Someone tried to lighten the darkness by reminding us that, after the 21st of this month, the days begin to lengthen again. Roll on that day. At times recently this reader thought of a book that impressed him with the misery of the French peasant in the second half of the 19th century - the most striking image being that of families which spent the greater part of the deep winter in bed, 24 hours round. They were reasonably warm and they didn't put demands on their bodies by exercising and thus making them hungry.
In fact the writer, Eugen Weber, declares in Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of rural France 1870 to 1914, that in rural France real hunger only disappeared, or minds only adjusted to its disappearance, as the 20th century was dawning.
And even in this book, published in 1977, he declares that "there are those in Franche-Compte - not so far from Paris - who remember the older generation being very stingy about food and as giving children as little as possible to eat. There are memories, too, of lean years when bread was made of barley or beans because the grain had been spoiled, and days when there was no bread. In the worst times the bare minimum, which was sometimes bread or pancakes, was always la soupe. At the worst of times this might be just hot water with salt or fat added, as the base of the diet."
At about mid-century the peasants of Hautes-Alpes were said to be happy to have bread "even hard and black, even a year old and all of rye." For in some houses bread was, indeed, baked only once a year and then hoarded to last. In one area they greased the vegetables they ate with lard which they kept in a small bag, and plunged briefly into the cooking pot and used over and over until it was gone.
But as with us here, the staple was the potato. A crop failure could condemn half the population to "under-feeding or worse". When you had potatoes, bread could be a luxury according to the area you lived in. But in many cases, good produce would not be given to the family because that was meant to be sold. A cleric is quoted as saying that the peasant saved for himself and his family the very scum of his products - the rest was for sale.
"When you were young you had teeth but no bread, when old you had bread but no teeth," ran a proverb.