It was succulent and unctuous, robust and yet delicate, flavoured as it was with the broth of a whole flock of boiled chickens. The diners were silent now, their noses in their plates, their faces brightened by steam from the savoury soup, two selected dishes, a salad, and a dessert.
"Now is the time to repeat the chestnut dear to Flaubert, 'You can't dine like this in a restaurant,'" said Durtal.
"Let's not malign the restaurants," said Des Hermies. "They afford a very special delight to the person who has the instinct of the inspector. I had an opportunity to gratify this instinct just the other night. I was returning from a call on a patient, and I dropped into one of these establishments where for the sum of three francs you are entitled to soup, two selected dishes, a salad, and a dessert.
"The restaurant, where I go as often as once a month, has an unvarying clientele, hostile highbrows, officers in mufti, members of Parliament, bureaucrats.
"While laboriously gnawing my way through a redoubtable sole with sauce au gratin, I examined the habitués seated all around me and I found them singularly altered since my last visit. They had become bony or bloated; their eyes were either hollow, with violet rings around them, or puffy, with crimson pouches beneath; the fat people had become yellow and the thin ones were turning green.
"More deadly than the forgotten venefices of the days of the Avignon papacy, the terrible preparations served in this place were slowly poisoning its customers.
"It was interested, as you may believe. I made myself the subject of a course of toxicological research, and, studying my food as it went down, I identified the frightful ingredients masking the mixtures of tannin and powdered carbon with which the fish was embalmed; and I penetrated the disguise of the marinated meats, painted with sauces the colour of sewage; and I diagnosed the wine as being coloured with fuscin, perfumed with furfurol, and enforced with molasses and plaster.
"I have promised myself to return every month to register the slow but sure progress of these people toward the tomb."
"Oh!" cried Mme. Carhaix.
"And you will claim," said Durtal, "that you aren't Satanic?"