Chapter 3

"Every article," writes the Comte de la Garde, one of the chroniclers of the Vienna Congress, "but more especially fuel, soared to incredible heights. The Austrian government found it necessary, in consequence, to allow all its officials supplements to their salaries and indemnities."[16] In Paris things were worse. Greed and disorganization combined to make of the French capital a vast fleecing-machine. The sums of money expended by foreigners in France during all that time and a much longer period is said to have exceeded the revenue from foreign trade. There was hardly any coal, and even the wood fuel gave out now and again. Butter was unknown. Wine was bad and terribly dear. A public conveyance could not be obtained unless one paid "double, treble, and quintuple fares and a gratuity." The demand was great and the supply sometimes abundant, but the authorities contrived to keep the two apart systematically.

THE COST OF LIVING

In no European country did the cost of living attain the height it reached in France in the year 1919. Not only luxuries and comforts, but some of life's necessaries, were beyond the reach of home-coming soldiers, and this was currently ascribed to the greed of merchants, the disorganization of transports, the strikes of workmen, and the supineness of the authorities, whose main care was to keep the nation tranquil by suppressing one kind of news, spreading another, and giving way to demands which could no longer be denied. There was another and more effectual cause: the war had deprived the world of twelve million workmen and a thousand milliard francs' worth of goods. But of this people took no account. The demobilized soldiers who for years had been well fed and relieved of solicitude for the morrow returned home, flushed with victory, proud of the commanding position which they had won in the state, and eager to reap the rewards of their sacrifices. But they were bitterly disillusioned. They expected a country fit for heroes to live in, and what awaited them was a condition of things to which only a defeated people could be asked to resign itself. The food to which the poilu had, for nearly five years, been accustomed at the front was become, since the armistice, the exclusive monopoly of the capitalist or the _nouveau-riche_ in the rear. To obtain a ration of sugar he or his wife had to stand in a long queue for hours, perhaps go away empty-handed and return on the following morning. When his sugar-card was eventually handed to him he had again to stand in line outside the grocer's door and, when his turn came to enter it, was frequently told that the supply was exhausted and would not be replenished for a week or longer. Yet his newspaper informed him that there was plenty of colonial sugar, ready for shipment, but forbidden by the authorities to be imported into France. I met many poor people from the provinces and some resident in Paris who for four years had not once eaten a morsel of sugar, although the well-to-do were always amply supplied. In many places even bread was lacking, while biscuits, shortbread, and fancy cakes, available at exorbitant prices, were exhibited in the shop windows. Tokens of unbridled luxury and glaring evidences of wanton waste were flaunted daily and hourly in the faces of the humbled men who had saved the nation and wanted the nation to realize the fact. Lucullan banquets, opulent lunches, all-night dances, high revels of an exotic character testified to the peculiar psychic temper as well as to the material prosperity of the passive elements of the community and stung the poilus to the quick. "But what justice," these asked, "can the living hope for, when the glorious dead are so soon forgotten?" For one ghastly detail remains to complete a picture to which Boccaccio could hardly have done justice. "While all this wild dissipation was going on among the moneyed class in the capital the corpses of many gallant soldiers lay unburied and uncovered on the shell-plowed fields of battle near Rheims, on the road to Neuville-sur-Margival and other places--sights pointed out to visitors to tickle their interest in the grim spectacle of war. In vain individuals expostulated and the press protested. As recently as May persons known to me--my English secretary was one--looked with the fascination of horror on the bodies of men who, when they breathed, were heroes. They lay there where they had fallen and agonized, and now, in the heat of the May sun, were moldering in dust away--a couple of hours' motor drive from Paris...."[17]

The soldiers mused and brooded. Since the war began they had undergone a great psychic transformation. Stationed at the very center of a sustained fiery crisis, they lost their feeling of acquiescence in the established order and in the place of their own class therein. In the sight of death they had been stirred to their depths and volcanic fires were found burning there. Resignation had thereupon made way for a rebellious mood and rebellion found sustenance everywhere. The poilu demobilized retained his military spirit, nay, he carried about with him the very atmosphere of the trenches. He had rid himself of the sentiment of fear and the faculty of reverence went with it. His outlook on the world had changed completely and his inner sense reversed the social order which he beheld, as the eye reverses the object it apprehends. Respect for persons and institutions survived in relatively few instances the sacredness of life and the fear of death. He was impressed, too, with the all-importance of his class, which he had learned during the war to look upon as the Atlas on whose shoulders rest the Republic and its empire overseas. He had saved the state in war and he remained in peace-time its principal mainstay. With his value as measured by these priceless services he compared the low estimate put upon him by those who continued to identify themselves with the state--the over-fed, lazy, self-seeking money-getters who reserved to themselves the fruits of his toil.

