"It is the salon of Apollo," said Monsieur Ferulus, as he ushered each guest in with a self-satisfied air.
"The salon of Apollo? What on earth does that mean?" rejoined Monsieur Berlingue; "I did not know that Apollo presided at banquets."
"Is not monsieur aware, pray, that Lucullus had for his banquets several rooms, each of which bore the name of some divinity? and that that name also served to designate to the major-domo the amount that he was to spend for the banquet? So that Lucullus had only to say in which room he would sup, and the functionary knew the number of courses he was to serve. Nero, going a step beyond Lucullus, built the famous house of gold to give banquets in; Heliogabalus surpa.s.sed even Nero in the magnificence of his feasts, where there were as many courses as there were letters in the alphabet. Ah! you must agree, monsieur, after that, that we do not know how to eat! Think of the Emperor Claudius Albinus, who had for his breakfast five hundred figs, a hundred peaches, ten melons, a hundred ortolans, forty oysters and a lot of grapes! of the Emperor Maximin I, whose usual ration was sixty pounds of meat and twenty-four pints of wine; so that he became so fat that he wore his wife"s bracelets as finger rings. Think of----"
But Monsieur Ferulus discovered that he was talking to deaf ears, because they had all taken their places at the table; whereupon he ran to the seat which he had caused to be reserved for himself, between Uncle Mignon and Monsieur Moulinet; and Monsieur Ferulus had ordered the servants to place the large dishes in front of him, having told Robineau that he would undertake the duty of carving.
The large armchair reserved for solemn occasions had been taken to the dining-room, and Robineau had offered it to Monsieur de la Pincerie, who had planted himself in it; and the elevation of the seat, added to his tall stature, caused him to soar above the rest of the guests.
"Mon Dieu! How handsome my father is like that!" said Eudoxie, who had found a way to sit beside Edouard; whereas Cornelie, seated between Robineau and Monsieur Berlingue, sulked throughout the dinner, because Alfred laughed and chatted with two young women between whom he was sitting.
"Madame," said the Chevalier de Tantignac, who was at Eudoxie"s right, "I was once at a dinner where everyone was seated on a chair the height of which was proportioned to his merit; I actually touched the ceiling, and the servants were obliged to stand on stilts in order to serve us."
"Who wants soup? Who has not any soup?" cried Monsieur Ferulus, as if speaking to his scholars.
"This is worthy of Heliogabalus," said Monsieur Berlingue.
"Oh! messieurs," said Monsieur de la Pincerie, after swallowing two plates of soup, "I hope to entertain you with better dinners than this!
When I have completed my economical schemes, in which I prove that soup can be made without meat, I will show you some amazing soup!"
"I trust that I shan"t dine with him that day," said Monsieur Berlingue to his neighbor.
"You seem to be eating nothing, fair Cornelie?" said Robineau, with a languishing glance at his neighbor.
"I am not hungry, monsieur."
"Ah! that is the way I was the day before yesterday!"
"Your friend Alfred seems to be in very high spirits."
"Yes, he"s a facetious fellow.--Will you have a little of the _vol-au-vent_?"
"I will take just a taste of it."
"Monsieur Ferulus, a taste of _vol-au-vent_ for Mademoiselle de la Pincerie."
Monsieur Ferulus had a way of serving by which the choicest bits were always left for himself.
"Who on earth is that gentleman who carves so well and serves us so ill?" asked a young man to whom Ferulus had as yet given nothing but legs, necks and bones.
"He is a scholar, a philologist; he manages everything in the chateau."
"And eats everything too, I should say."
"He knows ten tongues."[10]
"Ah! in that case, I am not surprised that he eats so fast!"
"Who was it who arranged the guests in this way?" inquired Mademoiselle Cornelie; "it seems to me that it"s a wretched arrangement."
"It was my librarian who undertook to do it; but I told him to place me beside you, otherwise the whole thing would have seemed dull and wretched to me.--You drink nothing! here is a certain burgundy----"
"Oh! the idea! Do you expect a woman to drink, and to be a connoisseur in wine?"
"Mademoiselle is right," said Ferulus, filling his gla.s.s; "wine is not suited to the fair s.e.x; Mecenius killed his wife because she had drunk wine; in the time of Romulus, a woman having broken the seals of a cellar, her kinsmen condemned her to die of starvation!"
"Oh! for heaven"s sake, let us alone with your Romans, monsieur!" said Madame Gerard; "they were impertinent creatures if they prevented their wives from doing as they chose!--Give me some wine, Monsieur Gerard."
"That woman has a very masculine tone," said Eudoxie, turning to Edouard.--"Uncle Mignon, please fetch me my handkerchief, which I left in the salon."
Uncle Mignon regretfully left the table to fetch his niece"s handkerchief, and when he returned, Cornelie sent him to find her reticule. Meanwhile, Monsieur Moulinet went into ecstasies over all that was given him to eat, exclaiming:
"You have a delicious cook, Monsieur de la Roche-Noire."
"She is a woman," said Robineau; "she is a girl of great merit; it was she who won the prize on the greased pole."
"We already know a part of her merits," said Monsieur Berlingue.
"In old days, that girl would not have remained in her kitchen," said Ferulus, "Sultan Osman made a gardener who planted cabbages well a viceroy; Anthony gave a Roman citizen"s house to a cook, and Henry VIII, King of England, raised to a post of honor a scullion who had cooked a wild boar to a turn."
"Evidently," said Monsieur Berlingue in an undertone, "that fellow has sworn to make us eat ancient history."
"I have a prodigious talent in the way of cooking," said Tantignac, "although you might not think it. You may judge for yourselves. One day, three of my friends came unexpectedly to dine with me, in an isolated chateau where I was living; all my servants had gone out, and there were no provisions in my castle. Well! what do you suppose occurred to me? I had an old pair of leather breeches which I no longer wore, and I took it into my head to regale my friends on them; I sc.r.a.ped and cleaned them, put them into the kettle, and made such a delicious sauce for them, that my guests and myself made an excellent dinner!"
"I see nothing so extraordinary in that," said Edouard, who was beginning to weary of Monsieur de Tantignac"s lies; "once I entertained a friend at breakfast with old sheets of parchment stewed _a la poulette_."
"Oh! upon my word, monsieur," sneered the chevalier, "allow me to tell you that that is a little too much! Parchment would never digest."
"Why, monsieur," said Edouard, "I allowed you to dine on leather breeches; it seems to me that you might in return allow me to breakfast just once on parchment!"
The company laughed heartily, and the Chevalier de Tantignac did not breathe a word during the rest of the meal.
Cornelie was bored at the table, and she requested Robineau to hasten the service, on the pretext that it was not good form to be a long while at dinner; but Monsieur Ferulus constantly invented some pretext or found some quotation as an excuse for keeping the dishes which the servants were about to remove. But at last they arrived at the dessert; the ladies, who were burning with the desire to dance, were already suggesting an adjournment to the ball room, when Monsieur Ferulus rose and observed in a solemn tone that he had something to sing on a subject which could not fail to interest the company.
Everybody was silent and waited for him to begin; the librarian drank a gla.s.s of madeira to give himself courage, and began, to the tune of the lament of the Marechal de Saxe, a eulogy of Robineau, in which he compared him with Saturn, Sophocles, Cicero and Bayard. The guests glanced furtively at one another, biting their lips. Uncle Mignon alone stuffed himself with biscuits and macaroons, taking advantage of a moment when his nieces left him undisturbed.
As it was plain after the third couplet that Monsieur Ferulus did not propose to stop, a faint murmur arose. Robineau, taking that for a sign of approbation, lowered his eyes modestly, and said to Mademoiselle Cornelie:
"He insisted upon singing these couplets. Certainly if I had suspected that he would mention me, I would not have consented."
"Very well, monsieur, then tell him to hold his tongue, and order the coffee at once."
Instead of ordering the coffee, Robineau tried to think how he could demand an encore, as he had promised Ferulus to do; but a part of the ladies had already left the table, and the others soon followed their example; the men made haste to drink their coffee, and Monsieur Ferulus discovered that he was singing for Uncle Mignon alone; even he was soon called away by his nieces to tie something or other.
"Behold the results of a poor education," said Ferulus to himself; "these people put on airs and have no manners! I will go and sing my couplets to Jeannette; she will listen to me or tell me the reason why."
The ball room was decorated as if for a distribution of prizes. The musicians, seated upon raised benches, played false with distressing self-a.s.surance; but when it is a question of dancing, the ladies are always indulgent. Monsieur Robineau opened the ball with Cornelie; Alfred danced opposite them, which aroused a spirit of emulation in Mademoiselle de la Pincerie, who executed her steps with such accuracy that Robineau cried:
"She dances like a geometrician!"