It was now ten o’clock in the morning, so I decided then and there to get back to Gisors and have some lunch.
As I was walking down the line I kept saying to myself:
“Gisors, Gisors, I am sure I know someone there. But whom? Gisors? I am certain I have a friend in the town.”
Suddenly a name leapt into my mind: “Albert Marambot.” He was an old college friend whom I had not seen for twelve years at least, and who practised medicine at Gisors. He had often sent me invitations, which I always accepted but never kept. This time, however, I would use my opportunity.
I asked the first person I met:
“Do you know where Dr. Marambot lives?”
He answered immediately in the drawling accent of Normandy:
“In the Rue Dauphin.”
I saw, indeed, on the door of the house he pointed out, a big brass plate on which was engraved the name of my old friend. I rang the bell, but the maid, a girl with yellow hair and slow movements, repeated stupidly:
“He’s out, he’s out.”
I could hear the clatter of forks and glasses, so I cried out:
“Hello, Marambot!”
A door opened and a fat man with side-whiskers came out with a vexed air, carrying a napkin in his hand.
Well, I really would not have recognised him. He looked at least forty-five, and I had an instant vision of the provincial life that makes a man heavy, middle-aged and old. In a flash of thought that took less time than the action of holding out my hand, I knew his life, his manner of living, his attitude of mind and his theories about things. I guessed at the large meals to which he owed his paunch, the drowsiness after dinner in the lethargy of an overladen digestion watered with cognac, the cursory examination he gave his sick when his thoughts were on the fowl roasting on the spit in front of the fire. His conversations on cooking, on cider, brandy and wine; on the manner of cooking certain dishes, and how best to thicken certain sauces, needed no further evidence than the moist redness of his cheeks, his drooping eyelids and the dull shine of his eyes.
I said to him:
“You don’t recognise me. I am Raoul Aubertin.”
He opened his arms and nearly suffocated me. His first words were these:
“You haven’t had lunch, of course?”
“No.”
“What luck! I was just sitting down to it and there is an excellent trout.”
Five minutes later I was sitting opposite him at lunch.
I asked him:
“You are still a bachelor?”
“My goodness, yes.”
“And are you happy here?”
“I am not bored; I keep busy. I have patients and friends. I eat well, enjoy good health—can laugh and hunt. That’s good enough for me.”
“You don’t find life monotonous in this little town?”
“No, old chap—not if you know your way about. A small place is in essentials very like a large one. Events and pleasures are less varied but one notices them more; there are fewer people but one sees more of them. If you know all the windows in a street, each one of them interests and intrigues you more than a whole street in Paris.
“A little town is very amusing, you know—very amusing, most amusing. Take this one—Gisors. I have at my fingertips all there is to know about it, from its beginning to the present day. You have no idea what a quaint history it has.”
“You are a native of Gisors?”
“Me? No, I belong to Gournay—its neighbour and rival. Gournay is to Gisors what Lucullus was to Cicero. Here everyone is out for Fame; people call us the ‘arrogant people of Gisors.’ At Gournay they think of nothing but their stomachs. We call them the ‘guzzlers of Gournay.’ Gisors despises Gournay, but Gournay laughs at Gisors. This is a comic country.”
I noticed that I was eating a truly exquisite dish of soft-boiled eggs surrounded by a layer of meat jelly savoured with herbs and slightly frozen.
Smacking my lips to please him, I said to Marambot:
“This is good.”
He smiled.
“It only requires two things—a good jelly, which is hard to get, and good eggs. Oh, good eggs—how rare they are, and, with a slightly reddish yolk, how savoury! For myself, I have two weaknesses, one for eggs, the other for poultry. I feed my hens in a special way. I have my own ideas on the subject. In an egg, as in the flesh of a chicken, or in beef, or mutton, or milk, or any of these things, there is, and one ought to taste it, the juices, almost the essence, of the internal secretions of the animal. How much better one would fare if everyone realised that!”
I laughed.
“So you are a gourmand?”
“Lord! It’s only idiots who are not! One is a gourmand much as one is an artist, or a scholar, or a poet. The palate, my dear, is a delicate organ as perfectible and as worthy of respect as one’s eyes or ears. Not to have a palate is to be deprived of an exquisite faculty, the power of appreciating the quality of food, just as one can be deprived of the power to appreciate the quality of a book or a work of art. It is like being deprived of one of the primary senses—a part of man’s superiority; without it, one is relegated to the innumerable ranks of weaklings, outcasts and fools of which our race is composed. In other words, it is like having a ‘low’ tongue instead of a low mind.
“The man who cannot distinguish between a crawfish and a lobster, or a herring (an excellent fish which has in itself all the flavour and scent of the sea) and a mackerel or a
