‘It is the start of a formidable year indeed!’ thought Ferdinand. He could viscerally feel himself amassing the fortune he would make from all this muck, and what a delicious feeling it was.

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1 So what are they eating?

Chapter 10

10

MY RESEARCH INTO MY FAMILY had foundered because I didn’t know how Auguste had met his end. As for my collection of documents on the nine months between the sale of my great-grandfather and the birth of his son, I had to make allowances for source credibility, seeing as the available texts obviously emanated solely from educated people offering up a vision of the world which corresponded to their own bourgeois life experience. The others were, for the most part, illiterate.

Of course, there was Jules de Goncourt, with his excellent Journal. It was funny, sparkling, but horribly disdainful towards the populace, as he liked to call half of Paris. The other writers, your Maxime Du Camp, Alexandre Dumas the younger, Catulle Mendès, Leconte de Lisle, Henry Bauër, and even Zola with his Débâcle, as well as literary observers like Edmond Bossaut, Gustave de Molinari or Juliette Adam – the predecessors of bloggers – who described the siege as they walked the town, all managed to hint through their writing at the civilising nature of their way of life, often despite themselves. Had they had to burden their minds with concerns as unexciting as their livelihood, had they not had servants to look after their laundry, their housekeeping, their meals and their horses, it would have been impossible for them to create such beautiful works, to have such lofty thoughts or simply, like those few young bourgeois types led astray by the communalist adventure, to feed the revolutionary shitshow with their beautiful ideas. It seemed entirely normal to them to belong to a minority who were thinking on behalf of everybody else and not a single one of them could have imagined it any other way.

The only text emerging from the batch I had found was the diary of a gloomy nurse, one Victorine B, published in an even gloomier Swiss anarchist volume: The Walking Dead – One Woman’s Memoirs. It had neither the style nor humour of the more recognised authors, nor the purely informative tone of Louise Michel. It had been written by a simple woman who was not seeking to impress, but rather to describe the siege as she personally had experienced it.

In answer to Jules de Goncourt’s account in his Journal of his exhausting hunt across Paris for tins of boiled mutton and beef, she wrote: