PARIS MARKETS.
The Halles-Centrales--The Cattle Markets--Agriculture in France--The
French Peasant.
The Panthéon, standing on the summit of the mountain of
Sainte-Geneviève, and the Luxemburg Palace, surrounded by the galleries
and the garden of the same name, dominate the rest of the left bank,
which has still, however, one salient point in the Hôtel des Invalides.
To the left of the Luxemburg Garden, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel,
stands the National School of Mines, established in the house which
formerly belonged to a religious order. Here, as in so many other of the
public establishments of France, the instruction is gratuitous, under
the direction of an inspector-general and thirteen professors. The
museum contains all kinds of interesting geological and mineralogical
specimens, together with a library of 30,000 volumes, which, like the
museum, is open to the public.
The Rue de Tournon--to pass from the garden to the front of the
palace--has already been mentioned in connection with that Hôtel de
l’Empereur Joseph at which Joseph II., visiting his sister Marie
Antoinette, elected to stay in preference to putting up at one of the
royal palaces. The street owes its name to François de Tournon,
cardinal-ambassador under Francis I. At that time the land through which
the street was afterwards to run was the site of a large horse market, a
sort of annex to the Marché Saint-Germain, and familiarly known as the
Muddy Meadow--“le Pré crotté.” Very different were the Paris markets of
those days from the system of markets now so perfectly organised. At
present, when Paris has expanded so far beyond its ancient “barriers”
that it has become one of the greatest cities in the world, the
provisioning of its population is a question of the first importance.
For breakfast, as for subsequent meals, the French metropolis requires a
stupendous quantity of food, which must arrive regularly at a fixed
hour, and be delivered promptly at the doors of the numberless beings
whose mouths are to be filled.
At some hours before dawn a large number of market-gardeners and other
cultivators from the vicinity of Paris enter the city and converge
towards the same point. Enormous and noisy drays at the same time bring
in to this common centre the consignments of edible produce which arrive
by rail daily from the provinces or abroad.
The great market which receives all these goods, known as the
Halles-Centrales, is situated opposite the beautiful church of
Saint-Eustache, at the end of the Rues Coquillière, Montmartre,
Montorgeuil, and Rambuteau. This immense and elegant building,
constructed entirely of bricks and iron, consists of twelve pavilions,
which shelter the sale of the various descriptions of goods. Each
pavilion has its speciality. One is a wholesale, another a retail
meat-market, a third is devoted to fish, a fourth to eggs and butter,
and so on.
Markets are held in various parts of the city; but most of them are fed
by the Central Market. Many of them recall the Central Market by the
light character of the architecture in brick and iron. Two great
cattle-markets are established at Sceaux and at Poissy, and a smaller
one at La Chapelle Saint-Denis, connected with the Marché de la
Villette, built with the view of absorbing all the smaller meat-markets.
Unlike England, France, in the matter of agricultural products, is
self-sufficing. Two-thirds of the population are occupied, as
proprietors, farmers, or labourers, with the cultivation of the soil. In
England the agricultural classes represent only one-third of the
population. In France there are nine millions of small landowners with a
slight proportion of large ones; in England the land is in the
possession of comparatively few persons. Up to the time of the
Revolution the number of proprietors in France did not go beyond 30,000,
and the peasantry at that period were in a state of utter poverty, the
actual cultivators receiving, according to Alison, only a twelfth part
of the produce for their share. “The people’s habitations,” wrote Arthur
Young, “are miserable heaps of dirt--no glass, no air; the women and
children are in rags--no shoes, no stockings. The proprietors of these
badly cultivated lands, all absentees, were worshipping the king at
Versailles in the most abject and servile manner, spending their scanty
income and getting into scandalous debt.” “The agricultural population,”
he says elsewhere, “are 76 per cent. worse fed and worse clad than in
England. Impossible to have an idea of the animals who served us at
table, called women by courtesy. In reality they are walking dunghills,
without stockings, shoes, or sabots.”
All this was changed by the Revolution, when immense numbers of tenants
became proprietors of the land they had previously cultivated, as serfs,
for their masters. The progress from destitution to comfort was effected
in less than twenty years, and since then the condition of the peasantry
has been constantly improving. Under the system of small ownerships
agriculture, as an art, may not be brought to the highest possible pitch
of perfection, but the agriculturists thrive and are happy. France is
not a corn-exporting country; and it is quite possible that under a
system of large estates the sum of her agricultural produce might be
greater than it really is. The peasants, however, under the system of
“la petite culture” produce more butter and their fowls more eggs than
they need for their own consumption or for sale in France. Accordingly
great quantities of eggs and butter are sent to England, France’s best
customer for produce of this kind.
The small proprietors, too, keep rabbits and pigeons, many of which find
their way not only to the Paris markets but to England. A century ago,
until the time of the Revolution, the landholding aristocracy had alone
the right of shooting rabbits and keeping pigeons. “The birds,” says M.
Nottelle, writing on this subject, “ate the seed of the poor peasants in
the neighbourhood and the rabbits ate the corn when it was green. These
exclusive privileges were abolished on the celebrated night of the 4th
of August, 1789.” Yet it should always be remembered that the noble
proprietors gave up their exclusive privileges--doubtless under the
influence of the Revolution, but, nevertheless, as a matter of fact--of
their own accord. Now everyone can keep pigeons; but the owners are
ordered by the mayor to keep them in the pigeon-house during seed-time.
If they are allowed to fly at this period they are considered as game,
and may be shot. The owner, moreover, is fined. Occasionally in the
French market frogs are to be seen, and it is quite possible that in the
days before the Revolution the epithet “frog-eating” could be more fitly
applied to the generality of Frenchmen than it can now, when the thighs
of frogs are only to be met with at certain restaurants, where they are
served, equally with snails, as a rare delicacy.
