Jardin des Plantes, for whose vast live-weight no butcher could afford the reserve price of 80,000 francs. Otherwise no animal was exempt. By the end of December, even the pride of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, two young elephants called Castor and Pollux, were dispatched after several disgracefully inept attempts with explosive bullets. Like most of the bigger animals the poor creatures were bought by Roos, the opulent proprietor of the Boucherie Anglaise. Visiting his premises on New Year’s Eve, Goncourt describes how ‘in the midst of nameless meats and unusual horns, a boy was offering some camel kidneys for sale’; while on the wall ‘hung in a place of honour, was the skinned trunk of young Pollux’ which the butcher w
as pressing upon a group of women for 40 francs a pound. “You think that’s dear? But I assure you I don’t know how I’m going to make anything out of it. I was counting on three thousand pounds of meat and he has only yielded two thousand three hundred!”’ Obviously shocked at the price, Goncourt concluded, ‘I fell back on a couple of larks’.

  Opinions varied sharply on the merits of these unaccustomed dishes. One Englishman wrote his wife that ‘horseflesh is excellent and the French cooks make the best of it; the flesh of the Mule and Ass is equal to veal….’ On first eating horse in November, Tommy Bowles exclaimed in rapture: ‘How people continue to eat pigs I can’t imagine’, but a few weeks later he had changed his tune: ‘In spite of all attempts, I cannot eat horse’, adding almost enviously that ‘A franc-tireur tells me that he made an excellent dinner off crow and dahlia root’. By the first days of January he was recording: ‘I have now dined off camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule and elephant, which I approve in the order in which I have written… horse is really too disgusting, and it has a peculiar taste never to be forgotten.’ Goncourt declared that horsemeat gave him nightmares, while Verlaine recalled how a dinner of burnt horse provoked the second scene of his marriage, ‘and—the first blow’. Juliette Lambert also appeared to agree with Bowles, writing to her daughter at the end of December about the hump of camel she had bought: ‘It was divine! What a dinner!’ As time went on, people’s palates became more discriminating; there was a noticeable price differential between ‘brewery’ and sewer rats, and Wickham Hoffman of the American Legation declared that among horses light greys were greatly preferable to blacks. Of the zoo animals, he thought elephant was ‘tolerably good’, but reindeer was the best. One French ‘expert’ described dog as being ‘fine, fresh, rosy, covered with very white fat; stimulating to the appetite when well prepared’. Professor Sheppard, another American, made the agreeable discovery that ‘rats, to my surprise, taste somewhat like birds’, while cat ‘tastes something like the American grey squirrel, but is even tenderer and sweeter’. And on the whole most people, ranging from the fastidious Labouchere to the Earl of Carnarvon’s brother, Dr. Alan Herbert, seemed to agree with Sheppard about the superiority of cat; while the robust Edwin Child betrayed little concern about the taste of what he was eating—so long as it was food.