THE REFECTORY.
"Forbear to scoff at woes you cannot feel,
Nor mock the misery of a stinted meal."—Crabbe.
The dietary tables at the chateau, conspicuous alike for the paucity and simplicity of the articles registered therein, are easily recalled to mind. The fare they exhibited was certainly coarse—though, by a euphemism, it might have been termed merely plain—and spare withal. The breakfast would consist of milk and water—the first aqueous enough without dilution, being the produce of certain ill-favoured, and, as we afterwards tasted their flesh, we may add ill-flavoured kine, whose impoverished lacteals could furnish out of their sorry fodder no better supplies. It was London sky-blue, in short, but not of the Alderney dairy, which was made to serve our turn at Yverdun. This milk, at seven in summer, and at half-past seven in winter, was transferred boiling, and as yet unadulterated, into earthenware mixers, which had been previously half-filled with hot water from a neighbouring kettle. In this half-and-half state it was baled out for the assembled school into a series of pewter platters, ranged along the sides of three bare deal boards, some thirty feet long by two wide, and mounted on tressels, which served us for tables. The ministering damsels were two great German Fraus, rejoicing severally in the pleasing names of Gretchen and Bessie. When Frau Gretchen, standing behind each boy, had dropt her allowance of milk over his right shoulder—during which process there was generally a mighty clatter for full measure and fair play—the other Frau was slicing off her slices of bread from a brown loaf a yard long, which she carried under her arm, and slashed clean through with wonderful precision and address. It was now for all those who had saved pocket-money for menus-plaisirs to produce their cornets of cinnamon or sugar, sprinkle a little into the milk, and then fall to sipping and munching with increased zest and satisfaction. So dry and chaffy was our pain de ménage that none ventured to soak it entire, or at once, but would cut it into frustrums, and retain liquid enough to wash down the boluses separately. In a few minutes every plate was completely cleaned out and polished; and the cats, that generally entered the room as we left it, seldom found a drop with which they might moisten their tongues, or remove from cheeks and whiskers the red stains of murdered mice on which they had been breaking their fast in the great tower. So much for the earliest meal of the day, which was to carry us through five hours, if not of laborious mental study, at least of the incarceration of our bodies in class, which was equally irksome to them as if our minds had been hard at work. These five hours terminated, slates were once more insalivated and put by clean, and the hungry garrison began to look forward to the pleasures of the noon-day repast. The same bell that had been calling so often to class would now give premonitory notice of dinner, but in a greatly changed tone. In place of the shrill snappish key in which it had all the morning jerked out each short unwelcome summons from lesson to lesson, as if fearful of ringing one note beyond the prescribed minute, it now would take time, vibrate far and wide in its cage, give full scope to its tongue, and appear, from the loud increasing swell of its prolonged oyez, to announce the message of good cheer like a herald conscious and proud of his commission. Ding-dong!—come along! Dinner's dishing!—ding-dong! Da capo and encore! Then, starting up from every school-room form throughout the chateau, the noisy boys rushed pell-mell, opened all the doors, and, like emergent bees in quest of honey, began coursing up and down right busily between the salle-à-manger and the kitchen—snuffing the various aromas as they escaped from the latter into the passage, and inferring from the amount of exhaled fragrance the actual progress of the preparations for eating. Occasionally some "sly Tom" would peep into the kitchen, while the Fraus were too busy to notice him, and watch the great cauldron that had been milked dry of its stores in the morning, now discharging its aqueous contents of a much-attenuated bouillon—the surface covered with lumps of swimming bread, thickened throughout with a hydrate of potatoes, and coloured with coarse insipid carrots, which certainly gave it a savoury appearance. It was not good broth—far from it, for it was both sub-greasy and super-salted; but then it was hot, it was thick, and there was an abundant supply. It used to gush, as we have said, from the great stop-cock of the cauldron, steaming and sputtering, into eight enormous tureens. The shreds of beef, together with whatever other solids remained behind after the fluid had been drawn off, were next fished up from the abyss with long ladles, and plumped into the decanted liquor. The young gastronome who might have beheld these proceedings would wait till the lid was taken off the sauerkraut; and then, the odour becoming overpoweringly appetising, he would run, as by irresistible instinct, into the dining-room, where most of the boys were already assembled, each with a ration of brown bread in his hand, and ready for the Fraus, who were speedily about to enter. The dinner was noisy and ungenteel in the extreme—how could it be otherwise? ventre affamé n'a point d'oreilles. Hardly was the German grace concluded, and the covers removed, when that bone of contention, the marrow bone, was caught up by some big boy near the top of the table, and became the signal for a general row. All in his neighbourhood would call out second, third, fourth, fifth, &c., for said bone; and thus it would travel from plate to plate, yielding its contents freely to the two or three first applicants, but wholly inadequate—unless it could have resolved itself altogether into marrow—to meet all the demands made upon its stores. Then arose angry words of contention, which waxed hot as the marrow waxed cold, every candidate being equally vociferous in maintaining the priority of his particular claim. Earnest appeals in German, French, Spanish, English, &c., were bandied from one to the other in consequence, as to who had really said après toi first! At last the "dry bone" was found undeserving of further contention; and, ceasing to drop any more fatness upon any boy's bread, the competition for it was dropt too. When now we had half-filled our stomachs with a soup which few physicians would have withheld from their fever patients on the score of its strength, we threw in a sufficiency of bread and sauerkraut to absorb it; and, after the post-prandial German grace had been pronounced, the boys left the table, generally with a saved crust in their pockets, to repair to the garden and filch—if it was filching—an alliaceous dessert from the beds, which they washed in the clear stream, and added, without fear of indigestion, to the meal just concluded within the chateau. Most of us throve upon this Spartan diet; but some delicate boys, unendowed with the ostrich power of assimilation usual at that period—for boys, like ostriches, can digest almost anything—became deranged in their chylopoietics, and continued to feel its ill effects in mesenteric and other chronic ailments for years afterwards. An hour was given for stomachs to do their work, before we reassembled to ours in the class-room. At half-past four precisely, a gouté, was served out, which consisted of a whacking slice of bread, and either a repetition of the morning's milk and water, or café au lait, (without sugar "bien entendu,") or twenty-five walnuts, or a couple of ounces of strong-tasted gruyère, or a plateful of schnitz (cuttings of dried apples, pears, and plums). We might choose any one of these several dainties we liked, but not more. Some dangerous characters—not to be imitated—would occasionally, while young Frau Schmidt stood doling out the supplies from her cupboard among the assembled throng, make the disingenuous attempt to obtain cheese with one hand and schnitz with the other. But the artifice, we are happy to say, seldom succeeded; for that vigilant lady, quick-eyed and active, and who, of all things, hated to be imposed upon, would turn round upon the false claimant, and bid him hold up both his hands at once—which he, ambidexter as he was, durst not do, and thus he was exposed to the laughter and jeers of the rest. At nine, the bell sounded a feeble call to a soi-disant supper; but few of us cared for a basin of tisane under the name of lentil soup—or a pappy potato, salted in the boiling—and soon after we all repaired to our bedrooms—made a noise for a short time, then undressed, and were speedily asleep under our duvets, and as sound, if not as musical, as tops.
Our common fare, as the reader has now seen, was sorry enough; but we had our Carnival and gala days as well as our Lent. Vater Pestalozzi's birthday, in summer, and the first day of the new year, were the most conspicuous. On each of these occasions we enjoyed a whole week's holiday; and as these were also the periods for slaughtering the pigs, we fed (twice a-year for a whole week!) upon black puddings and pork à discretion, qualified with a sauce of beetroot and vinegar, and washed down with a fluid really like small-beer.