"But you went on as if you knew more about him than even Fleetwood; and I think that toward the end Fleetwood almost thought you did himself."
"Oh—that," Berri shrugged, after trying to recall the conversation. "That was merely what an old frump of a woman said at my aunt's one day when I dropped in for luncheon. She and Aunt Josephine gabbled and gabbled, and never paid the slightest attention to me, and although they were both unusually tiresome, I suppose I could n't avoid remembering some of the things they said. But it would have been impossible for me to dwell any longer on that particular topic with Fleetwood, even if my life had depended on it, because that day at luncheon, just as my aunt's friend got started on 'James the man,' I happened to glance up and notice that she was wearing an entirely different kind of wig from the ratty old thing she 'd flourished in before she went abroad. She had brought back a new one that was—why, it was an architectural marvel; it looked like the dome of a mosque, and covered her whole head, from eyebrows to neck, with little cut-out places for her ears to peek through. It hypnotized me all through luncheon, and I never heard a word about 'James the man,'—so of course when I got that far with Fleetwood I had to change the subject. Don't you remember that we began to discuss Bernhardt's conception of Hamlet rather abruptly? I 'll never trust that old woman again—after making the mistake about Buffon. Why, she's positively illiterate!"
Fleetwood told me a lot about Mazuret's—that 's the name of the restaurant—which made me glad that we had come across it accidentally,—found it out for ourselves. It's very famous. All sorts of people—writers and painters and actors and exiled noblemen—used to make a kind of headquarters of it and dine there whenever they happened to be in town. Fleetwood has been going there for years, and always sits at the same table. (That's the proper thing to do; you must have a favorite table, and when you come in and find it occupied, you must scowl and shrug and complain to the waiters in a loud voice that the place is going to the dogs. Then everybody in the room takes it for granted that you 're a writer or a painter, an actor or an exiled nobleman, and looks interested and sympathetic. We saw several performances of this kind.) But the place, of course, "isn't what it used to be." I'm seven or eight years too late, as usual. Some of the poets have become very successful—which means, Fleetwood says, that they 're doing newspaper work in New York; some of the painters and actors are beyond the reach of criticism—which means that they 're dead; and some of the noblemen are confident that their respective governments are about to recall them to posts of responsibility and honor—which means that they are in jail.
It was more entertaining, Fleetwood says, in the days of Leontine,—the shrewd, vivacious, businesslike Frenchwoman who, when Monsieur Mazuret became too ill, and Madame too old, used to make change and scold the waiters and say good evening to you, and whose red-striped gingham shirt-waists fitted her like models from Paquin. It was Leontine who brought back the wonderful wall-paper from Paris (through the glass door it looked like a painting) that represents a hunting scene, with willowy ladies in preposterous pink velvet riding-habits and waving plumes, and gentlemen blowing tasselled horns, and hounds and stags—all plunging through a perfectly impenetrable forest, whose improbable luxuriance Berri brilliantly accounted for by saying that it was evidently "Paris green."
"Attend now—I tell you something," Leontine used to say confidentially when the evening was drawing to a close, and but one or two stragglers were left in the dining-room.
"These peoples—they stay so long sometimes; I tell to them that they must go. But non—they will not go; and they stay, and they stay, and they stay. And all at once the—what you call?—the chasse—she begin to move! The horses—he gallop; the ladies—she scream of laughing; the gentlemen—he make toot, toot, toot, tooooo! The dogs—Ah-h h-h! The—the—cet animal-là—the deer?—the deer—Ah-h-h-h!" Carried away by these midnight memories, Leontine would become a galloping horse, a screaming lady, a master of hounds, a savage pack, and a terrified monarch of the glen—all at once. Then, overpowered by the weird horror of it, she would cover her face with her apron and run coquettishly as if for protection to another table.
There was another tale—the description of a thunderstorm—a regular cloud-burst, it must have been—that, one afternoon, overtook Madame and Leontine in the Place de la Madeleine, Leontine personifying the truly Gallic elements—the lightning (reels backward—eyes covered with hands)—the thunder (fingers in ears—eyes rolling—mouth open and emitting groans)—the rain hissing back from the asphalt in a million silver bubbles (skirts lifted—tip-toes—mon dieus—shrieks—hasty exit to kitchen)—Leontine bringing this incoherent scene vividly before one, was worth one's eating a worse dinner, Fleetwood says, than the dinner at Mazuret's. But Monsieur is dead, and Madame just dried up and blew away, and Leontine is married, and—although I don't know when I 've enjoyed a dinner so much—"the place isn't what it used to be."
While Fleetwood was telling me all this, I noticed that Berri called one of the waiters and spoke to him in French. I don't know what he said, as he talked very fast—and anyhow it did n't sound much like the kind of French I 've been used to. The waiter disappeared, and in half an hour or so a messenger boy came in and gave Berri a little envelope which he put in his pocket without saying anything. Then, when we had finished dinner and were just about to push away from the table, Berri exclaimed,—
"Now we 'll all go to the theatre."
"My dear young man, if you could see the work I have to do this night," Fleetwood protested with a gesture that seemed to express mountains of uncorrected themes, "you would realize, for once in your life, what work really is."