We returned to dinner. I have dined with Barras three times, and at each dinner I witnessed an unusually odd incident. On the first occasion—the one of which I am speaking—we were between twenty and twenty-five in number. Among the guests was Madame Tallien, who became the Princess of Chimay. She came accompanied by a footman whose marvellous plumes were the admiration of the whole company. We had been introduced into the salon, where the first comers did the honours of the house to those who arrived later. Barras never appeared except at the dinner-table. When the dinner-hour arrived, the folding doors were flung open into the dining-room and each guest found the place that had been put for him; the bedroom door was then opened and Barras was wheeled to the centre of the table; then the guests sat down and attacked the delicate repast with good appetite. Barras's own meal was very odd: a huge leg of mutton was brought to him and carved in such a fashion as to bring out all the gravy; the joint was then carried back to the kitchen, and the gravy was left in Barras's deep plate. He sopped bread in the gravy and this concoction formed his meal. I never saw him eat anything else on the three occasions I dined with him.
On this particular day, in the middle of dinner, a great noise was heard in the kitchen as though a fight were going on, and we could hear shouts mingled with bursts of laughter. Barras was accustomed to be admirably waited on and in an unusually silent manner. Not a single one of the servants who waited behind the guests ever breathed a word or rattled a plate or jingled the silver. Apart from the luxuriousness of the food with which the table was loaded, one could have imagined oneself in a pythagorean school. Only one man was allowed to speak when he wished and that was the valet-de-chambre, the steward, and, better still, the friend of Barras. His name was Courtand.
"Courtand!" Barras asked, frowning, "what is all that noise?"
"I do not know, citizen-general," Courtand replied, himself as greatly astonished at this infraction of the rules of the house; "I will go and see."
Courtand went out and, five seconds later, re-entered, every face turning to the door to look at him.
"Well?" asked Barras.
"Oh! it is nothing, citizen-general," Courtand replied, laughing.
"But what was it about?"
"The servants belonging to the citizens present"—and Courtand pointed towards the guests, who, it should be said, mostly belonged to Republican opinion—"are plucking feathers from citizen Tallien's footman and the poor devil shrieks because they pinch his skin a bit while they are doing it."
"And what has he done to deserve to be plucked alive by the other servants?" asked Barras.