Here's a fine business! It is my uncle who has got into trouble this time! My aunt Eudoxia has found out everything, and I have just spent two days in helping my aunt Van Cloth to pack up and get back to Holland with my long string of cousins, the fat Dirkie, the cooking moulds, and the barrel-organ following by goods' train.
It was a veritable thunderclap!
I have told you all about this Dutch household and its patriarchal felicity, its sweetmeat and sausage pastries, and its inimitable tarts—less appetizing, however, than my aunt's fine eyes. I have told you about their quiet family evenings with my uncle's pipe and schiedam, in which domino-parties of three were varied by the delightful treat of a symphony from one of the great masters, executed in a masterly style by a pretty little plump hand covered with pink dimples.
Once or twice a week, as became a favourite and affectionate nephew, I came into the midst of this idyll of the land of tulips; and always quitted it full of sweetmeats and good advice.
However, the day before yesterday, Ernest, the second of my cousins, who is five years old, suddenly caught a violent fever; he grew scarlet in the face, and his stomach swelled up like a balloon.
My poor aunt, having exhausted all her arsenal of aperients and astringents against what she reckoned to be an indigestion due to preserved plums, quite lost her head. In the afternoon the child grew worse. Where in Paris could she find a Dutch doctor? She could only place confidence in a Dutchman. At the end of her wits with fear, she thought she would go after my uncle or me; so, without thinking any more about it, as she knew our address, she takes a cab and gets driven to the Rue de Varennes, believing in her simplicity that this was where our shops and offices were.
She arrives and asks for my uncle. Being seven o'clock, the hall-porter tells her that the captain will soon be in, shows her to the staircase, and rings the bell; one of the men-servants asks her for her name, and then opens the folding doors, announcing—
"Madame Barbassou!"
It is my aunt Eudoxia who receives her.
My aunt Van Cloth, who is distracted with anxiety, thinks that she sees before her some lady of my family, and in order to excuse herself for disturbing her, begins by saying that she has come to see Captain Barbassou, her husband.