A four-pound pain bis is a dense brown brick, rye and coarse wheat, heavy as a cat, and it had to stretch a household two or three days. By that autumn in 1789 one of them ate half a labourer's daily wage, or more. Marguerite's got the drum, and she's right, but the quieter noise was earlier: a baker's shutters still down at dawn tells a street everything before anybody says a word.
A drum, taken up by a young woman near the markets, and the sound of it carrying through the eastern districts; that's where most accounts start it, in 1789. Then roughly twenty kilometres to Versailles in the rain, thousands of women with…
The crop that failed went down in a day, Rosa — a freak hailstorm in July 1788 flattened wheat across the north of France, and the accounts talk about dead hares and birds left lying in the fields with it. Then the winter came in hard on top. A shut shutter at dawn is the end of a long chain.
Rosa, when the crowd walked the king back from Versailles they weren't shouting for a constitution — the cry on the road was for the baker, the baker's wife and the baker's boy. The papers covered it in 1789 half as a grain story: get the court into Paris and the flour follows it.