The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (54 page)

In ten days there had not been ten minutes of sunshine. It had become one of the coldest winters anyone could remember. The Prussian command began threatening Paris with bombardment, but the people showed no sign of panic. There was still no discernible lessening of spirit.

In the United States, sympathy and admiration for the people of Paris could be heard everywhere. “Too much cannot be said in praise of the conduct of the population of Paris in these days of suffering and privation,” wrote a correspondent for the
New York Times
.

Never did any population under similar circumstances exhibit greater patience, resignation and heroism. The Prussians imagine that when they begin their threatened bombardment, those qualities will fail them. They are mistaken. The people of the capital know well what is before them, and are prepared for everything.

In Washington, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish did what he could to boost Washburne’s spirits, assuring him his efforts were not going unappreciated. “There is universal approbation for your course from Americans,” he wrote. “Nothing has been omitted [by you] that ought to have
been done and what has been done, has been done well. I think you have earned the title ‘Protector General.’ ”

All over the city, long lines, mostly of women, stood in the bitter cold outside butcher shops and bakeries, lines of a thousand people in some cases. Lines formed as early as four in the morning and the waiting could last five or six hours, only to buy nothing more appetizing than horses’ hooves and horrible dirt-colored bread. On the rue de Clichy a jeweler now displayed eggs wrapped in cotton in the part of his window usually reserved for fine silver.

As firewood began running out, bands of thousands of people roved the streets at night to cut down trees and rip apart wooden fences for fuel. Many poor families were burning their furniture to keep warm.

Christmas Day was the coldest day yet, “the climax of the forlorn,” Nathan Sheppard called it. “Thermometer at zero, snow dribbling, scowling heavens, slippery pavements, ominous silence all round … thousands of people lying abed to save food and fuel.”

“Never has a sadder Christmas dawned on any city,” wrote Washburne. “The sufferings … exceed by far anything we have seen.” Of so much that was horrible, the continuing slaughter of horses seems to have distressed him particularly.

The government is seizing every horse it can lay its hands on for food. It carries out its work with remorseless impartiality. The omnibus horse, the cab horse, the work horse, the fancy horse, all go alike in mournful procession to the butcher’s block. …

For his part, determined not to let Christmas go by unrecognized, he sacrificed two laying hens for a Christmas dinner at home for Wick-ham Hoffman, Dr. Johnston, Nathan Sheppard, and a few other American friends, in addition to Gratiot. The bill-of-fare included oyster soup, followed by sardines, roast chicken, corned beef and potatoes, tomatoes,
cranberries, green corn, and green peas—all but the chicken from Washburne’s supply of canned goods.

As Hoffman was to explain, the French were accustomed to shopping for fresh food day-to-day, not only because of their love of fresh food, but because so many lived in apartments with little if any room for stores. Americans liked being well stocked with canned goods, and consequently many Paris grocers had obligingly imported large quantities for the
colonie américaine.
With the greater part of the
colonie
having departed by the time the siege began, a quantity of canned fruits, vegetables, oysters, even lobsters, had remained on the market. “The French knew nothing of these eatables till late in the siege, when they discovered their merits,” Hoffman wrote. “In the meantime the Americans bought up nearly all there was at hand.”

For dessert Washburne offered a selection of canned fruits, in addition to chocolates, of which there was still no shortage in Paris. Indeed, supplies of French chocolate, mustard, and wine appeared to be inexhaustible.

The day after Christmas, he recorded a stark winter scene he had never thought imaginable—a “wood riot” virtually at his front door.

The large square across the street diagonally from our house was filled with wood from the Bois de Boulogne, which has been saved up to burn into charcoal. At about one o’clock this
P.M
. a crowd of two or three thousand women and children gathered … right in our neighborhood and “went for” this wood. … Nearly all the wood was carried off.

It was probably only the beginning, he speculated. “These people cannot freeze to death or starve to death.”

Two days later, on December 28, he hit a new low, despairing over everything, including himself. “The situation becomes more and more critical … I am becoming utterly demoralized.”

I am unfitted for anything. This siege life is becoming unendurable. I have no disposition to read anything. … I am too lazy to do any work and it is an immense effort to write a dispatch once a week. …

By New Year’s Day, Paris was both freezing and starving to death. People were eating anything to be had—mule meat, dogs, cats, crows, sparrows, rats, and bread that was nearly black and as heavy, Washburne said, as the lead from a Galena mine. To Nathan Sheppard it tasted of “sawdust, mud, and potato skins.”

Sheppard sampled just about everything, and out of necessity, it seems, as much as curiosity. He found dogmeat preferable to horsemeat, but could not honestly say he liked it. Cats he considered “downright good eating,” as apparently did many people. The price of a cat on the market was four times that of dog. For the poor, nothing was a bargain. By the second half of December a single egg was 3 francs, twice the daily pay of a soldier in the National Guard. A single sparrow cost 1 franc. For weeks along the Champs-Élysées and in the Tuileries and Luxembourg Gardens, and on the quays by the Seine, people had been busy shooting sparrows, to the point that some felt it dangerous to be out walking there.

A rat cost only a little less than a sparrow. A rat, Sheppard was surprised to find, tasted a lot like a bird. It had been estimated that at the start of the siege the number of rats in Paris exceeded 20,000. It was also generally agreed that the flavor of a brewery rat surpassed that of the sewer rat, due to its diet. Rat pâté was considered a delicacy, but Sheppard knew of only one shop that carried it.

Food had become the principal topic of conversation. “The worst of it is,” he wrote, “the more one talks about eating, the more one wants to eat.” Many Parisians, with their abiding affection for dogs, were keeping them hidden. One elderly woman assured him she would sooner starve to death than eat her cat.

With little or nothing to feed the animals in the zoo, the government began butchering them as well, until nearly all had gone to feed the starving city—bear, kangaroo, reindeer, camel, yak, even porcupine, and two long-popular elephants named Castor and Pollux.

But as bad as things became, there was no time when money— preferably gold—would not buy good food (a point vividly made by Honoré Daumier in a caricature of a fat, well-heeled epicure, a great bib at his neck, happily gorging himself). Nor did anyone in Paris doubt that across the lines the enemy’s army had all it wanted in the way of bread and German sausage.

Everyone dreamed of white bread, café au lait, and green vegetables, wrote Mary Putnam. “But bah!!! Such things are not worth speaking about.”

“The incessant and exceptional cold weather continues, and the suffering in the city is steadily increasing,” Washburne stressed in a dispatch to the secretary of state in the first week of January, doubtless wondering whether anyone enjoying the comforts of Washington had the least idea of the agony of Paris, and of the army as well as the people. Several hundred French soldiers had been disabled by the extreme cold or had frozen to death.

So severe was the suffering of the indigent Germans who still came to him in desperation, pleading for his help, that Washburne had converted the whole first floor of the legation building into a dormitory where he housed, fed, and kept warm more than a hundred men, women, and children.

The poor suffered the most. The death toll in the city, not counting those dying in the military hospitals, had reached more than 4,000 a week, five times the usual average, and the heaviest toll was among infants and the elderly poor. “Great discontent is now prevailing among the poorer classes, yet there seems to be a disposition to hold out until the last extremity,” wrote Washburne.

With the ground frozen as hard as marble to a depth of a foot and a half, the Prussians were able to bring up the biggest of their Krupp cannon, and on January 5, 1871, the 109th day of the siege, they commenced bombardment of Paris itself. Many had predicted it would never happen, that
Bismarck would not allow it. In fact, Bismarck had wanted to begin bombarding the city as early as October, convinced that “two or three shells” would be enough to scare the Parisians into surrendering.

“At 2
P.M
. I walked down the Champs-Élysées,” wrote Washburne, “and to say that the firing was then terrific would give no idea of it. I supposed, however, it was only a bombardment of the forts and I had not thought that the shells were coming into the city.”

The initial barrage struck on the Left Bank, the first shell on the rue Lalande. Olin Warner, who had not gone off to fight with the French army as he originally intended, but stayed on living on the Left Bank, wrote of German shells hitting “on all sides” all night in his neighborhood. “Sometimes they would strike and burst so near I could smell the powder from the explosion and once I heard a woman scream. …”

The thundering assault on the Left Bank continued day and night. An old woman had her head blown off. Near the Luxembourg Gardens a little girl was cut in two on her way to school. An American student from Louisville, Kentucky, named Charles Swager had part of one foot torn to pieces when a shell struck his room on the Left Bank. Taken to the American Ambulance, he had to have his leg amputated. The operation was performed by doctors Swinburne and Johnston, as Washburne duly noted, but a month later the young man would die.

The poor were especially to be pitied, wrote the American doctor Robert Sibbet.

They carry with them, through the deep snow which has fallen, their children and their bedding. They are crowding into the basement stories of the theaters, the churches and other buildings, where they are safe from the cold and the shells.

With shells bursting all around the house where she lived on the Left Bank, Mary Putnam had to move out. One night, with four or five hundred others, she slept in the vast crypt beneath the Panthéon, where the heroes of French liberty were buried. “It was singularly dramatic,” she wrote, “the tombs of Voltaire and Rousseau sheltering the victims of the Prussian barbarians. …”

The bombardment continued with great fury. The shells rained down at a rate of three or four hundred a day, all striking the Left Bank. (The domes of the Panthéon and the Invalides remained favorite German targets.) But the number of people killed was surprisingly low, given the size of the city’s population. “Nearly twelve days of furious bombardment has accomplished but little,” Washburne wrote on January 16. “The killing and wounding of a few men, women, and children and the knocking to pieces of a few hundred houses in a city of two millions is no great progress. …” “The bombardment so far,” he reported to Secretary of State Fish that same day, “has not had the effect of hastening the surrender of the city. On the other hand it has apparently made the people more firm and determined.”

The total number of those killed by the bombardment would be estimated to have been 97 over three weeks, or less than a third of the number dying of smallpox in the hospitals each week, week after week.