Madame Poulard

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

MADAME POULARD, who has retired from the savory kitchen of the Poulard Ainé at Mont Saint-Michel, was in her way as truly an artist as her friends whose sketches covered the walls of the salle-à-manger in the famous inn. To see her preparing an omelette or a stew, or keeping an eye on the chickens revolving over the fire, was to see a woman practicing an art rather than following a trade. In handling and using her utensils she had the grand air which distinguishes the artist from the artisan, the cook whose heart is in her work from the cook bent on earning a living. A charming woman said of the table of a club in an American summer resort, that there was no love in it; the actual needs were generally met, but there was no margin, no suggestion of human interest. You were treated as a boarder to be fed, and not as a human being with taste as well as appetite. Madame Poulard paid her visitors the compliment of treating them as persons to whom cooking as a fine art was a delicate tribute.

Sitting one day in the little openair café across the street from the Poulard Ainé, Madame Poulard coming to the door from time to time and smiling in her gracious way, an Englishman looked up from his after-dinner coffee and remarked that she was a European personage. She had welcomed a host of Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, and Americans to the old town, and they will always think of her as one of its most characteristic features. The little cafe was one of the most interesting places in Europe; and the few who sat under its roof were as much on the pavement as if they had been at the open-air tables of the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Italiens. Everybody who came into Mont Saint-Michel passed through the two narrow arched gates that pierce the wall between the hotel and the cafe. The street is a small alley, and the town is built along a series of stairways. In the old days the traveler came across the causeway from Pontorson by coach or carriage, was met at the outer gate by emissaries from the Poulard Ainé and the Poulard Jeune, and his luggage carried by hand to his destination.

In those days there was fierce rivalry between the two inns, — a strife as bitter as that between the Montagues and Capulets; for a family quarrel lay in the background and had grown to epic proportions. To reach the rival hotel it was necessary to conduct the guests past the hospitable doors of the inn “renowned for its omelettes,” and very pretty comedy was played every day before the eyes of the sitters in the café. At the precise psychologic moment, Madame Poulard stepped smiling out of her kitchen, with a grace of manner so full of cordiality that the new arrivals followed her queenly gestures instinctively as she waved them into her house, and left the emissaries of the other establishment vainly gnashing their teeth in the empty street. Site was a born hostess, and no visitor wished to go farther when she barred the way.

Dark of hair and eye, with a dignified and handsome figure and a manner full of charm, Madame Poulard was born to make strangers feel at home. She spoke French, not only with musical intonation, but so slowly and distinctly that dull ears caught her nice distinctions of sound, and understood. She was not only hostess of the inn, which she made famous throughout Europe, but of the town as well; she was the custodian of its traditions and the guide to its treasures of interest.

And what a town it is! From the yellow sands, which shine league on league when the tide is out, to the great door of the Castle and the spire of the beautiful Abbey Church, it is a matching of splendid architecture with a magnificent site in a setting of inimitable beauty. Battlement and church rise on a huge rock out of a sea full of magic. When the tide runs out, as far as the eye can reach stretches that wonderful shimmering surface alive with the vitality of the sea: beneath is the buried forest of Broceliande; beyond are the shores of Normandy, the spires rising from unseen villages; from that shore in the old days many a pilgrim took his conch and picked his way to the shrine of Saint-Michel.

They still come on festal days, but alas! the shell and staff are no longer borne; they come by trolley! Climb the long stairs in the shadow of the great pile; enter the portal of the fortress, pass through the noble Hall of Knights, where a little group of gallant men once stood out alone on the coast against Henry V; walk through the beautiful Abbey Church, descend the winding path along the battlements, and one seems to be moving through the Middle Ages, visible in massive wall and tower, and disclosed afresh to the mind by the history and traditions of a place unsurpassed in its picturesque beauty.

But. it is of the living, not the dead, that one takes account when Madame Poulard stands in the narrow street. If you lodged in the Maison Vert or the Maison Blanc you had your morning coffee and roll on a little terrace, overhung with vines, looking out on the sands or the sea; but for luncheon and dinner you descended to the house by the inner gate, and there was Madame moving quietly about, concerned with stews, soups, or oysters, as well as with omelettes. She was never hurried or preoccupied. She bore herself with the ease and freedom of a presiding genius, and her deftness was only an external and visible sign of an inward gift and calling. When the time came to go, no bill was presented; you kept your own score, and neither Madame nor Monsieur was concerned about small matters like afternoon tea. They said Saint-Michel watched over the inn and protected it from dishonest guests.

A fortune awaits the men and women who have the taste and skill to open and conduct attractive, artistic, thoroughly comfortable small hotels or inns in this country. Such hostelries are so few and far between that one can almost count them on his fingers. There are “ palatial hotels ” everywhere, with palatial prices; but where are the small, quiet, refined houses in which one can draw an easychair up to a low table, with a good reading light, and feel at home ? The traveler sits, as a rule, in a great room with composite marble pillars, in a vast leather chair, too heavy to be moved, with a light ten feet above his head. Where are the small hotels, with lovely gardens about them, such as one finds in all parts of England ? Where are the hotels with the air of hospitality for the individual rather than for the public en masse; with the personal touch which transforms cooking from the mere production of food to the kindly ministrations of a neglected art ? There is an unpretentious hotel in a small western town, kept by a woman who has the instincts of a hostess. It is a very simple house, and the furniture and decorations are commonplace; but it is full of flowers and pervaded by a sense of comfort and an atmosphere of home. A woman not only “runs ” it, but pervades it, — a very different matter; and men go a hundred miles out of the way to spend Sunday in its cheerful atmosphere. There is room for inns as well as for hotels in this country; there are hosts of people who long for quiet comfort; for low lights and bright fires in winter; for gardens in summer; for a homelikeness which opulence of furnishing and decoration have almost banished from American hotels.