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THE HOUSE OF THE ARTIST
IN HIS 1881 BOOK, La maison d'un artiste, Edmond de Goncourt describes in loving detail the interior décor of his home at 53, Boulevard de Montmorency, in the Auteuil section of Paris. Twenty pages into the book, however, the catalogue comes to a sudden halt in the petit salon. Goncourt goes back in time to the German siege of Paris in the winter of 1870-71, when he lived in constant fear of Prussian shelling. At any moment, the collection of precious objects he had spent decades accumulating could have been reduced to rubble. But fear was not the only thing that kept him awake at night. Like many of his fellow Parisians during the siege, Edmond de Goncourt was slowly starving. Out of necessity, he had been forced eat his own goldfish. As if this were not bad enough, he had also set up a chicken coop in the petit salon. The chickens were slaughtered, prepared, and served up on porcelain platters one after another, until only one of the original six remained, a poule named Blanche. As a hen, Blanche was a dismal failure; she destroyed her own eggs as soon as she laid them, then she jumped up onto the carefully set table to gobble down the meager portions on her master's plate. As a companion, however, Blanche was a godsend. Edmond de Goncourt was starved for affection as well as food: his beloved younger brother Jules, from whom he had never been apart, and with whom he had co-written all his books, had died that year, on June 20, 1870, at the age of thirty-nine. The bereaved Edmond enjoyed having Blanche climb all over him and give him affectionate pecks. (It is impossible not to remember at this point in Edmond's narrative that, in nineteenth-century French slang, une poule also means a kept woman.)
As the siege dragged on, however, the time came when Blanche's charms as a companion paled in comparison to the prospect of a chicken dinner. Unsurprisingly, Goncourt did not know the proper way to slaughter a chicken; surprisingly, neither did his housemaid. While the perplexed reader is left to ponder how the previous chickens were dispatched (perhaps a different servant, now no longer...