Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/247

Charles Dickens] sturgeon of inordinate growth, men are sent round the building to announce the event at the highest pitch of their voices. This brings together the fishmongers and the "marchands de primeurs," whose hobby it is to display an occasional marvel on their marble slabs; and the competition is often as warm and prolonged as when an "old master" falls under the hammer at the Hotel Drouot, in the presence of the representatives of almost every picture-gallery in Europe. The authorities are much more strict in Paris in seizing all sorts of damaged provisions than we are in England; and indeed the Frenchman, when he becomes an official, takes a characteristic delight in carrying out his instructions to the letter. He is most punctilious where he can be most tormenting, and a market inspector is as zealous in seizing bad fish as a sergent de ville is in locking up beggars and vagabonds.

The fresh-water fish are sold under the same roof, those from the Port St. Paul being preserved alive. The fish are conveyed to market in large wooden tanks full of water, and on their arrival are transferred to stone troughs, where a current is kept up, which speedily refreshes them, and renders them brisk and lively.

In 1867, eighteen thousand two hundred and eighty-three tons of salt fish and sixteen hundred and twenty-six tons of fresh fetched, the one sixteen millions four hundred and forty-one thousand francs, and the other one million nine hundred and twenty-five thousand nine hundred francs. Of these supplies, three thousand six hundred and thirteen tons of sea and one thousand and ten tons of fresh-water fish came from abroad. A great proportion of the latter came from Holland, Prussia, Switzerland, and Italy; while Belgium and England supplied most of the former. More than fifty-two per cent of the mussels eaten in Paris come from Belgium.

Pavilion number nine, the section of the Halles Centrales devoted to fish, has become much too confined for the requirements of the trade; and as soon as the fine pile of sheds in course of construction, is completed, a much larger space will be at the disposal of the fish department. The fresh-water fish and the oysters will then occupy the space at present allotted to poultry and game. Oysters, somehow, do not sell well at the Halles, where they have only been installed since the suppression of their old market in the rue Montorgeuil. The oyster trade is a distinct business; it has its own customs and traditions, and refuses to depart from them in spite of the reforming efforts of the authorities. The oyster fishery, according to the French law, commences on the first of September and closes at the end of April. Before sailing for the banks, the dredgers fix the price at which the oysters are to be delivered with the agents of the Paris salesman, and the contract is binding during the whole season, whether the take be great or small. Whether these again fix the price with the large consumers we are unaware, but the chief restaurateurs of Paris have their annual meeting, at which they in their turn fix the price at which oysters are to figure on the "carte" for the next twelve months. The price paid by the salesmen, as is shown by the following statistics, increases every year. In 1840, the thousand was worth twelve francs; in 1850, sixteen and a half francs; in 1860, twenty-six francs; and in 1867 as much as forty francs. The dearth of oysters on the banks is not the sole cause of this increase in value. Here, again, the railways have produced a revolution, and London and Paris find competitors in Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Moscow for the Essex natives, and the green oysters of Arcachon. Last year Paris consumed as many as twenty-six million seven hundred and fifty thousand seven hundred and fifty-five oysters, of which the greater portion came from Courseulles and Saint Waast. The celebrated Ostend oysters, or rather the Essex natives barrelled there, only reached the figure of nine hundred and thirteen thousand, and those from Marennes merely four thousand two hundred and fifty, owing to the great scarcity.  

 .—Surely there must be demons in the air. And yet I return here quite calm, in no fury. They drove me to it. I felt them holding my hand, forcing it to my pocket. After twenty had gone, not she opposite—no, nor all the clergy and bishops in the world, with their smooth platitudes—would have stopped me. Oh! don't let me think of it! Don't—don't! Let me go out—go anywhere! Oh, Heaven! Sixty—sixty pieces gone! Was I mad? Did I know what I was doing?

O for this monster, that enters into the soul of a man, and makes him forget all, every restraint in the sense of this succession of defeats! Here is the devilish, the demoniac part of the whole—the perversity with which defeat clings to you, do what you will. Was it not an artful, cruel, and monstrous device of the arch enemy to have selected that precise moment when I had begun, to make this turn against me? O Heaven! to think that I should be sitting with only a few scraps of silver in my pocket, and sixty golden pieces flung away in this blind, wicked, sinful fashion—sixty precious pieces, that I might have sent home! O vile, miserable, weak, abandoned, contemptible wretch, where are your prayers, your complacent superiority and scruples! And O, greatest villany of all, that I should not be dwelling on the piece of news now before me, in her gentle, trembling writing!

"I have sad news for you, dearest, which