“But there are lots of stoves where you can see the fire,” objected madame.
“Yes, and then it’s worse yet. Fire behind a grated window of mica. Flame in prison. Depressing! Ah, those fine fires of faggots and dry vine stocks out in the country. They smell good and they cast a golden glow over everything. Modern life has set that in order. The luxury of the poorest of peasants is impossible in Paris except for people who have copious incomes.”
The bell-ringer entered. Every hair of his bristling moustache was beaded with a globule of snow. With his knitted bonnet, his sheepskin coat, his fur mittens and goloshes, he resembled a Samoyed, fresh from the pole.
“I won’t shake hands,” he said, “for I am covered with grease and oil. What weather! Just think, I’ve been scouring the bells ever since early this morning. I’m worried about them.”
“Why?”
“Why! You know very well that frost contracts the metal and sometimes cracks or breaks it. Some of these bitterly cold winters we have lost a good many, because bells suffer worse than we do in bad weather.—Wife, is there any hot water in the other room, so I can wash up?”
“Can’t we help you set the table?” Des Hermies proposed.
But the good woman refused. “No, no, sit down. Dinner is ready.”
“Mighty appetizing,” said Durtal, inhaling the odour of a peppery pot-au-feu, perfumed with a symphony of vegetables, of which the keynote was celery.
“Everybody sit down,” said Carhaix, reappearing with a clean blouse on, his face shining of soap and water.
They sat down. The glowing stove purred. Durtal felt the sudden relaxation of a chilly soul dipped into a warm bath: at Carhaix’s one was so far from Paris, so remote from the epoch. …
The lodge was poor, but cosy, comfortable, cordial. The very table, set country style, the polished glasses, the covered dish of sweet butter, the cider pitcher, the somewhat battered lamp casting reflections of tarnished silver on the great cloth, contributed to the atmosphere of home.
“Next time I come I must stop at the English store and buy a jar of that reliable orange marmalade,” said Durtal to himself, for by common consent with Des Hermies he never dined with the bell-ringer without furnishing a share of the provisions. Carhaix set out a pot-au-feu and a simple salad and poured his cider. Not to be an expense to him, Des Hermies and Durtal brought wine, coffee, liquor, desserts, and managed so that their contributions would pay for the soup and the beef which would have lasted for several days if the Carhaixes had eaten alone.
“This time I did it!” said Mme. Carhaix triumphantly, serving to each in turn a mahogany-colour bouillon whose iridescent surface was looped with rings of topaz.
It was succulent and unctuous, robust and yet delicate, flavoured as it was with the broth of a whole flock of boiled chickens. The diners were silent now, their noses in their plates, their faces brightened by steam from the savoury soup.
“Now is the time to repeat the chestnut dear to Flaubert, ‘You can’t dine like this in a restaurant,’ ” said Durtal.
“Let’s not malign the restaurants,” said Des Hermies. “They afford a very special delight to the person who has the instinct of the inspector. I had an opportunity to gratify this instinct just the other night. I was returning from a call on a patient, and I dropped into one of these establishments where for the sum of three francs you are entitled to soup, two selected dishes, a salad, and a dessert.
“The restaurant, where I go as often as once a month, has an unvarying clientele, hostile highbrows, officers in mufti, members of Parliament, bureaucrats.
“While laboriously gnawing my way through a redoubtable sole with sauce au gratin, I examined the habitués seated all around me and I found them singularly altered since my last visit. They had become bony or bloated; their eyes were either hollow, with violet rings around them, or puffy, with crimson pouches beneath; the fat people had become yellow and the thin ones were turning green.
“More deadly than the forgotten venefices of the days of the Avignon papacy, the terrible preparations served in this place were slowly poisoning its customers.
“It was interested, as you may believe. I made myself the subject of a course of toxicological research, and, studying my food as it went down, I identified the frightful ingredients masking the mixtures of tannin and powdered carbon with which the fish was embalmed; and I penetrated the disguise of the marinated meats, painted with sauces the colour of sewage; and I diagnosed the wine as being coloured with fuscin, perfumed with furfurol, and enforced with molasses and plaster.
“I have promised myself to return every month to register the slow but sure progress of these people toward the tomb.”
“Oh!” cried Mme. Carhaix.
“And you will claim,” said Durtal, “that you aren’t Satanic?”
“See, Carhaix, he’s at it already. He won’t even give us time to get our breath, but must be dogging us about Satanism. It’s true I promised him I’d try and get you to tell us something about it tonight. Yes,” continued Des Hermies, in response to Carhaix’s look of astonishment, “yesterday, Durtal, who is engaged, as you know, in writing a history of Gilles de Rais, declared that he possessed all the information there was about Diabolism in the Middle Ages. I asked him if he had any material on the Satanism of the present day. He asked me what I was talking about, and wouldn’t believe that these practices are being carried on right now.”
“But they are,” replied Carhaix, becoming grave. “It is only too true.”
“Before we go any further, there is one question I’d like to put to Des Hermies,” said Durtal. “Can you,
