"Four sous! Bon Dieu! I would rather eat them myself. They only lack speech to tell you themselves how fresh they are. Look at them!"
"Four sous," insists Suzette. "Do you think monsieur is rich enough to buy the république."
"Allez! Then, take them at four sous." And Mère Marianne laughs, slips the money into her trousers pocket, and goes off to another bargain in the village, where, if she gets two sous for her mackerel she will be lucky.
At six Suzette lifts the Burgundy tenderly from its resting-place in a closet beneath the winding stone stairs—a stone closet, low, sinister, and dark, that suggests the solitary dungeons of feudal times. Three cobwebbed bottles of Burgundy are now carefully ranged before the crackling blaze in the living room. At six-thirty Suzette lays the generous dark-oak table in lace and silver, thin glasses, red-shaded candles, and roses—plenty of roses from the garden. Her kitchen by this time is no longer open to visitors. It has become a sacred place, teeming with responsibility—a laboratory of resplendent shining copper sauce-pans, pots and casseroles, in which good things steam and stew and bubble under lids of burnished gold, which, when lifted, give one a rousing appetite.
I knew Tanrade's ring—vigorous and hearty, like himself. You would never guess this sturdy, broad-shouldered man has created delicious music—fairy ballets, pantomimes, and operettas. All Paris has applauded him for years, and his country has rewarded him with a narrow red ribbon. Rough-bearded, bronzed like a sailor, his brown eyes gleam with kindness and intelligence. The more I know this modest great man the more I like him, and I have known him in all kinds of wind and weather, for Tanrade is an indefatigable hunter. He and I have spent nights together in his duck-blind—a submerged hut, a murderous deceit sunk far out on the marsh—cold nights; soft moonlight nights—the marsh a mystic fairy-land; black nights—-mean nights of thrashing rain. Nights that paled to dawn with no luck to bring back to Suzette's larder. Sunny mornings after lucky nights, when Tanrade and I would thaw out over our coffee in the garden among the roses.
Tanrade had arrived early, a habit with this genial gourmand when the abandoned house is giving a dinner, for he likes to supervise the final touches. He was looking critically over the three cobwebbed bottles of his favourite Burgundy now warming before my fire, and having tenderly lifted the last bottle in the row to a place which he considered a safer temperature, he straightened and squared his broad shoulders to the blaze.
"I'll send you half a dozen more bottles to-morrow," he said.
"No, you won't, my old one," I protested, but he raised his hand and smiled.