We have just devoted a loquacious and resounding week to fish, which is a discreet and taciturn animal. The result of this propaganda, which is also excellent, is that all French people are perfectly resigned to henceforth giving a large place in their menus to oysters, fillet of sole, salmon, trout and lobster. But ichthyophagy is an expensive passion. Fish is definitely too expensive for the vast majority of French taxpayers.
But do you know why fish has become a luxury food? Quite simply because of the misdeeds of the “summer”.
The summer visitor is a being of gentle and sociable morals, who maintains his habitat in our cities during the winter but who, when summer comes, emigrates, surrounded by his offspring, wherever he has the hope of encountering sand and salted water. At this time, the summer visitor stays with Breton, Normandy or Vendée fishermen. The most widespread form of seaside resort is that of “homestay vacations”. The summer visitor is, in fact, a timid animal, to whom painful experience has taught to fear the gunshot of his natural enemy the hotelier. It therefore settles as a productive parasite in the homes of coastal dwellers, which are decorated for the occasion with the name “villas”.
What happens then? It happens that the fisherman no longer fishes. He no longer needs to arm his boat. In three months, as a “garni keeper,” he earned more money than he could earn during the rest of the year by pulling mackerel and catfish from the sea.
This is why, Fish Week tells us, the French fisherman catches only 2,100 kilograms of tide annually, while the German catches 5,500, the Dutch, 6,000 and the English 12,000.
And this is also why the summer visitor, who left for the beaches with the sneaky ambition of feeding his descendants cheaply by stuffing them with shellfish and fish, is obliged to pay dearly for the shrimp he was able to obtain from the halls of Paris, thanks to the fruitful work of the fishermen of Holland.

EMILE