One can well imagine--I have actually heard--the poilus putting their case somewhat as follows: "So long as we filled the gap between the death-dealing Teutons and our privileged compatriots we were well fed, warmly clad, made much of. During the war we were raised to the rank of pillars of the state, saviors of the nation, arbiters of the world's destinies. So long as we faced the enemy's guns nothing was too good for us. We had meat, white bread, eggs, wine, sugar in plenty. But, now that we have accomplished our task, we have fallen from our high estate and are expected to become pariahs anew. We are to work on for the old gang and the class from which it comes, until they plunge us into another war. For what? What is the reward for what we have achieved, what the incentive for what we are expected to accomplish? We cannot afford as much food as before the war, nor of the same quality. We are in want even of necessaries. Is it for this that we have fought? A thousand times no. If we saved our nation we can also save our class. We have the will and the power. Why should we not exert them?" The purpose of the section of the community to which these demobilized soldiers mainly belonged grew visibly definite as consciousness of their collective force grew and became keener. Occasionally it manifested itself openly in symptomatic spurts.

One dismal night, at a brilliant ball in a private mansion, a select company of both sexes, representatives of the world of rank and fashion, were enjoying themselves to their hearts' content, while their chauffeurs watched and waited outside in the cold, dark streets, chewing the cud of bitter reflections. Between the hours of three and four in the morning the latter held an open-air meeting, and adopted a resolution which they carried out forthwith. A delegation was sent upstairs to give notice to the light-hearted guests that they must be down in their respective motors within ten minutes on pain of not finding any conveyances to take them home. The mutineers were nearly all private chauffeurs in the employ of the personages to whom they sent this indelicate ultimatum. The resourceful host, however, warded off the danger and placated the rebellious drivers by inviting them to an improvised little banquet of _pâtés de foie gras_, dry champagne, and other delicacies. The general temper of the proletariat remained unchanged. Tales of rebellion still more disquieting were current in Paris, which, whether true or false, were aids to a correct diagnosis of the situation.

A dancing mania broke out during the armistice, which was not confined to the French capital. In Berlin, Rome, London, it aroused the indignation of those whose sympathy with the spiritual life of their respective nations was still a living force. It would seem, however, to be the natural reaction produced by a tremendous national calamity, under which the mainspring of the collective mind temporarily gives way and the psychical equilibrium is upset. Disillusion, despondency, and contempt for the passions that lately stirred them drive the people to seek relief in the distractions of pleasures, among which dancing is perhaps one of the mildest. It was so in Paris at the close of the long period of stress which ended with the rise of Napoleon. Dancing then went on uninterruptedly despite national calamities and private hardships. "Luxury," said Victor Hugo, "is a necessity of great states and great civilizations, but there are moments when it must not be exhibited to the masses." There was never a conjuncture when the danger of such an exhibition was greater or more imminent than during the armistice on the Continent--for it was the period of incubation preceding the outbreak of the most malignant social disease to which civilized communities are subject.

The festivities and amusements in the higher circles of Paris recall the glowing descriptions of the fret and fever of existence in the Austrian capital during the historic Vienna Congress a hundred years ago. Dancing became epidemic and shameless. In some salons the forms it took were repellent. One of my friends, the Marquis X., invited to a dance at the house of a plutocrat, was so shocked by what he saw there that he left almost at once in disgust. Madame Machin, the favorite teacher of the choreographic art, gave lessons in the new modes of dancing, and her fee was three hundred francs a lesson. In a few weeks she netted, it is said, over one hundred thousand francs.

The Prince de Ligne said of the Vienna Congress: "Le Congrès danse mais il ne marche pas." The French press uttered similar criticisms of the Paris Conference, when its delegates were leisurely picking up information about the countries whose affairs they were forgathered to settle. The following paragraph from a Paris journal--one of many such--describes a characteristic scene:

The domestic staff at the Hôtel Majestic, the headquarters of the British Delegation at the Peace Conference, held a very successful dance on Monday evening, attended by many members of the British Mission and Staff. The ballroom was a medley of plenipotentiaries and chambermaids, generals and orderlies, Foreign Office attachés and waitresses. All the latest forms of dancing were to be seen, including the jazz and the hesitation waltz, and, according to the opinion of experts, the dancing reached an unusually high standard of excellence. Major Lloyd George, one of the Prime Minister's sons, was among the dancers. Mr. G.H. Roberts, the Food Controller, made a very happy little speech to the hotel staff.[18]

