“Oh, for us cooks, them’s a mere nothing,” replies the cook.
As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except how a cook may feather his nest.
At evening, during the second course, all Caroline’s fibres quiver with pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain suggestive dish. She has positively waited for this dinner as she had waited for her husband.
But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure, there is, to the souls of the elect—and everybody will include a woman who adores her husband among the elect—there is, between these two worlds of expectation, the difference that exists between a fine night and a fine day.
The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges his spoon in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline’s extreme emotion, to several of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers who visit Milan do not for a long time recognize; they take them for some kind of shell-fish.
“Well, Adolphe?”
“Well, dear.”
“Don’t you recognize them?”
“Recognize what?”
“Your mushrooms a l’Italienne?”