“Indeed I am. I shall scrub and rub and polish until he looks like a wax image, or as pink and shining as the inside of the seashell his Uncle Pablôt sent him from Paimpol.”
Philippe’s father held a large brown potato at arm’s length, and, regarding it with his head cocked to one side, said: “Very fine! Yes, very fine!”
“A good size,” agreed his wife, looking over her shoulder, while she absently bored into the ear of her long-suffering son with a bit of soapy rag.
“Yes—but I was thinking rather of Philippe’s Uncle Pablôt. It is he who is very fine, a grand gentleman who carries a gold-headed cane and has traveled far—to the very borders of our beloved France, and even beyond, so I hear.”
“Oh, very much beyond! He has been in every country in the world, according to the wonderful stories he tells, and the world, Pierre, I understand to be of a tremendous bigness; indeed, if what I am told is the truth, it must be three or four times as big as our own country!”
“Is that so?” replied Pierre doubtfully, starting to cut the pallid sprouts again with quick motions of his work-hardened hands. “It may all be the truth, my good wife, but I have always taken the words of Pablôt with a grain of salt; I think, for that matter, that he is a little inclined to blow.”
“‘Blow’?” asked Philippe from his tub. “I thought it was only the wind that could blow.”
But of course no one answered him, for he was only a little boy, and not expected to understand; instead, his father bent over his bag of potatoes to hide his smile, and his mother remembered that the pot-au-feu (which is a thick soup made of odds and ends and bits and scraps and almost everything you can think of mixed with water in a large pot and left on the fire to bubble sluggishly for many hours) needed stirring right away.
“Take care,” warned her husband, “that you do not drop soap into the soup from your wet hands, for I know of nothing that gives it a more curious flavor.”
“Just the same,” said Philippe’s mother, turning from the hearth, her cheeks flushed rosy red by the bright, hot embers, “just the same, it is a good thing that our little one should be invited to meet such a fine gentleman. It will teach him how to say the most ordinary thing elegantly, and how to carry his head high as if he were a born dandy. Philippe, repeat to your father the little speech you are to say when you meet your uncle.”