Arlequins: The Resold Leftovers That Fed Nineteenth-Century Paris

Late in the 1860s, in pavilion 12 of the new iron market halls of Les Halles, a handful of stalls sold something the city’s officials preferred to describe in neutral terms. On paper they were “marchands de viandes cuites,” dealers in cooked meat. Everyone else called them bijoutiers, jewelers, and called their goods arlequins.¹ An arlequin was a plate made up of other people’s leftovers: scraps from the tables of restaurants, hotels and grand houses, picked over, trimmed and resold to people who could not afford a meal cooked for them.

The trade left traces in reportage, dictionaries and novels. Read together, those sources describe a well organized recycling economy that fed real people. They also show how hard it is to see those people except through the eyes of writers who found them strange.

A plate named for a patched costume

The name came from the theater. Harlequin, the servant of the commedia dell’arte, wore a suit stitched from pieces of many colors, and Émile Littré’s great dictionary of the 1870s gives that as the first sense of the word. Its third sense is culinary: “populairement,” scraps of meals and above all scraps of meat, so called because the dish is made of pieces put together at random. Littré adds a telling detail about who bought it: the plate was sold “pour la nourriture des animaux domestiques et que les pauvres ne dédaignent pas” (as food for household animals, and the poor do not scorn it).²

Alfred Delvau’s dictionary of Parisian slang, first published in 1866, defines the arlequin as a dish “à l’usage des pauvres,” made from what was cleared off rich tables and offering a range that ran from a piece of nougat to a mackerel’s head. He calls it “une sorte de carte d’échantillons culinaires,” a kind of sample card of cooking.³ The same dictionary explains the jeweler nickname: a bijoutier was a seller of arlequins, so called by people of the outer districts for whom these scraps glittered in the stomach.³ Delvau also records a related cheap pleasure, the omnibus, wine spilled on a bar counter and served to undemanding customers he describes as friends of the arlequins.³

The scholar Janet Beizer, who has written the main modern study of the subject, points out that the costume itself began as a sign of poverty: in the stock story, Harlequin’s mother could not afford whole cloth and sewed him a suit from rags. The food term, in her account, borrowed both the patchwork and the association with being poor.⁴

The dishwasher’s bucket

The fullest early description of how the trade worked comes from Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, a writer born at Sainte-Rose in Guadeloupe around 1815 who spent his adult life in Paris and died there in 1859.⁵ His sketches of “unknown industries,” gathered in Paris anecdote, follow small trades in the poor neighborhoods of Paris.

In one of them, a guide leads Privat past the market near the rue des Noyers and introduces the “mère Maillard,” described as “une bijoutière ou marchande d’arlequins.” According to the guide, she had an arrangement with the dishwashers of nearly all the large restaurants. The scraps that diners left on their plates, known in the trade as rogatons, were the dishwashers’ perquisite and were sold by the bucket, at three francs each. “On y trouve de tout, depuis le poulet truffé et le gibier jusqu’au bœuf aux choux” (you find everything in it, from truffled chicken and game to beef with cabbage). Fat, bones and peelings were sold separately to other trades.⁶ The mère Maillard sorted and matched what she bought, then “les vend aux gens aisés pour les animaux domestiques, et aux pauvres pour leur nourriture” (sold them to the well-off for their pets and to the poor as their food). The heaps, Privat was told, went for a sou apiece.⁶

Elsewhere in the same book, an arlequin appears as an ordinary line in a very small budget. Privat describes men paid to smoke new pipes until they darkened, a trade that earned them about 40 centimes a day. He sets out how they spent it: ten centimes for an arlequin, which he glosses as meat mixed with vegetables and other things, ten for wine, ten for bread or potatoes and ten for a bed on straw.⁶

These passages need careful handling. Privat wrote to amuse as well as to inform, and his guide’s figures (a dishwasher on 25 francs a month in wages who made 400 to 500 more from scraps, for example) cannot be checked against any record. His friend Victor Cochinat, writing just after his death, admired him as someone who spent his life collecting and passing on stories, and said that he invented anecdotes and news as well.⁵ The broad outline of the trade is confirmed by later writers; the colorful particulars should be read as Privat’s.

