“I invited our friends to dinner,” writes Mme. Adam on the 23rd of December. “But our dinners are now veritable picnics.” Jourdan, a well-known journalist, provided the butter, Peyrat the last box of Albert plums in Paris, another guest a little box of kidney beans, yet another had sent the joint—it was part of an interesting cow which for two months had been stabled in a salon. A few weeks later such a luxury as beef became quite unknown. Juliette for her New Year’s dinner-party considered herself lucky to be able to put before her friends a joint of elephant. It was part of the famous Castor from the Jardins d’Acclimation. The trunk of Castor’s twin, Pollux, which an English butcher of the Boulevard Haussman had temptingly displayed in a setting of camel kidneys, helped to furnish forth the war dinner-tables of Labouchère and Edmond de Goncourt. The _Daily News_ correspondent found it tough and oily, _une pièce de résistance_, but not in the usual sense of the term. The sufferings of the rich, however, were as nothing compared with those of the poor. They were aggravated by the severity of the winter and the scarcity of fuel. Guards on the Paris ramparts were found frozen stiff.[203] Well-dressed women were to be seen carrying bundles of faggots along the street, or bearing home in triumph the hoop of a cask. Walking along the Rue St. Honoré, Juliette was terrified to see a man fall down before her; he had fainted, and was on the point of dying of starvation. Mme. Adam learned that he was a whipmaker, whose occupation had forsaken him at a time when carriage-horses fetched a high price as a table delicacy. That day Juliette became possessed of a stock of whips large enough to furnish forth all the chariots of the Olympic Festival. “When my portion of horseflesh is tough,” she writes,[204] “I try to console myself with the thought that it is part of one of those poor skeletons I used to see beaten almost to death along the streets. When the meat is fat and tender I am always afraid it comes from one of those fine dapple greys belonging to the Western Railway Line, which you, Alice, loved to watch ascending the slight incline of the Boulevard Poissonnière.” The fortitude with which all classes in Paris endured the hardships of the siege Juliette is never tired of extolling. “Not a woman complains,” she writes. “The prevailing idea is devotion to _la patrie_. _C’est une si grande chose que la patrie quand on y pense_,” exclaimed a working man whom she met in the street.