his supplies of
funds from that quarter. He was of no earthly use in the besieged city,
but he refused to go. He had a small but very valuable collection of
family plate, which went bit by bit to the Mint, not to feed himself but
to feed others, for he was never weary of well-doing. He reminded one
irresistibly of Balzac's hero, "le Pere Goriot," parting with his
treasures to supply his ungrateful daughters, for the Parisians were
ungrateful to him. Mad as he was, no man in possession of all his mental
faculties could have been more sublime.

Whatever the question of human flesh as food may have been to the
Parisians, that of horseflesh was by no means new to them. Since '66,
various attempts had been made to introduce it on a large scale, but,
for once in a way, they were logical in their objections to it. "It is
all very well," wrote a paper, devoted to the improvement of the humbler
classes,--"it is all very well for a few savants to sit round a
well-appointed table to feast upon the succulent parts of a young,
tender, and perfectly healthy horse, especially if the steaks are 'aux
truffes,' and the kidneys stewed in 'Madeira;' but that young, tender,
and perfectly healthy horse would cost more than an equally tender,
young, and perfectly healthy bullock or cow. So, where is the advantage?
In order to obtain that advantage, horses only fit for the knacker's
yard, not fit for human food, would have to be killed, and the
hard-working artisan with his non-vitiated taste, who does not even care
for venison or game when it happens to be 'high,' would certainly not
care for a superannuated charger to be set before him. You might just as
well ask an unsophisticated cannibal to feast upon an invalid. The best
part of 'the warrior on the shelf' is his wooden leg or his wooden arm;
the best part of the superannuated charger is his skin or his hoof, with
or without the shoe; and no human being, whether cannibal or not, can be
expected to make a timber-yard, a tanner's yard, or an old-iron and rag
store of his stomach, even to please faddists."

As a consequence, only two millions of pounds of horseflesh were
"produced" during the first three years succeeding the publication of
that article (1866-69); but it is more than doubtful whether a sixteenth
part of it was consumed as human food--with a knowledge on the part of
the consumers. And during those three years, as if to prove the
writer's words, the public were being constantl