I was having breakfast outside a café in Paris a few years ago when a passer-by stopped and asked if she could try some of my bread. It seemed a reasonable request. Most French cafés just serve the basic white baguette. But, unusually, this one had given me a brown, wholegrain variety, writes Frank McNally.
So I thought the woman's curiosity was the height of Parisian sophistication. She was out shopping. She spied something interesting on a café table. Naturally, she asked the diner if she could taste it. Feeling sophisticated by association, I said: "Bien sur!" Whereupon the woman took a napkin and carefully helped herself to three of the six slices in the basket.
As she retreated up the Rue Montorgueil with half my breakfast, I studied her for any signs of poverty. But she was impeccably dressed and no thinner than the average Parisienne. There was nothing to suggest she was any hungrier than I was.
I thought of that woman again last week while reading two books about the French capital - Alistair Horne's Seven Ages of Paris and Andrew Hussey's Paris: The Secret History - in a succession of different cafés. Horne's is the marginally superior book, but both are fascinating. And what struck me repeatedly in their pages was the gulf between the city's glittering façade and the often desperate times from which it emerged.
The architectural splendour all around me masked wars, massacres, and revolutions: each trauma barely over before Paris was rededicating itself to the pursuit of beauty. It also masked sieges - those occasions when a city synonymous with fine dining starved. And viewed from a well-stocked café, it was these events that were hardest to imagine.
Contrast the "Belle Époque" Paris of gilt mirrors, brilliant lights, and art nouveau décor - now the classic image of the city for tourists - with the crisis that immediately preceded it. The Belle Époque arose almost directly out the dire days of 1870-71, which started with the French army's humiliation by the Prussians and ended with the last of the Communards being machine-gunned to death by their own countrymen against the walls of Père Lachaise cemetery.
In between, for the second time in three centuries, Parisians had experienced an engineered famine, when the Germans presented the bill for their victory. The city at least learned something from its history and stockpiled for the siege - turning the Bois de Boulogne, for example, into a giant sheep and cattle pasture. But this only delayed the inevitable.
Bismarck and the winter of 1870 both gradually tightened their grip, and the preferred forms of meat ran out. In the descent of species that followed, horses became a staple, while signs for "feline and canine butchers" also appeared. The writer Théophile Gautier noted how quickly the city's pets realised their status had changed. "More intellectual and more suspicious than dogs," he wrote, "the cats were the first to understand, and adopted the greatest prudence in their relations." The Paris correspondent of the London Daily News admitted feeling "like a cannibal" after eating a piece of spaniel. He also reported a man fattening his cat for Christmas and planning to serve it "surrounded with mice, like sausages". Meanwhile, the city's zoos were scoured for food. And then it was the rats. Even here there was distinction, with the more sought-after "brewery rat" commanding higher prices than the sewer version.
Horne writes that the fame of the rat's role during the siege of Paris was in inverse proportion to the number actually eaten. This he puts at a mere 300, compared with 65,000 horses, 5,000 cats, and 1,200 dogs. But then, as he explains, "the sauces that were necessary to render them edible meant that rats were essentially a rich man's dish".
The precedent they tried to learn from in 1870 was the siege of 1590, when the Huguenot Henri de Navarre marched on Paris to claim the vacant French crown. Parisians were hostile, however. So he blockaded the gates, burned the surrounding fields, and waited for hunger to deliver the throne.
This was a
sequel to the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre: an orgy of anti-Protestant violence launched 18 years before on the occasion of Henri's marriage to Marguerite de Valois, when the city was full of his co-religionists, there to celebrate. The cynical Henri would eventually secure the crown by converting to Catholicism, declaring famously that Paris was "worth a Mass". But in 1590, he still thought a short siege would be enough.
The vacancy on the throne had been caused by the assassination of Henri III, whose court was noted for the homosexual orgies involving "les mignons" ("the little cuties") with which he surrounded himself, while often dressing as a woman. This was only one of his crimes, in the eyes of Catholic Paris. And when a Jacobin monk got close enough to plunge a fatal dagger in his belly, in August 1589, there were wild celebrations.
One of the wildest was by the fanatic Duchesse de Montepensier, a long-time enemy of the king who had encouraged the assassin, and who danced through the streets announcing the news: "The tyrant is dead!" A year later, Paris was starving. As the stand-off with Henri de Navarre developed, an eye-witness (quoted by Hussey) reported the desperation inside the walls: "I have seen with my own eyes poor people descend on the corpse of a dog in the gutter of the streets, and others eating entrails thrown into the sewers, or eating dead rats and mice, or the brains of a dead dog."
It would get worse. When even rats could not be found, the poorest of the poor began to forage at night in the city's cemeteries. They dug up bones, crushing them into dust in the belief that this was a kind of flour they could bake. "The most famished ate this dust," writes Hussey, "which they called 'the bread of Madame de Montpensier'."