The menu was brought, and Monsieur Bouchard, with his head close to Madame Vernet’s, studied it attentively. His order as finally made out would have caused an earthquake in the Rue Clarisse. He ordered everything that had been strictly forbidden during the last thirty years. The order bore, too, a really remarkable resemblance to the one given by the de Menevals, except that those happy-go-lucky young people had not the money to pay for it, and Monsieur Bouchard had.
Never in all his life had Papa Bouchard enjoyed a supper as much as that one. He was at perfect liberty to eat and drink all the things that were certain to make him feel ill the next day, a prerogative dear to a man’s heart. He had a charming woman opposite him, and a waiter who fairly overwhelmed him with attentions. Without an order from Monsieur Bouchard, François produced the wine appropriate to every course, and instead of being frowned on was rewarded for it. But in spite of white wines and red wines, Papa Bouchard stuck pretty close to the champagne, which speedily got into his tongue and his eyes as well as into his blood. It was the champagne that made him squeeze Madame Vernet’s hand under the table, wink at François and kiss his fingers to one of the young ladies of the ballet, who responded by playfully throwing a bouquet to him which hit him on the nose. In fact, his enjoyment would have been entirely without alloy but for Pierrot, who, slyly inspired by the waiters, kept up a running fire of remarks, always ending in a shrill laugh and a yell of “Bad boy Bouchard!”
If Pierrot bothered Papa Bouchard slightly, he added immensely to the suppressed gaiety of the two listeners, de Meneval and Léontine, and they went off into spasms of silent laughter whenever Pierrot screamed out any appropriate remark.
Papa Bouchard, however, got a good deal of solid enjoyment out of his supper in spite of his old friend of the Rue Clarisse, and Pierrot did not interfere in the least with Madame Vernet’s pleasure.
“The fact is,” said Monsieur Bouchard, confidentially, to Madame Vernet, after the third glass of champagne, “I wasn’t quite candid about that devilish bird.” Papa Bouchard used this wicked word with the greatest relish. “It belonged to my sister—older than I—who brought me up in the way I should go, and a deuced dull and uncomfortable way it was! A day or two ago, Pierrot—that’s the parrot’s name—got tired of the propriety and seclusion of the Rue Clarisse, where we have lived for thirty years, just as Pierre, my man-servant, did, and I myself. All at once, without any previous consultation, Pierre, Pierrot and I levanted, so to speak. Pierrot has evidently got caught—which is more than I intend to be—but I’m sure he finds the Pigeon House a great improvement on the Rue Clarisse, and I haven’t the heart to return him there. You don’t know how pleasant it is to be living in the Rue Bassano after thirty years in the Rue Clarisse. And to be my own man, instead of my sister’s—excellent woman she is, excellent, but she doesn’t understand what a young man of the present day—er—I mean a man with the feelings of youth, requires to make him happy. So that’s why I eloped.”
“It’s a great mistake not to give a man his head sometimes,” added Madame Vernet, with one of her gentle and winning smiles.
“Yes, yes, yes. You know how to manage a man, I see.”
“I manage a man!” cried Madame Vernet. “Pray don’t say that. The idea of my managing a great, strong man! No, indeed! All I should ask of a man is that he would manage me—and I’m sure, as yielding as I am, nothing would be easier.”
At which François, behind Monsieur Bouchard’s chair, doubled up with laughter, and Léontine had to fan de Meneval, who appeared to be choking in an agony of enjoyment, while Pierrot varied his performance by beginning to sing the song from the opera, “Ah, I have sighed to rest me!”