peared from the
butchers' stalls. Rats are beginning to be sold at one franc apiece, and
eggs cost thirty francs a dozen. Butter has risen to fifty francs the
half-kilogramme (about seventeen ozs., English). Carrots and potatoes
fetch, the first, forty francs, the second, twenty francs, the peck
(English). I am being told that milk is still to be had, but I have
neither tasted nor seen any for ten days. Personally, I do not feel the
want of it; but in my visits to some of the poor in my neighbourhood I
am confronted by the fact of little ones, between two and three years of
age, being fed on bread soaked in wine, and suffering from various
ailments in consequence.

I am pursuing some inquiries at the various mairies, and find that the
death-rate for October has reached nearly three thousand above the
corresponding month of the previous year. I am furthermore told that not
a third of this increase is due to the direct results of the siege--that
is, to death on the battle-field, or resulting from wounds received
there; typhus and low fever, anaemia, etc., are beginning to ravage the
inhabitants. Worse than all, the authorities have made a mistake with
regard to the influx of strangers. The seventy-five thousand aliens and
Parisians who have left at the beginning of the siege have been replaced
by three times that number, so that Paris has virtually one hundred and
fifty thousand more mouths to feed than it counted upon. "All the women,
children, and old men," says one of my informants, "ought to have been
removed to some provincial centre; it would have cost no more, and would
have left those who remained free for a more energetic defence. And you
will scarcely believe it, monsieur, but here is the register to prove
it; there have been nearly four hundred marriages celebrated during the
past month. It looks to me like tying the Gordian knot with a
vengeance."

One thing I cannot help remarking amidst all this suffering; the
Parisian never ceases to be witty. Among my pensioners there was the
wife of a hard-working, frugal upholsterer, whose trade was absolutely
at a standstill. He was doing his duty on the fortifications; she was
keeping the home together on the meagre pittance allowed to her husband
by the Government, and the rations doled out to her every morning. The
youngest of her three children was barely four weeks old. One morning,
to my great surprise, I found two infants in her lap. "C'est comme ca,
monsieur,"