CHÉRON LIFE

Despite the heat, meat prices are not falling much. In recently haranguing his colleagues on the General Council as president of age, Mr. Ambroise Rendu deplored the increasing cost of living and he advised those who listened to him to engage in a serious examination of conscience in the following form: “ What will we say to taxpayers when they ask us what we have done to try to alleviate this burden of the cost of living which weighs them down more and more every day? Taxpayers will obviously say that not much has been done for them. We didn't even do anything at all. We were not even able to restore the auction in this old fortress of Les Halles, so admirably defended. This question raised by my old friend Desvaux was included, I believe, on the agenda of the last meeting of the Municipal Council. But it no longer appears there, and our councilors are going their separate ways tomorrow to take their summer vacation. » Let us do this justice to Mr. Ambroise Rendu that, ending the session as he had begun it, he asked that at this last session he could address to the two prefects of Paris a question on the means they intended to use to fight the cost of living.
The prefect of the. Seine has already responded in advance, on I don't remember what occasion, by advising consumers to restrict themselves. If there are some who need to put this wise advice into practice, there are others to whom it will seem singularly ironic. Suffice it to say, in fact, to a whole category of citizens to put one more notch in their belt. But they are coming out to take some. They have only been doing this for months and months. It’s a remedy that they are starting to get tired of and the least prefectural taxation of meat would undoubtedly do their business much better.
For his part, what will the prefect of police respond to Mr. Ambroise Rendu’s question? Until now he has hardly been involved in the fight against the high cost of living and it must also be admitted that the example of his late predecessor must, in this regard, make him rather skeptical. The famous scale, whose application Mr. Naudin had decreed, did not last very long, and apart from Mr. Paisant we can say that in the circumstances the public authorities supported Mr. Naudin more or less as the rope supports the hanged.
The truth is that the two prefects can't do much. Mainly regarding meat, what do you want them to do? This is a question that will only be resolved, if it ever is, by the reorganization of the Villette market. However, as Paris does not enjoy municipal autonomy, there is nothing to do without Mr. Chéron. We know his feelings. He once said in the House (it will be seven months ago tomorrow) that we would soon have to deal with meat and, of course, he never did. Oh yes! He announced, a little less than two months ago, that the arrival of grass-fed cattle on the market would cause a decline in pot-au-feu and its substitutes. With the help of the heat, beef prices have indeed fallen somewhat. We also eat much less meat in summer than during other seasons. Beef prices have therefore fallen in La Villette by around fourteen cents per kilo. But try to find the repercussions of this reduction at the butcher! It is by engaging in this vain search that we begin to deeply regret Mr. Naudin's scale.
Something very worrying: despite the Senegalese temperature that we experience, the mutton and pork are very firm. They have some merit in this. The first is currently worth 10 francs in La Villette. 60 per kilo and the second not far from 9 francs. I repeat, in the middle of July, with fifty degrees in the sun, these prices are fabulously indecent. We owe them to Mr. Chéron, to his famous decrees which prohibit the entry of South American sheep into our borders and which more recently regulated the importation of foreign pigs. And Mr. Chéron, who knows all this perfectly, is surprised with feigned candor in the Senate gallery that he is accused of being the artisan of life chèré. Mr. Poincaré will see in the next elections whether this criticism is well-founded.

HENRI GÉROULE