It has been seen that before 1789 the French peasants were poor and
miserable. Arthur Young’s descriptions of them have been quoted often
enough. A century earlier than Arthur Young, La Bruyère, author of “Les
Caractères,” spoke of them as looking like ferocious animals. “The men
and women,” he continued, “are meagre, dark-looking objects, their dirty
rags scarcely covering them, and retiring at night into filthy dens or
hovels.” It is possible, then, as M. Nottelle, in his unpretentious but
interesting and instructive little book on the French peasantry since
the Revolution, declares, that several millions of peasants were obliged
to live on roots. “No doubt,” he adds, “they ate frogs, though it took
much time to get a decent dish of them. But time was not a great object
to these poor famished slaves. From this, most likely, Shakespeare
called the French ‘frog-eaters,’ and foreigners have come to the
conclusion that many of the French feed mostly on frogs. It is not easy,
however, to exist on frogs, which are too dear to be eaten by the
generality of people.”
[Illustration: RUE DE TOURNON, WITH THE FAÇADE OF THE SENATE HOUSE.]
It is said, too, that frogs are in favour with the devout, for they may
be eaten as fish on fast days. Not only frogs but also snails are to be
seen exhibited for sale in some of the Paris markets. It may be that in
the days when the unhappy French peasantry were on the verge of
starvation they found themselves reduced to a disgusting diet of snails
and even slugs. However that may have been, the only snail eaten by the
French at the present day, and the only kind of snail to be seen in the
Paris markets, is the “escargot,” in its streaked whity-brown shell. The
escargot is found chiefly in the wine countries, especially Burgundy,
where it feeds on the leaves of the vine. One of the few places in Paris
where snails and frogs used to be sold, cooked, no doubt in perfection,
is or was the famous restaurant in the “New Street of the Little
Fields”--otherwise Rue Neuve des Petits Champs--which Thackeray
celebrated in his ballad on the subject of Bouillabaisse.
Many interesting anecdotes of the French peasants are told by a writer
from whom I have recently quoted. Living in the midst of their property,
with their domestic animals around them, they become very much attached
to their cattle, not sentimentally but by reason of the beasts’ market
value. A story is told of a farmer who sent to the cattle-show a fat
pig, that obtained a medal which he afterwards wore with great pride as
though he himself had carried it off. The peasant’s love of his cow
surpasses even his affection for his pig. A peasant proprietor lamented
the loss of one of his cows to such an extent that a friend at last said
to him: “If you had lost your wife your grief could scarcely be
greater.” “Maybe,” he replied; “for many of the farmers about here would
gladly give me their daughter in marriage, while none of them would give
me a cow.” In one of Pierre Dupont’s songs this preference on the part
of the peasant of the cow to the wife finds full expression. The cow, it
is true, becomes in the poet’s lines an ox; but cows, like oxen, are
used in France for the plough. “I love Jeanne, my wife,” exclaims the
peasant of Pierre Dupont’s song; “well, I would rather see her die than
see the death of my oxen”; or, in the French--
_Eh bien, j’aimerais mieux_
_La voir mourir que voir mourir mes bœufs_.
So great is the cow-passion by which the French peasantry are animated,
that when one of them had stolen the cow of his neighbour, the
exhortations of the priest were powerless to enforce restitution.
“You must return it to the owner,” said the priest.
“But, father, I have confessed my fault.”
“Yes, yes; but you must do as I tell you. Send back the cow to its
owner.”
The man hesitated; he did not wish to restore the cow.
“Then no absolution; no sacrament.”
The peasant still demurred.
“Think,” the priest then said, “of the day of judgment, when all the
village will be assembled on the green, and you will be there holding
the cow by the tail, and everybody will know you stole it. How ashamed
you will be!”
“Really! but will the owner of the cow be there too?”
“Of course he will.”
“Well, if I see him, I will then give him back his cow.”
One more anecdote may be permitted in reference not indeed to the Paris
markets, but to those by whom the Paris markets are supplied. Not only
is the French peasant prudent and economical: he is also, as is shown by
the story just told, very cunning. Equally so is the peasant woman. One
day at a market in Normandy people were much surprised at seeing a woman
offer an excellent horse for sale at the price of five francs, and still
more astonished at her asking 500 francs for a dog she wished to dispose
of. The two animals were to be sold together. They were ultimately got
rid of on the terms demanded. The explanation of the mystery was this.
The peasant woman was the widow of a man who in his will had directed
that the horse was to be sold for the benefit of his own family and the
dog for the benefit of his wife. She had so arranged matters that out of
the joint sale 500 francs, the price of the dog, came to her, while five
francs went to her husband’s relations.
[Illustration: THE SAINT-GERMAIN MARKET.]
It seems strange and somewhat absurd to English Conservatives that so
many peasants in France should have a vote; but inasmuch as of these
peasants nine millions are proprietors, the establishment of universal
suffrage in France was not a revolutionary but a Conservative measure.
The peasantry, moreover, are in some degree trained to public affairs by
the part they play in the communal councils. There are about 40,000
communes in France, and each commune has its mayor and its municipal
councillors elected by universal suffrage for the management of local
affairs. Every peasant may become a municipal councillor and, if duly
elected by the municipal council, a mayor. The municipal council meets
periodically for the discussion of local affairs; so that its members
accustom themselves to public speaking and the interchange of ideas.
France has now about 10,000,000 electors, of whom two-thirds are
peasants, but, as before explained, peasants in the possession of landed
property.