By R. HEATH.
Like all the inhabitants of Paris, the workmen dwell in houses of five
or six stories high. The ground floor is let out in shops, between
which the principal staircase is entered by a narrow passage. At the
back there is a small court-yard, skirted on one side by a wing from
the main building, of from two to three stories high. Each flat of the
main building and of its wing is occupied by several tenants, so that
such buildings contain on an average 50 different tenants, with as many
as from 120 to 150 inhabitants. In one that I have visited there were
47 tenants, the total number of persons in the building at night being
114.
Workmen inhabit all quarters of Paris, the better sort preferring to
live at some distance from their work. The northeast of Paris is,
however, peculiarly their quarter; the suburb of St. Antoine and that
of St. Martin, with the districts known as La Villette and Belleville,
are almost entirely inhabited by workmen, and the tradespeople who
supply their wants. The neighborhood of the Canal Saint Martin is
altogether a different Paris to that usually seen by the visitor. It
has more of the cheerless look of our own manufacturing districts;
however, the bright sun of Paris, the rows of trees, and the fountains
prevent it from looking gloomy or sad.
In this neighborhood lodging is not so dear as in the older parts of
the city. In very miserable and dirty streets in the Latin quarter, the
workman has to pay as much as thirty dollars a year for a single room;
two rooms cost him fifty-six dollars a year; and two rooms and a little
place, which he can use as a kitchen, seventy-two dollars a year. This
is enormous, and amounts to about twenty per cent. of his income,
supposing him to work full time, and not to belong to one of the more
skilled trades.
The question of rent is one of the greatest grievances of which Paris
workmen have to complain. It keeps them in poverty and anxiety, and,
it is alleged, often drives the whole family to moral ruin; the wife
selling her honor to obtain means, and the husband giving himself up in
despair to drink.
How impossible it is to settle questions which affect the tenderest
feelings of humanity by an assertion of the rights of property, the
following story strikingly illustrates:
During the siege of Paris the people universally fell into poverty. On
its termination a certain landlord, unable to get his rents, determined
to eject all the defaulters. He sent an order to his agent to turn
them out and sell their goods. One was a widow with two children.
Her husband had died of a cold caught in the trenches. In her grief
the poor woman had vowed she would never be married again, and as a
sort of testimony of the truth of her intention she had had their
walnut bedstead sawn in half. When the time came for the expulsion the
proprietor arrived, and seeing the best piece of furniture spoiled,
upbraided her with ruining his goods.
She found hospitality elsewhere, but the loss of the old home and the
household gods turned her brain. The insurrection of the Commune broke
out. She was one of the first to rush to the scene and to join the
insurgents. She and her children were seen wherever there was peril.
She mounted the barricade, and planted the flag of the Commune in the
teeth of the besiegers. In one of the last days of the defence her
eldest son was separated from her in the struggle, and the youngest
was killed at her feet. Frantic, she seized the body of the child, and
springing up a barricade, hurled it upon the bayonets of the soldiers,
then tearing open her dress she cried wildly, “Kill me! kill me!” She
fell over the stones, but was not dead. “Finish her!” cried the young
officer in charge.
A workman’s rooms are generally poorly furnished, but clean; the custom
being to spend a disproportionate amount of income on food and clothing.
Living does not seem so costly in Paris as in London, yet it is
generally thought dear. Nevertheless the workman can not be said to
fare badly.
There are various modes and hours of taking meals in Paris, depending
chiefly on the nationality; for it must never be forgotten that Paris
is a cosmopolitan city, and contains large numbers of workmen of
German, Belgian, and Italian origin.
The French mode is for the workman to leave home fasting, taking his
first two meals at a restaurant or cabaret near the place where he is
working. The second meal is eaten about ten or eleven o’clock in the
morning, and consists of a plate of meat and vegetables and half a
bottle of wine. Any one walking about Paris at this hour of the day
must have observed workmen seated alone or in groups at the little
tables outside the restaurants, eating their breakfast.
The variety offered and the prices may be judged from the following
bill of fare, exposed in a street peculiarly frequented by workmen:
cents.
Radishes, sardines, butter 3
Soup 3
Common wine 7
Beef 6
Mutton stew 7
Leg of mutton 8
Stewed rabbit 12
Chops 8
Goose and veal 12
Potato stew 3
Salads and fruits 3
Cheese and sweetmeats 3
Coffee 4
The workman’s wife has, with her children, an early meal of milked
coffee or soup, the children taking with them to school sandwiches of
bread and cheese, or something from the previous day’s dinner. The
mother takes a similar breakfast in the middle of the day, the whole
family looking forward to the third meal, indiscriminately called
dinner or supper, as the principal one of the day. This consists of
soup, meat, vegetables or salad, cheese or prunes, and fresh fruit
according to the season.
Two or three times a week the kettle is put on, and rich soup and
boiled beef obtained. Thin soup is made from the water in which the
vegetables have been boiled, or with onions, of which the Paris workman
is fond. Wine is generally drunk at supper, but when it is very dear a
home-made wine is obtained from raisins, or the wife and children drink
water in which liquorice root has been steeped.
Nearly every district in Paris has excellent markets, at which all
kinds of meat and poultry, vegetables and dairy produce, can be bought
at reasonable prices. There are special days in which it is known
certain articles will be fresh and abundant.