Seventeen “jewelers” at Les Halles

Maxime Du Camp’s multivolume survey of the city, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie, treated Paris as a living body and set out to describe each of its organs and functions. His chapter on Les Halles, written with statistics for 1868, gives the most systematic account of the arlequin trade.¹

Du Camp counted seventeen of these dealers, housed in pavilion 12 with fruit sellers and bakers. “Ce qu’ils vendent se nommait jadis des rogatons, mais l’argot a prévalu, et cela s’appelle aujourd’hui des arlequins” (what they sell used to be called rogatons, but slang won out, and today it is called arlequins).¹ His description of the supply chain is precise. Each morning the dealers or their agents went round the kitchens they had contracts with, pulling a small closed cart fitted with vents for air. Their sources were the leftovers of ministries, embassies, palaces, large restaurants and well-known hotels. The previous day’s remains were tipped into the cart together and taken to the storerooms of the market.¹

There the sorting began. Anything still recognizable was set aside, cleaned and trimmed, and laid on a plate of its own. Du Camp notes that the work was done out of sight of customers, following the maxim “qu’il ne faut jamais voir faire la cuisine” (that one should never watch the cooking). Then the best pieces were arranged to catch the eye of passers-by, a barely broken timbale or a pyramid of broccoli in front. By noon or one o’clock, he says, a dealer had generally sold everything.¹

Nothing was wasted. What could not be sold to people went to the owners of pampered pet dogs. Bones went to makers of bouillon tablets and, once the gelatin was extracted, to manufacturers of bone black. Du Camp adds that some dealers were said to have retired after a few years with an income of ten thousand livres a year, which suggests that for those at the top this was a solid business.¹ When a gas fire destroyed pavilion 12 on the night of 10 July 1868, the city rebuilt it within the year.¹

Who ate them

Du Camp names the main customers plainly: poor people and laborers working in the market, who preferred arlequins to the more filling but more expensive food of the cheap eating houses. For two or three sous they had something to eat. He reports that dealers had regular customers, a loyalty the dealers themselves credited to the skilled kitchens the scraps came from.¹ He also mentions wealthy but miserly buyers who came in secret and were mocked behind their backs, and the many women who made the daily trip to Les Halles to buy a cheap meal for their dogs.¹

Fiction tells the same story from closer up, though always as fiction. In the opening chapter of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, set in a thieves’ tavern on the Île de la Cité, the character called the Chourineur orders wine, bread and “un arlequin,” and is teased for his passion for them. Sue adds a footnote defining the dish as a jumble of meat, fish and all kinds of leftovers from the servants’ table of great houses, and then apologizes: “Nous sommes honteux de ces détails” (we are ashamed of these details).⁷ Michael Garval’s review of Beizer’s book notes that she devotes a chapter to Sue’s literal and figurative uses of the arlequin.⁸

Émile Zola used the word as a marker of how far a person could fall. In chapter XII of L’Assommoir, Gervaise, once a successful laundress, has lost her shop and her savings. “Elle tombait aux arlequins, dans les gargots borgnes, où, pour un sou, elle avait des tas d’arêtes de poisson mêlées à des rognures de rôti gâté” (she sank to arlequins, in shabby eating houses where for a sou she got heaps of fish bones mixed with trimmings of spoiled roast). The next step down, in Zola’s sequence, is begging for crusts.⁹ In Le Ventre de Paris, his novel of Les Halles, the word appears only as a figure of speech: the poster columns at the edge of the market look as if they wear a harlequin’s coat of green, yellow, red and blue squares.¹⁰ According to Garval, Beizer reads that novel’s fragmented, kaleidoscopic picture of the market as a “harlequin” vision of modern life.⁸

Reading the sources with care

Almost everything we know about arlequins was written by people who did not eat them. Privat’s guide warns him that he may feel nauseated; Sue says he is ashamed to mention the dish; Du Camp lingers on misers and lapdogs.⁶⁷¹ The people who depended on these plates appear as types (the laborer, the ruined woman, the regular at a tavern) rather than as individuals with their own accounts. None of the sources used here records what a buyer thought of the food, or how a family fitted it into a week of other meals.

