RODENTS ON THE RISE

PUTTING THE 'PARIS' IN 'PARISITE'

        They're everywhere. By the thousands. The hundreds of thousands. On the Eiffel Tower, inside the Louvre, under the colonnades of the Palais Royal. One can't go anyplace in Paris without bumping into them. Even in medieval churches, crawling in and out of the ancient stone work, gnawing at the symbols of Christianity....

           Really? Tourists gnawing? 

           No, not tourists. Rats.

Paris is the fourth most rat-infested city in the world. In fact, it has more rats than people: an estimated six million, an average of two for each human inhabitant.  One statistician speculated that, in the most populous corners of Paris, a specimen of Rattus rattus is never more than a metre away.

           All this came to mind this morning when, at a flea market, among copies of Le Petit Parisienne, a weekly of the belle epoque noted for its lurid illustrations, I found an issue of March 1909 featuring the plight of the aged Comtesse de la Pommière, who was found unconscious in the salon of her derelict mansion. Scattered around her were banknotes, most of which had been devoured by rats. It wasn’t explained how madame la comtesse (“said to be a daughter of Napoleon II,” the text say, unhelpfully) got into this state, but the illustrator at least was on the side of the rats, which look more playful than rapacious

Most French people seem to feel the same way. If the formulation "...rat", as in "lab rat" or "gym rat", didn't begin in France, it certainly flourishes here. "Rat" is also how the ballet world designated the painfully thin pre-teen ballerinas-in-waiting who so fascinated Edgar Degas. And a rat is the bundle of fibre which, incorporated into a hairdo, allowed women to wind their hair into the bouffant or beehive style,  integral to the appeal of Brigitte Bardot.

Since the pandemic, Paris rats have been increasingly audacious. The recent rise of water levels in the Seine may have driven them from their subterranean lairs. (The numbers that swarm around the tiny park of the Vert Galant, at the foot of the Ile de la Cité, appear to support this.) Another suggestion blames the European Union's crackdown on the poisons and pesticides formerly used to limit the population. (Pointing the finger in the general direction of Strasbourg never fails.)

One method of limiting the numbers has yet to be tried. During the Prussian siege of 1871, rat butchers set up stalls to sell rats, the subject of a popular painting by Narcisse Chaillou. And of course there was the film Ratatouille, where a rat with gourmet cooking skills finds appreciation, even adulation, in Paris.  Can Rat Bourguignon or Rat farci aux truffe really be beyond the inventiveness of Alain Ducasse or Guy Savoy?

Le Dépeceur de Rats. Narcisse Chaillou, 1871.