Paris is
less patient. For this reason, all the rest is sacrificed to it,[58]
not merely the public funds, the Treasury from which it gets one or
two millions per week,[59] but whole districts are starved for its
benefit, six departments providing grain, twenty six departments
providing pork,[60] at the rate of the maximum, through requisitions,
through the prospect of imprisonment and of the scaffold in case of
refusal or concealment, under the predatory bayonets of the
revolutionary army. The capital, above all, has to be fed. Let us
see, under this system of partiality, how people live in Paris and
what they feed on.
"Frightful crowds" at the doors of the bakeries, then at the doors of
the butchers and grocers, then at the markets for butter, eggs, fish
and vegetables, and then on the quay for wine, firewood and charcoal -
such is the steady refrain of the police reports.[61] - And this lasts
uninterruptedly during the fourteen months of revolutionary
government: long lines of people waiting in turn for bread, meat, oil,
soap and candles, "queues for milk, for butter, for wood, for
charcoal, queues everywhere! "[62] "There was one queue beginning at
the door of a grocery in the Petit Carreau stretching half way up the
rue Montorgueil.
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