To the coterie of the Café de l’Univers, however, he gave a different explanation altogether of Professor Martin’s descent in the social scale. The Professor, said he, had abandoned the professoriat for the more lucrative paths of commerce and had decided to open a hotel in England, where every one knew the hotels were villainous and provided nothing for their clients but overdone bacon and eggs and raw beef-steaks. The Professor, more enlightened than his compatriots, was apprenticing himself to the business in the orthodox Continental fashion. As the substantial Gaspard Bigourdin himself, son of the late equally substantially, although one-armed and one-legged Armédée Bigourdin, had, to the common knowledge of Brantôme, served as scullion, waiter, sous-chef de cuisine, sous-maître d’hôtel, and bookkeeper at various hotels in Lyons, in order to become the bon hôtelier that he was, his announcement caused no sensation whatever. The professor of the Ecole Normale bewailed his own chill academic lot and proclaimed Monsieur Martin an exceedingly lucky fellow.
“But, mon cher patron, it isn’t true what you have said at the Café de l’Univers,” protested Martin, when Bigourdin told him of the explanation.
Bigourdin waved his great arm. “How am I to know it isn’t true? How am I to get into the English minds of you and my farceur of a brother-in-law so as to discover why you arrive as an honoured guest at my hotel and then in the wink of an eye become the waiter of the establishment? What am I to say to our friends? They wouldn’t care a hang (ils se ficheraient pas mal) for your soul. If you are to continue to mix with them on terms of equality they must have an explanation, nom de Dieu, which they can understand.”
“I never dreamed,” said Martin, “of entering the circle at the Café again.”
“Mais, j’y ai pensé, moi, animal!” cried Bigourdin. “Because you have the fantasy of becoming my waiter, are you any less the same human being I had the pleasure of introducing to my friends?”
And then, perhaps for the first time, Martin appreciated his employer’s fine kindness and essential loyalty. It would have been quite easy for the innkeeper to dismiss his waiter from the consideration of the hierarchy of Brantôme as a mad Englishman, an adventurer, not a professor at all, but a broken-down teacher of languages giving private lessons—an odd-job instructor who finds no respect in highly centralised, bureaucratic France; but the easy way was not the way of Gaspard Bigourdin. So Martin, driven by force majeure, lent himself to the pious fraud and, when the evening’s work was done, divested himself of his sable panoply of waiterdom and once more took his place in the reserved cosy corner of the Café de l’Univers.
The agreeable acidity in his life which he missed when Corinna, graciously dignified, had steamed off by the night train, he soon discovered in the pursuit of his new avocation. Euphémie, the cook, whose surreptitious habits of uncleanliness carefully hidden from Félise, but unavoidably patent to an agonised Martin, supplied as much sourness as his system required. She would not take him seriously and declared her antipathy to un monsieur in her kitchen. To bring about an entente cordiale was for Martin an education in diplomacy. The irritability of a bilious commercial traveller, poisoned by infected nourishment at his last house of entertainment—the reason invariably given for digestive misadventure—so that his stomach was dislocated, often vented itself on the waiter serving an irreproachable repast at the Hôtel des Grottes. The professional swallowing of outraged feelings also gave a sub-acid flavour to existence. Motorists on the other hand, struck by his spruceness and polite demeanour, administered pleasant tonic in the form of praise. They also bestowed handsome tips.
These caused him some misgiving. A gentleman could be a waiter or anything you pleased, so long as it was honest, and remain a gentleman: but could he take tips? Or rather, having taken tips, was it consonant with his gentility to retain them? Would it not be nobler to hand them over to Baptiste or Euphémie? Bigourdin, appealed to, decided that it would be magnificent but would inevitably disorganise these excellent domestics. Martin suggested the Assistance Publique or the church poor-box.
“I thought,” said Bigourdin, “you became a waiter in order to earn your living?”
“That is so,” replied Martin.