The following extract is also worth quoting:

A packed house applauded 'Hullo, Paris!' from the rise of the curtain to the finale at the new Palace Theater (in the rue Mogador), Paris, last night.... President Wilson, Mr. A.J. Balfour, and Lord Derby all remained until the fall of the curtain at 12.15 ... and ... were given cordial cheers from the dispersing audience as they passed through the line of Municipal Guards, who presented arms as the distinguished visitors made their way to their motor-cars.[19]

Juxtaposed with the grief, discontent, and physical hardships prevailing among large sections of the population which had provided most of the holocausts for the Moloch of War, the ostentatious gaiety of the prosperous few might well seem a challenge. And so it was construed by the sullen lack-alls who prowled about the streets of Paris and told one another that their turn would come soon.

When the masses stare at the wealthy with the eyes one so often noticed during the eventful days of the armistice one may safely conclude, in the words of Victor Hugo, that "it is not thoughts that are harbored by those brains; it is events."

By the laboring classes the round of festivities, the theatrical representations, the various negro and other foreign dances, and the less-refined pleasures of the world's blithest capital were watched with ill-concealed resentment. One often witnessed long lines of motor-cars driving up to a theater, fashionable restaurant, or concert-hall, through the opening portals of which could be caught a glimpse of the dazzling illumination within, while, a few yards farther off, queues of anemic men and women were waiting to be admitted to the shop where milk or eggs or fuel could be had at the relatively low prices fixed by the state. The scraps of conversation that reached one's ears were far from reassuring.

I have met on the same afternoon the international world-regenerators, smiling, self-complacent, or preoccupied, flitting by in their motors to the Quai d'Orsay, and also quiet, determined-looking men, trudging along in the snow and slush, wending their way toward their labor conventicles, where they, too, were drafting laws for a new and strange era, and I voluntarily fell to gaging the distance that sundered the two movements, and asked myself which of the inchoate legislations would ultimately be accepted by the world. The question since then has been partially answered. As time passed, the high cost of living was universally ascribed, as we saw, to the insatiable greed of the middlemen and the sluggishness of the authorities, whose incapacity to organize and unwillingness to take responsibility increased and augured ill of the future of the country unless men of different type should in the meanwhile take the reins. Practically nothing was done to ameliorate the carrying power of the railways, to utilize the waterways, to employ the countless lorries and motor-vans that were lying unused, to purchase, convey, and distribute the provisions which were at the disposal of the government. Various ministerial departments would dispute as to which should take over consignments of meat or vegetables, and while reports, notes, and replies were being leisurely written and despatched, weeks or months rolled by, during which the foodstuffs became unfit for human consumption. In the middle of May, to take but one typical instance, 2,401 eases of lard and 1,418 cases of salt meat were left rotting in the docks at Marseilles. In the storage magazines at Murumas, 6,000 tons of salt meat were spoiled because it was nobody's business to remove and distribute them. Eighteen refrigerator-cars loaded with chilled meat arrived in Paris from Havre in the month of June. When they were examined at the cold-storage station it was discovered that, the doors having been negligently left open, the contents of the cases had to be destroyed.[20] From Belgium 108,000 kilos of potatoes were received and allowed to lie so long at one of the stations that they went bad and had to be thrown away. When these and kindred facts were published, the authorities, who had long been silent, became apologetic, but remained throughout inactive. In other countries the conditions, if less accentuated, were similar.

One of the dodges to which unscrupulous dealers resorted with impunity and profit was particularly ingenious. At the central markets, whenever any food is condemned, the public-health authorities seize it and pay the owner full value at the current market rates. The marketmen often turned this equitable arrangement to account by keeping back large quantities of excellent vegetables, for which the population was yearning, and when they rotted and had to be carted away, received their money value from the Public Health Department, thus attaining their object, which was to lessen the supply and raise the prices on what they kept for sale.[21] The consequence was that Paris suffered from a continual dearth of vegetables and fruits. Statistics published by the United States government showed the maximum increase in the cost of living in four countries as follows: France, 235 per cent.; Britain, 135 per cent.; Canada, 115 per cent.; and the United States, 107 per cent.[22] But since these data were published prices continued to rise until, at the beginning of July, they had attained the same level as those of Russia on the eve of the revolution there. In Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, the prices of various kinds of fish, shell-fish, jams, apples, had gone up 500 per cent., cabbage over 900 per cent., and celeriac 2,000 per cent. Anthracite coal, which in the year 1914 cost 56 francs a ton, could not be purchased in 1919 for less than 360 francs.

