Dessert came on. The voluble one cut an apple in half. It was rotten. "Hey, Mademoiselle; regardez-moi ça. Il y en a une qui marche (There's one walking)."
"So I see. He would willingly be quit of Monsieur."
The other men would sit round sniggering—and occasionally chipping in; but they seldom got the better of the maid, who had a fund of repartee that I have rarely heard matched, even in France.
From this house of frivolity and good cooking—the chef had been seven months at the Carlton—hence enough quite incomprehensible jargon to warrant the legend "English spoken" on the hotel omnibus—we made some good excursions over the undulating country that lies around Arnay; through miles of spring woods where brave nightingales sang on a spray before your very eyes; by lofty green uplands, through plateaux, suggestive of Normandy, where the cattle and the lady's-smock dapple with splashes of white and mauve the rich green meadows; where the cloudless skies are mirrored in bluer than English ponds, and peasants' sabots clatter through the most tangle-wood villages of France; wide silences where your eye can roam all ways, along the distant hills shimmering in silver and blue, quivering with living light, to majestic Château-Neuf of Philippe Pot, and the tower-crowned castles of other lords of ancient Burgundy.
Footnotes:
[136] Godefroy de Bouillon left France for the crusade in 1096.
[137] Hugues le Pacifique, one of the worthiest of the Capetian Dukes of Burgundy, died in 1142.
[138] The spring that marks the site of this incident is still called the Fontaine-Cheval. It runs into the rivulet De Larvot, by the "Pré de l'Etang." See l'Abbé B—— s "Tebsima," p. 179.
[139] Tebsima, p. 185.
[140] Ibid, p. 220.