About the Rat M. Toussenel says he could
write twenty volumes, if he were only suffered
to have his own way. There is no
richer subject than the rat; the rat of Paris
especially. The rat tells of the invasions of
barbarians, as the war-horse declares the
grandeur and the decline of the aristocracy
of blood. Like horde, like rat; every fresh
occupation of the surface is followed by a
corresponding occupation of the subsoil. The
rat of the Goths, the rat of the Vandals, and
the rat of the Huns have successively appeared.
There is the Norman (English) rat,
and the Tartar (Muscovite) rat. One might
count the strata of barbarians which have
been deposited one above the other upon the
soil of France by the varieties of rats which
that soil has in turn supported. Here, certainly,
is a new and important historic datum.

All rats are Ratophagi; that is to say, rat
eats rat. Not only neighbouring races reciprocally
devour one another, but even individuals
of the same race. The fathers eat
their children in the cradle, to spare them
the pain of an initiation into existence; and
the grateful children hasten, in return—after
the fashion of the Messagetæ, the worthy
ancestors of the Cossacks—to relieve their
parents of the burden of life, as soon as they
begin to fall into years.

The whole family of rats, endowed with
prodigious fecundity, is the emblem of those
miserable and prolific populations which now
cover the face of the globe, and which are
driven by hunger and the hatred of labour
to make war upon, and to devour each other.
They will all disappear, one of these fine
days, simultaneously with war, the plague,
and famine. The rat, like the barbarian, is a
scourge sent by God, to warn the nations of
Civilisés, and to punish them for the errors
they are committing. The natural viciousness
which impels the rat to turn its incisors
against its own proper blood, is also the
natural check and corrective of the " wolf,"
or raging hunger, with which it is insatiably
possessed. Had it not been for the propensity
of ratophagy, rats, by this time,
would have eaten up all other inhabitants of
the globe. And if barbarians had not also
turned their arms against each other, where
would "civilisation" have been at the present
day? There are rats—for instance the campagnols
and the lemmings—which annually
quit their own country to go and plunder
the neighbouring territories, and then return
home, as soon as their expedition is concluded.
So did the Gauls, the barbarous
ancestors of modern Frenchmen; so still do
the pirates, the Arabs, and all the wandering
tribes of Africa and Asia. There are
others who, like the brown rat and the
surmulot, abandon their native land without
any intention of returning, but establish
a permanent settlement in the conquered
country, like the Norman in Great Britain
and the Mongolian in China. Authorities
abound proving the coincidence of the Norman
invasion (of France) with that of the
brown rat—the rat properly so called. The
surmulot, the actually existing rat of Paris,
is a thing of yesterday in Europe, like the
Muscovite, whence it comes to us. The
Norman, the honourable stock of the present
English aristocracy, is the tribe which has
left behind it the most fearful reputation of
barbarity. The Norman pirate made men
believe in the existence of the ogre. The
French people, in their public prayers, used
to implore God to deliver them from evil and
the Norman.

The amount of wealth laboriously collected
by the workers of France, and destroyed by
the brown rat during the six or seven centuries
that we have had to maintain it, is incalculable.
It was also the period during which
the labour of the serf fed the indolence and
pride of the noble. A carnivorous and a
plundering invader—such was the Norman
rat. The fear of disturbing the cordial understanding
which exists between the English
and French Governments, prevents me from
pursuing the analogy to the end. But
in the last century, the Norman rat found
his master in the Muscovite or Tartar rat,
otherwise called the surmulot, the rat of
Montfaucon. One day in seventeen hundred
and sixty (not yet a hundred years ago), the
town of Jaïk, in Siberia, was attacked and
taken by storm by an innumerable army
of rats. The attack took place at four in the
evening; the conquered people yielded to
their conquerors sovereign possession of a
quarter of the town. These new rats, unknown
to Europe, descended from the heights
of the same central plain of Asia, which sent
forth those Hun and Mongolian cavaliers,
who spread to the right and left of their
meridian, and at one time took the west and
Rome, at another the east, from Jerusalem
to Pekin. The campaign being opened by
the conquest of a town, the tide of invasion
did not cease to flow. It soon became an
actual torrent. The surmulot overflowed into
Europe. It has penetrated, in fifty years, into
the heart of every capital; and no one can
now tell where the course of its subterranean
progress will stop. Paris trembles lest she
should furnish a new chapter to Pliny's
history of cities overthrown by rats.

The first consequence of the settlement of
the Muscovite or Tartar rat in France, was
the complete extermination of the Norman
rat; because there is a mortal antipathy
between Norman blood and Muscovite blood.
The extermination of the Norman by the
Muscovite rat in France is contemporary
with the annihilation of the privileges of the
French aristocracy, and the accession of the
régime of the sabre. The powers of destruction
with which the Tartar rat is armed, his
indomitable courage, and his fearful voracity,
completely recall the style of the ferocious
cavaliers of Attila and Tamerlane—those