The sources also disagree about where the scraps came from. Sue speaks of servants’ tables, Privat of restaurant plates bought from dishwashers, Du Camp of contracts with official and commercial kitchens.⁷⁶¹ These may describe different moments or different tiers of a trade that changed over several decades. Garval praises Beizer for being open about what in this “murky realm” remains unclear or unknowable, despite long research, and that caution is warranted.⁸

One thread that does run through the sources is a moral argument about who should profit. Privat describes an older custom at long-established restaurants of giving the day’s leftovers to the poor each morning, and singles out the successors of a M. Passoir in the faubourg du Temple for keeping it up. He complains that modern speculation had changed this: leftovers were now sold by contract to the arlequin dealers, “qui revendent aux pauvres ce qui leur appartient en toute justice” (who resell to the poor what rightly belongs to them).⁶ Beizer draws a similar line between past and present. Modern food redistribution, she says, aims to reduce hunger and waste, while “the earlier practice was very much for profit, and additionally, rather lacked a concern for hygiene.”⁴

A long afterlife in manners

Beizer first used “harlequin” as an English term for this food in a 2014 article and in earlier talks, and her book The Harlequin Eaters appeared from the University of Minnesota Press in 2024.⁴⁸ It opens with a chapter on the business of leftovers in nineteenth-century Paris and moves on to Sue, to picture postcards showing the urban poor buying and eating leftovers, and to Zola.⁸ Garval lists other work on the same ground, including Madeleine Ferrières’s 2007 history Nourritures canailles, which has sections on arlequins and rogatons.⁸

Beizer has also argued that the trade still shapes French habits. In a 2017 article she traced the reluctance of many French diners to take restaurant leftovers home to feelings of shame tied to the memory of the arlequin, the practice of passing scraps from wealthy tables down the social ladder.¹¹⁴ She is careful not to overstate the parallel with today’s food banks, noting that there are “no easy parallels to be drawn here.”⁴ In the book’s epilogue she describes her own volunteering at the Saint-Eustache soup kitchen, in the shadow of the vanished market where Du Camp counted his seventeen jewelers.⁸

The arlequin is a reminder that the celebrated food culture of nineteenth-century Paris had a second circuit beneath it. Truffled chicken left on a plate in a fashionable restaurant could reach a laborer’s hand the next morning, by way of a dishwasher’s bucket, a ventilated cart and a stall in pavilion 12. The writers who recorded that journey were often more interested in its strangeness than in the people at its end, and the sources should be read with that in mind.

Footnotes

1. Du Camp, Paris, ses organes, vol. 2 (1875), “Les Halles centrales,” pp. 144-147. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, “arlequin,” sense 3. ↩

3. Delvau, Dictionnaire de la langue verte, s.v. “Arlequin,” “Bijoutier,” “Omnibus.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Liverpool University Press Blog, interview with Janet Beizer (2020). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Cochinat, in Privat d’Anglemont, Paris inconnu (1886), biographical fragment. ↩ ↩²

6. Privat d’Anglemont, Paris anecdote (1875 printing), pp. 41-46, 127-129, 314-315. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

7. Sue, Les Mystères de Paris, t. I, ch. 1, and note 30. ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Garval, review of Beizer, NCFS 53.1-2 (2024). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

9. Zola, L’Assommoir, ch. XII. ↩

10. Zola, Le Ventre de Paris (Project Gutenberg text). ↩

11. Beizer, “Why the French hate doggie bags,” Contemporary French Civilization 42 (2017), Crossref record. ↩