In addition to the ordinary butchers’ shops, which in Paris are always
peculiarly clean and well arranged, there are special shops for the
sale of the flesh of horses, asses, and mules. These shops are called
horseflesh shops. There is nothing in the least revolting in their
appearance, the joints looking like ordinary meat, only a little
darker. It strikes the eye at first as strange to see, “Ass, best
quality,” but it is a matter of habit.
The economical wife knows all the various pieces of meat which are
nourishing, some of which are little heard of in England, such as
beef’s stomach, veal’s mouth, sheep’s foot.
Vegetables are always plentiful in Paris, owing to the quantity of
market-garden land round the city, and for the same reason there is a
constant supply of salads all the year round, but then the Parisians
will make a salad of the leaves of the lamb’s lettuce and the dandelion.
Another help in the domestic economy of the workman’s home is the
existence of the co-operative stores for the sale of provisions. In
1870 there were three or four hundred such societies in Paris.
The clothing and linen in a workman’s home are said to equal in value
his furniture. His own clothing costs him about $24 a year; washing
and mending raising the cost by $12; the clothing of his wife and two
children would be about $44 more.
The workman’s wife is extremely industrious, rising early and always
assiduously engaged in domestic duties, or in some work by which she
adds to the income.
Many workmen with small families are able to save sufficient to set
their wives up in business as washerwomen, or in a fruit or newspaper
stall. Often she undertakes the duties of a housekeeper, _i. e._,
acting as general servant for the first few hours of the day in some
family of the middle class. When she thus works she has to send her
children to the crib or to the asylum; but this is not frequent, as the
families of workmen in Paris are usually very small.
Those who have the largest are generally of German origin, coming from
Alsace, Belgium, and countries bordering on the Rhine. That very large
families sometimes are found among workmen in Paris is proved by one
case where a day laborer, a native of the department of the Haut-Rhin,
received a prize of $600 for bringing up a family of fifteen children
respectably on a wage of fifty cents a day. In the end he was assisted
by his son, who was able to earn as a skilled workman more than his
father.
As a rule the workman leaves the management of the children and the
spending of the money entirely to his wife. He gives her all the wages
on pay-day, and she doles out to him every morning the sum necessary
for his meals.
Sometimes she finds a great deficit when this time comes. Then
she weeps and upbraids him, while he, confessing his fault, says
reproachfully of himself, “One must not deceive when one has five or
six children.”
It does not appear to be easy to outwit a French woman. Occasionally
a drinking husband will try to hide a piece of money in some out of
the way place, as, for instance, the peak of his hat. But his wife
ransacks his clothes while he is asleep and finds the missing coin.
This position of affairs being well known, the workman who will not
be entrapped into drinking, or who, being one of a social gathering,
insists on going home early, is chaffed as a man who buttons up his
coat with pins.
It is certainly a fact that feminine influence is very powerful in
Paris, and that what the mother is the home becomes. Thus while Paris
workmen almost universally absent themselves from the churches, and
throw all their influence politically against the priests, their
children go in crowds to make their first communion, and to this end
are placed under the priests for religious instruction.
To see the street in front of a Paris church on Whit Sunday, no one
would believe religion was a matter not only of indifference, but of
contempt, to the Paris workman. The road seen from a balcony is like
an immense field of snow-drops. Hundreds of white-robed children float
about among crowds of smiling parents and friends. And yet there is
hardly anything in it beyond a domestic rite, something which it is
respectable to go through at a certain age.
“I will sell my clothes, but my child shall not be different from
others,” says a mother, who, no more than her husband, considers the
spiritual aspect of the ceremony.
The domestic affections of the workman, where he has not been
demoralized by licentiousness or vice, are strong, and his sense of
duty to his relatives unusual. Thus it would seem not at all uncommon
for a workman to support his wife’s mother, even when she lives far
away. A workman who had done this for some time fell, through the state
of public affairs, into such distress as to be obliged to earn his
bread by selling journals in the street. After a time he recovered his
position; but all through his period of poverty, the mother-in-law was
allowed to believe that no change had taken place in his circumstances.
Another workman, who had originally been in business as a butcher,
partly ruined himself by undertaking the charge of his wife’s family.
However, he never forsook the mother-in-law, but when he had a numerous
family and only the small and precarious wages of a day laborer, she
remained as much part of his family as the children.
The workman is careful of his children. He will fetch his daughter,
apprenticed to dressmaking, from her work in the evening, and likes to
have his son follow the same business as himself. He respects his own
art, and has no desire to see his boy made into a clerk. If his wife is
foolish enough to express such a wish he rates her soundly. “Does she
want to make a skip-kennel (errand boy) of him because one gets dirty
in factory work?”
“Thou knowest,” he concludes, “I always consider what thou sayest,
but candidly, thou art unreasonable—wouldst thou then have him die of
hunger when he is grown up? To slave at a desk is a miserable business;
one ought to have a manual trade, with that a man always has his living
at his fingers’ ends. Why! thou hast never said I was too dirty for
thee; ah! I should like to see him a clerk. And to think that there are
people who pretend that the woman has as much judgment as the man. Yes,
yes, thou art a very good sort of a woman, but at bottom thou knowest
nothing. Henri shall be a mechanic; the devil may burn me if ever he
becomes a scribbling puppet.”—_Good Words._