The restaurants and hotels waged a veritable war of plunder on their guests, most of whom, besides the scandalous prices, which bore no reasonable relation to the cost of production, had to pay the government luxury tax of 10 per cent, over and above. A well-known press correspondent, who entertained seven friends to a simple dinner in a modest restaurant, was charged 500 francs, 90 francs being set down for one chicken, and 28 for three cocktails. The _maître d'hotel_, in response to the pressman's expostulations, assured him that these charges left the proprietor hardly any profit. As it chanced, however, the journalist had just been professionally investigating the cost of living, and had the data at his finger-ends. As he displayed his intimate knowledge to his host, and obviously knew where to look for redress, he had the satisfaction of obtaining a rebate of 150 francs.[23]

Nothing could well be more illuminating than the following curious picture contributed by a journal whose representative made a special inquiry into the whole question of the cost of living.[24] "I was dining the other day at a restaurant of the Bois de Boulogne. There was a long queue of people waiting at the door, some sixty persons all told, mostly ladies, who pressed one another closely. From time to time a voice cried: 'Two places,' whereupon a door was held opened, two patients entered, and then it was loudly slammed, smiting some of those who stood next to it. At last my turn came, and I went in. The guests were sitting so close to one another that they could not move their elbows. Only the hands and fingers were free. There sat women half naked, and men whose voices and dress betrayed newly acquired wealth. Not one of them questioned the bills which were presented. And what bills! The _hors d'oeuvre_, 20 francs. Fish, 90 francs. A chicken, 150 francs. Three cigars, 45 francs. The repast came to 250 francs a person at the very lowest." Another journalist commented upon this story as follows: "Since the end of last June," he said, "445,000 quintals of vegetables, the superfluous output of the Palatinate, were offered to France at nominal prices. And the cost of vegetables here at home is painfully notorious. Well, the deal was accepted by the competent Commission in Paris. Everything was ready for despatching the consignment. The necessary trains were secured. All that was wanting was the approval of the French authorities, who were notified. Their answer has not yet been given and already the vegetables are rotting in the magazines."

The authorities pleaded the insufficiency of rolling stock, but the press revealed the hollowness of the excuse and the responsibility of those who put it forward, and showed that thousands of wagons, lorries, and motor-vans were idle, deteriorating in the open air. For instance, between Cognac and Jarnac the state railways had left about one thousand wagons unused, which were fast becoming unusable.[25] And this was but one of many similar instances.

It would be hard to find a parallel in history for the rapacity combined with unscrupulousness and ingenuity displayed during that fateful period by dishonest individuals, and left unpunished by the state. Doubtless France was not the only country in which greed was insatiable and its manifestations disastrous. From other parts of the Continent there also came bitter complaints of the ruthlessness of profiteers, and in Italy their heartless vampirism contributed materially to the revolutionary outbreaks throughout that country in July. Even Britain was not exempt from the scourge. But the presence of whole armies of well-paid, easy-going foreign troops and officials on French soil stimulated greed by feeding it, and also their complaints occasionally bared it to the world. The impression it left on certain units of the American forces was deplorable. When United States soldiers who had long been stationed in a French town were transferred to Germany, where charges were low, the revulsion of feeling among the straightforward, honest Yankees was complete and embarrassing. And by way of keeping it within the bounds of political orthodoxy, they were informed that the Germans had conspired to hoodwink them by selling at undercost prices, in order to turn them against the French. It was an insidious form of German propaganda!

On the other hand, the experience of British and American warriors in France sometimes happened to be so unfortunate that many of them gave credence to the absurd and mischievous legend that their governments were made to pay rent for the trenches in which their troops fought and died, and even for the graves in which the slain were buried.

An acquaintance of mine, an American delegate, wanted an abode to himself during the Conference, and, having found one suitable for which fifteen to twenty-five thousand francs a year were deemed a fair rent, he inquired the price, and the proprietor, knowing that he had to do with a really wealthy American, answered, "A quarter of a million francs." Subsequently the landlord sent to ask whether the distinguished visitor would take the place; but the answer he received ran, "No, I have too much self-respect."

Hotel prices in Paris, beginning from December, 1918, were prohibitive to all but the wealthy. Yet they were raised several times during the Conference. Again, despite the high level they had reached by the beginning of July, they were actually quintupled in some hotels and doubled in many for about a week at the time of the peace celebrations. Rents for flats and houses soared proportionately.