But she purchases well. There is the finest array of perfumes and soaps, champagne and liqueurs, cakes and biscuits, chocolates, Stilton and Gruyère, eggs and butter, almonds and chestnuts. It is Félix Potin in little, with all the richness of Félixian variety and quality. If it's wine you are buying, she'll take you below to the cellars; that's a rich and vivifying spectacle. The whole shop is shelved, desked, and finished with an appearance of distinction; the windows are dressed with a taste and an avoidance of super-crowding that would grace the Rue de la Paix. The whole magasin is in a class beyond compare with any other shop in D——. It puts one in the dress-circle to purchase a box of chocolates there. But in the interests of finance he had far better make the purchase at the Expeditionary Force Canteen. At the canteen you pay neither for the atmosphere of the place nor for the expense of importation from Paris.
The stationer's shop opposite the Hôtel de Ville gets the English newspaper daily. Towards evening there is an incessant stream of privates, N.C.O's, and Staff-Officers asking for the daily sheet from England. "'Delly Mell,' m'sieur?—pas encore arrivée." (The voyageur arrives late in these parts.) It's with difficulty you can elbow your way about this shop at most hours of the afternoon. Soldiers who call for the paper loiter, attracted by the post-cards or the range of English novels. The post-cards are spread out in an inciting array. They are Parisian in their frankness.
Everyone knows the boot shop. There are four boot shops in D——. But when you speak of the boot shop there is no doubt in the mind of the company which is the shop referred to, because the prettiest girl in D—— is there. When an officer appears in the street with new boots (though he guilelessly bought them at Ordnance) his friends will say: "Ha! did she try them on for you? Was she long about it? It's a pretty pair of shoulders, n'est-ce pas?" It is but fitting that the shop with the prettiest girl in D—— should be the most expensive. So it is. Better go bare-footed unless you have "private means" or can get access to an Ordnance clothing store—or (better still) get an "issue."
But who can avoid the tobacconist's in the Rue ——? One must have a well-finished pipe now and then, and the widow's daughter is handsome and speaks a kind of English. In accordance with the French usage, madame, as a widow, has been given this tobacco shop by the State. Had she been daughterless, or had her daughter been unlovely, she would have imported some jolie demoiselle. But she had no need. Marie Thérèse fills the rôle. And Marie Thérèse is kept busy by a genuine queue of purchasers. For this is the shop where small purchases are most excusable, and in any case it is an easy matter to ask for an impossible brand of tobacco and listen with feigned amazement to Marie Thérèse's pretty, well-gestured regrets that she has it not. But she has other. But you explain how you are a purist, and none other will do. And if the shop is not busy—which is seldom indeed—such explanations can be made elaborate and prolonged, and Marie Thérèse can be made intelligently interested in the inscrutable whims of thoroughgoing smokers. But the damsel is not all guileless. If it is your ill-fortune that she has what you ask, you pay well and truly. And Marie Thérèse knows as well as you (though neither says so) that you have paid for the repartee.
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND