Adventures With a Restaurant

I

INNOCENCE is often a substitute for courage, and innocence of cooking was my stock in trade a few years ago when I started to run my restaurant. That, with some odd francs in my apron pocket, no cook, and great bewilderment in a foreign land. At that time it was not just a restaurant I wanted; in fact, I did not know that I wanted a restaurant at all until I saw Rosalie’s. The simple truth is that I was so enthralled by the gentle, confused Bohemianism of the place that I caught the desire to buy it as one catches a disease, and forgot to wonder whether I could cook or not.

Rosalie’s restaurant was in Paris, down an old-fashioned side street of the Latin Quarter — on the Rue Campagne-Première, just two blocks from the Dôme. Anyone who knew the Quarter before the war will remember it, with its sawdust and red brick floor, its boisterous cheer, its savory Italian meals — the air about it of being there to serve young artists while they learned to paint.

All her life Rosalie had known and worked for artists. When she was young, she posed. Dagnan-Bouveret discovered her when she was sixteen, peddling fruit; and, with a commanding eye for beauty, he literally wrenched her from her pushcart into his studio. From him she passed to other fames, posing for Bouguereau, and perhaps for Whistler. She can be seen as ‘Truth’ by Bouguereau in the Luxembourg, and, in her own mind, as a Madonna which she says Whistler painted.

Legends aside, she posed all through the days of her youthful grace, and then, during middle age, she dusted and cleaned the studios, mingling reminiscences with work. So in later years, when she decided to feed the profession and hung up her sign, ‘Chez Rosalie,’ her clientele was already at her doorstep, for any artist who had ever known her would hurry gladly to eat and chat with her.

At the time I first knew Rosalie she was a stunning woman of sixty-five, of statuesque Roman profile and ample form, animated by keen likes and dislikes for the people she let in to be fed. You had to be in some way related to Art to get in at all (my husband is a painter); and, once in, to eat there happily you had to meet with Rosalie’s approval. She would never actually put you out, but her aversion would take very definite forms. She would bring you what you had not ordered, or nothing at all for a long time, or charge you double, or throw up her hands and exclaim, if you happened to be a woman, ‘Why aren’t you at home, cooking for your own man?’ In the end your meal would be ruined by nervous indigestion, and you would stay away forever. But for those she liked there were always chicken (not posted on the menu), alert and willing service, and a hearty welcome.

On general principles, she disliked the ‘chic.’ Her greeting to one of the conscious well-to-do was usually a sharp invitation to ‘Stay at the Ritz, where you belong!’ Though her favor seldom fastened upon women, she was kind to me from the first, and during the period just before she thought of giving up her restaurant I stood in her special good graces. For this I can claim no credit. My husband had gone to America, and Rosalie had adopted a protective attitude toward me, as if I were the only lone woman in France. She would charge me once for turkey when I had eaten twice of it, or for my dessert she would bring me the cream cheese which she withheld from others until the more perishable cheeses had been consumed.

Thus I was in the way of becoming a charitable habit with Rosalie when, suddenly, she was taken sick for the first time in her stalwart life — a sort of half stroke which convinced her that the warning for rest had come at last. The next day she dressed in velvet and sat in the corner of the dining room with folded hands, to all intents and purposes beginning her retirement. But the business was far from feeling its last days. It ran on in turmoil, Rosalie had no gift for ordering others, although she could shower vivid and precise reproaches. Consequently she found that she could not keep servants; they came and went so fast that they clashed on the doorsill. Meanwhile the business dangled on the efforts of Rosalie’s reluctant son, who produced inferior omelettes by the hundred for clients who clamored for Rosalie’s spaghetti and rich stews.

It was while things were at this pass that I intimated to Rosalie that I should be glad to take the restaurant off her hands. As soon as her astonished mind had grasped the idea, she exclaimed, ‘But business is business!’ That shrewd look which invades the expression of Latins when a bargain is pending came over her face, and she made it clear that she would do what she could to forget our friendship, lest it befog the deal. She believed that I was essentially informal, and she knew that a stiff manner in her successor would be fatal to the enterprise. But as she had sat in velvet those last few weeks she had been more than ever convinced that a restaurant is founded primarily on a cook, and although she had never branded me as ‘chic,’ she thought I was too much a woman of the world and too little of a cook.

Rosalie knew that I believed in atmosphere. Fortunately for me, there were rival buyers who did not. There was, for example, an Armenian bartender who had a pretentious idea of putting in a white tile floor. That killed his prospects, for Rosalie loved her old floor, and so did I. It was, as I have said, of bricks and sawdust, and it humped up in the middle where the catacombs were supposed to ramble beneath it. The walls were the color of mustard, and dripped with dampness in the winter — dark brown drops. The kitchen was minuscule, and the stovepipe once came clattering down in a crisis at mealtime. The tables were of cracked marble, and the guests sat on stools. There were four chairs for the aged or the earliest comers, placed against the dampest wall, a decrepit gas jet, a mottled mirror, and a temperamental clock. This clock was dear to Rosalie, and she prayed me never to entrust it for repairs to any expert. But since the slightest breeze put it out of order, and since it was ceiling high and responsive only to her coaxings, it remained all through my régime at the hour of six.

My ultimate triumph, however, in falling heir to these treasures was long delayed. Some of my own qualities argued against me more eloquently than my rivals. Rosalie hated what she called my ‘bureaucracy,’ and held it as a blot upon my character that I knew how to add. Pencil in the hand, or figures in the head — the real Bohemian is at heart too large for such! Though Rosalie scorned all methods of accounting, she had formerly had a system of her own. In August, during the lull that comes to any restaurant without an ice box, even in Bohemia, she would write upon the wall her cash in hand. That was all there was to her system, except to forget about it until another riotous, non-calculating year should have run its course to another August. But once a hungry artist had painted a mural over these annual accounts in payment for his meal, and since Rosalie was an apt symbolist as well as a reluctant mathematician, she gave up keeping books then and there.

In the end, she was magnanimous enough to overlook my faults, and it was agreed that I was to succeed her in the Rue Campagne-Première.

II

To procure a business in France is more complicated than to run it. Rosalie was confused by all the arrangements that had to be made, and as the proceedings dragged along she became resentful. ‘Why a contract?’ she protested, as my lawyer discussed it with hers. ‘I can’t write and she can’t cook, so why bother the Government at all?’ She thought of all papers, legal discussions, and lawyers as ‘the Government,’ and never called them anything else.

About one point she grew quite formal and insistent as legalities went on piling up. That was the spaghetti. If there was going to be a contract, — and we had forced it upon her, — then write spaghetti, large and important, into it. She had always told me that it was the backbone of the business; that I must cook it her Italian way; that spaghetti, and spaghetti only, could bridge the gulf between her clients and mine. I believed her, I promised, I swore to make it; but that was not enough. ‘Print it out in black and white,’ she said, with scorn for all the black and white that had already gone into nonessentials. ‘Write it in the contract that every meal served forever after has got to have spaghetti in it!’ When her own lawyer, w’ho was also a wrine merchant, objected, Rosalie accused him of reserving a place in the contract for his own wines, and he had considerable trouble explaining to her that the legal transfer of a restaurant cannot concern itself with compulsory items of the menu, be they food or drink.

Nearly every day we signed some paper. It took two months for me to buy the restaurant after Rosalie and I had come to our personal agreement about it. There were countless delays. The first came when Rosalie published her intention to sell; the law prescribed that we wait a certain period for her debts to spring up. A superfluous precaution, for Rosalie had no debts; she had always paid cash, and kept her money in her petticoat. Next, I brought matters to a standstill when I could n’t remember the date of my grandfather’s birth, and had to be allowed to approximate it. Then, deep in and far along in the arrangements, somebody suddenly remembered that I was a woman, and married — and therefore powerless. That almost dashed our deal upon the rocks. Rosalie’s endurance exploded.

‘You are only a woman!’

‘ So are you! ’

‘Happily, I am a widow!’ And she rushed off to reopen pourparlers with the Armenian bartender.

Abroad, a married woman is helpless without her husband’s authority to act. Although my husband had given me power of attorney eight pages long, no restaurant was mentioned in it, and in France a general power cannot be drawn up. It was firmly and exactly told off for me just what I could do in my husband’s name: I could build his house if I wished; if need be, I could represent him in matters of crime; I could open his registered mail — but I could not run his restaurant. I protested that the restaurant was not his, but ‘the Government’ said it was quite useless to discuss who owned the restaurant beyond the fact that I never could.

What was I to do? Rosalie was drinking friendly wine with the Armenian at all hours, and I was more than ever determined that the prize should not go to him by default. At last my lawyer, who is an American, hit upon a device in argument which won the day. He brought to light that I was born in Wisconsin, and that my husband was domiciled in Washington, where I should also be domiciled if I were living where I ought to be; that Wisconsin and Washington are places where women have the power of independent commercial action, though married; and that I ought to be permitted, therefore, to behave as independently in France as I should be permitted to behave at home. Although a bit of fuss was made about allowing the freedom of Wisconsin and Washington to take root in France, a settlement was effected upon this basis, and I was legally invested as Rosalie’s successor.

III

During the final stages of these negotiations, Rosalie took it upon herself to teach me to shop. The business of breaking me in necessitated a return to health and activity, so she put off velvet and went back into her winecolored sweater and nine-gored skirt. As for me, the worst clothes I had were not disreputable enough to satisfy her, so I enlarged a hole in my oldest coat and let my skirt sag down behind. Dressed for our parts, we bustled off to the Central Markets every morning before six, laden with crippled baskets and dusty sacks — Rosalie to buy provisions, I to watch her buy, and, as I soon discovered, to lift and carry for her.

These Central Markets in Paris consist of eight enormous pavilions, zincroofed and open on the sides, that fairly bulge with produce of all kinds. Pushcarts clatter over the cobblestones. Hucksters shriek their wares. And here, in the reek of garlic and stale cabbage, in the din of jostling crowds, curses, rough jokes, and perpetual haggling, one comes upon the real paradise of the commercial-minded and the shrewd.

‘This is reality,’ I said to myself, ‘a ruddy, noisy sphere where nothing counts but muscle, wits, and speed. No brooding before the fact. Rush in and get your bargain, and rush out with it ’ — when, bump! my hat was off, rolling in the mud, in collision with a leg of veal.

‘ You should n’t wear a hat! ’ cried Rosalie.

The next day I left my hat at home, and we paid two sous less for battered apples.

Rosalie denied me all the luxuries my exhaustion prompted. ‘You must not call a porter for your sacks: the apple woman might see you and think you are rich. If you can lift them to the porter’s back, you can have them on your own.’ So saying, she loaded me with a ponderous sack. The lesson was clear, and I was learning; but I knew that I was also being used, for during my apprenticeship, all the while I tugged and lifted, variety began to appear on the menus ‘Chez Rosalie.’ Heretofore, her meals had been conditioned by her own back. As she explained, she was building up the business for me.

She taught me to break a turkey’s beak. If it makes a certain crisp, young sound, that turkey is for you. I do not know whether this test of turkeys is acknowledged by the world at large, but Rosalie believed in it. You must do it on the sly; as a shopping gesture it is forbidden by the most sacred laws of market places. You must bend over the bird while the merchant’s back is turned, or seem to be probing its breastbone, which is legitimate. I go on breaking turkey beaks to this day, although I cannot distinguish between a crisp, young sound and a dull, old sound. All I am sure of is that if you find a turkey with its beak already broken, you can be certain that it did n’t suit someone who really knows.

Rosalie rehearsed me in the manners that count in shopping. She taught me to scowl and cajole and joke. She taught me to shrug and desert a piece of meat that I was bound to have. She knew all the ways to get things cheap. Little room was left for my own initiative, although once she did have to praise me — the day I invented the scheme of not having quite enough money. ‘That’s too much!’ I exclaimed, showing a depleted purse. ‘I have n’t got it.’ And with Rosalie watching in amazement, the butcher reduced his price by fifty francs. But the manœuvre never worked again. The next merchant lent me what I lacked, to pay him what the meat was worth.

Rosalie knew that she would continue in the minds of the tradesfolk as a shrewd and living memory, so she introduced me everywhere as a working woman of her own family. To the mutton man I was presented as her natural daughter, heretofore hidden away in Italy, but she had to admit, reluctantly, that I had also spent some years in America. To me, afterward, she summarized all these efforts in hopeless French. ‘I have done what I can for you, ma fille, but you have an English accent that will betray you.’

IV

At last, when the time came for me to take over the reins of the enterprise, my plans were upset by an unexpected blow. The cook, upon whom I had staked everything, failed me.

Vadja is her name, and she is Polish. She had been my servant in the country the year before, when she had come to me after two French religious maniacs had gone crazy in my kitchen. Vadja’s feet are on the ground; she is a realist; she sleeps all night and rushes at her work. With her to aid me, I had felt confident of becoming a creditable successor to Rosalie. Before the restaurant had even been thought of, she attached herself to me for life, saying, ‘Go out into the world and find a business for us both to work in.’ She consented to anything, on general principles, and to the restaurant, in particular, when I wrote her about it. She did not hesitate when I described its most awkward, dirty, madcap phases. I told her about the rats in the cellar, and the clients who might try to kiss her — it was all one to her. And then, at the eleventh hour, her brother came down with pneumonia, and she could not leave him.

There seemed nothing for it but to close the restaurant before I had opened it. ‘What! Close?’ Rosalie’s disapproval was withering. She had not once closed in eighteen years. Clients, she said, can be held only through force of habit; if you give them freedom to explore, they will find that the Ritz or Claridge’s will do just as well. Nevertheless, I made up my mind to wait for Vadja, and decided to close the restaurant for a week. The interval could be devoted to cleaning up the place, and, to be frank about it, I put up a sign to that effect.

But Rosalie said that too much cleanliness is also bad. She withdrew her offer to help, and sat in sharp secession in the comer, dressed again in velvet. All my friends came in to assist me, and I needed every one. While relays of us rested, other relays attacked with fresh courage those unspeakable recesses behind the stove. Nausea brought down the strongest of us. And the strange thing about it was that we could not, by look or word, let it appear that we attributed the state of the place to Rosalie; we could not seem to blame her. True, those were her nests of bygone spaghetti on the floor, those her walls embossed with the gravy of past beefsteaks. Indignation would rise within us, but we could not focus it upon her.

The valiant group of friends, victims of my commercial impulse, saw me through. I myself ran along smoothly on my muscle power, busier than the sun, rising before dawn and setting at midnight. Through it all I worked like a madman, but to Rosalie I was nothing but a business coward who scrubbed to cover fright.

V

The opening day dawned more hectic than any of its predecessors. I had not slept at all. Rosalie had taken from midnight on to pronounce her last words of wisdom. Worn-out with talk, I took down the slate and began to print the luncheon menu — without prices, as she had always printed it. I was anxious to continue the traditions of the place, and had not realized that in this instance I should be usurping one of her most precious prides.

‘So you think you can go on as I have, charging by the head?’ she cried, her spirit stung to jealous anger by this indication that I thought myself great enough to invent the fee to fit the client.

During her régime no two people eating the same meal had ever paid the same price: each was charged what Rosalie thought he ought to pay. For the benefit of her public she went through all the motions of making out bills, but the totals she invoked by instinct. She scribbled figures on the marble table tops, — a scrawl for each dish, illegible even to herself, — but the show she made of adding up had only the hand jerks of arithmetic. It furnished her the pause which her subconscious mind needed to prompt her what to charge. And all the while she murmured in Italian. That helped her to ‘ rate them,’ she once explained to me.

‘You better write down your prices and stick to them if you don’t want a riot for a meal! There is only one Rosalie in the world.’ It was only too true.

Rosalie gave further proof of her uniqueness by thinking up many matchless ways to help me the day of my début. To begin with, she took me to market at three in the morning. I protested, for I knew that three was the wholesale hour, when supplies are sold only by the wagonload.

‘You are needing a great deal of everything,’ she replied; ‘the earlier the better.’

Too much of everything was not enough to satisfy her. Rosalie had never before participated in the spending of another’s money. She bought a cartload of cabbages, and told me to resell what I did not need (which I did, at a loss). She took on fifty-five kilos of spinach, remarking that it condensed in cooking. We waited until seven for the half-wholesale marketing of meat to begin, and by that time my independence was sufficiently awake to deny her an entire carcass of no matter what animal. Adding twelve ducks and three pumpkins to our purchases, we taxied home.

Duck and spinach may combine delightfully on a menu, but duck feathers and spinach stems can spread chaos in any kitchen where nimble friends are assembled plucking and cleaning. At eleven, the whirlwind moment when the last plumes were hesitating where to fall, Rosalie made her final inspection of the premises, the tidiness of which had been such an obsession with me the previous week. She said very little, but her shrug at the vanity of it all was more eloquent than words.

VI

Among the earliest arrivals was a family of spaghetti eaters. Rosalie was quick to detect them. She rushed up to the group, assuring them that there was no risk in the spaghetti, since she, herself, had made it. She was almost humble, quite unlike her old assertive self, so great was her dread of the reaction of these connoisseurs to my first spaghetti.

I found that it was not possible to learn Rosalie’s recipe for spaghetti once and for all. I must vary it: I must take on her genius, as it were, so that spaghetti should taste a little different every day. All that is choicest in the kitchen must go into it; the establishment must turn upon its sauce. To it are dedicated chicken livers, and tomatoes out of season, and bacon, no matter what the cost. Then there is the subtle question of the garlic. One must rub it in often, ‘mais jamais toujours’ — just now and then. ‘About every other day?’ I asked, in my eagerness to space it right. ‘Mais non’ — the intervals between must be in no way regular; garlic must function as a perpetual expectation, but touch the tongue as a surprise. And spaghetti must always be ready, but never heated in advance, never broken, and always handled with a certain fork which consisted of a space between two prongs.

Above all, I must never raise the price. It was selling for seventy-five centimes when I took over the restaurant. Counting the cost one day, I found that it came to sixty-five in ingredients alone, and this did not allow for any variation in the theme, for chicken livers or their equivalents — no margin for the agony of composition, for the steadiness of hand, for the foreign worry of it. It looked like a doubtful asset, this legacy of spaghetti à la Rosalie, but it was one I could not refuse to be heir to, at least during the transition period. For, as a prophetic friend explained, the spaghetti eater would venture seventy-five centimes, and no more, on the national dish made by a rank outsider, and for the time being the rest of my clientele was bound to consist of other eaters come in to watch the Italian group tasting for flaws. So I charged my losses on spaghetti to entertainment, and sought to tempt the appetites of the observers with apple pie.

In view of the pitfalls that beset me, I had every reason to be pleased when I saw that my first spaghetti was appealing to the customers. The family of four consumed five rounds apiece. The street outside began to swarm with clients, and the restaurant was soon filled with people eating unfalteringly down the menu. Rosalie took up a strategic position in the kitchen, making portions — mountains of someone else’s food. Gradually I began to have misgivings. I overheard remarks. Many thanked me, but no one stepped up to pay. Rosalie darted from the kitchen to encourage those who hesitated to take two desserts. Then the truth dawned upon me. Unknown to me, she had announced the length and breadth of the Latin Quarter that the first meal was to be free to all comers.

Under such auspices, my début was acclaimed a magnificent success.

Curiosity filled the restaurant again for dinner. Even those who had overeaten at noon for nothing returned and paid. Beggars and street entertainers had gotten wind of the change in management, and came to try whether the door would be cordial. Rosalie had maintained a vigorous campaign against them for years. I put out as many as I had time and energy to attend to. One entertainer, knowing that I could not refuse him if he sat down to eat, legalized his presence by an order and later performed his trick, which consisted in balancing a burning cornucopia on his nose.

About nine o’clock it rained — an unannounced, terrific downpour, with thunder. All who were eating stayed on for shelter. A Spanish guitarist, dark and sombre, began to play plaintive tunes. A table of Italians decided to sharpen my knives, stroking legato time to the music. The assembled Americans sighed appreciatively, having come upon atmosphere at last. The concierge, that dragon guardian of whose despotism no building is free, burst in to remind me that it was ten o’clock, and that the restaurant was not a music hall. The Italians hissed him out into the rain, and called for more knives to sharpen.

Terrified by the thought of what the concierge might do on the morrow to avenge himself, I appealed for quiet in very bad French. Fright interferes with one’s accent, and someone understood me to say that the American Consul was lodged upstairs. A song was immediately improvised to that effect, and confusion and amusement raged to a charming climax. Then and there my reputation for informality was made, between thunderbolts.

VII

As the days went on, the same mouths came back to be fed. My clientele was gradually being built up of straggling, experimental eaters who joined the ranks of the habitués. The rack for napkins began to fill. Restaurants like mine always have racks, partitioned off and numbered, where a napkin, once paid for, may be kept in personal isolation until the laundryman comes round. I do not know whether this is strictly a French institution, but I do know that a rack well filled is the sign of an economical, repeating clientele, for a man does not save his napkin if he hopes never to return.

When things settled down to an even pace, Rosalie went into retirement, and after her departure I soon learned that I had contracted not simply to feed people, but to enter into their lives. Where people eat informally, they expect to be listened to. Older women, relaxing over lunch, always told me how they had passed their mornings. I was talked to, talked at, talked through, until there seemed to be nothing to my business but an open ear.

Disturbing situations multiplied from day to day. In fact, I seemed to set my tables for the nourishing of problems. To illustrate my difficulties, let me describe a sample gathering. One could count upon an ever-present triangle — a husband and wife, and her ex-husband, all of them furious at finding themselves unexpectedly brought face to face in one small room; the patron of another restaurant stingier than mine, who had come to scrutinize my portions; a government official, eating in plain clothes to spy upon my prosperity, so as to levy taxes in accordance with his notion of it; a group of incredulous sight-seers, come to watch a business where customers make out their own bills, put in their money, and take out their own change; and Rosalie, come to taste and criticize the spaghetti, which had just run out.

Slumming had set in, too. Word had gone abroad that the place was ‘quaint,’ and droves of people came in the spirit of an audience, to catch a glimpse of the real Bohemia. Some inquired about the rats that used to gambol in the dining room during Rosalie’s régime; others asked to see the decorations which Maurice Utrillo had flung upon the wall in a moment of too much wine. The rats were in the cellar, but as for the murals — Rosalie had dug them from the wall to sell, just before I took the restaurant. Utrillo’s work had grown in value, and she is said to have realized enough to repay herself for the wine he drank on credit during his early, thirsty days.

In the midst of my perplexities, which were never the same two days running, I began to realize my inadequacy to fill the boots of the dauntless Rosalie. I coveted all her qualities, particularly her gift for rage. The whole Quarter used to flock to hear her angers. Her receipts must have doubled on the days of her ill humor. And what is more, she got results; her glare had the magic potency of Jove’s lightnings. At this juncture I thought of Vadja. She was a superb cook, but she also possessed dramatic talents. Could she not be pressed into supplementary service on this larger stage? I determined to give her the chance. Stating the case quite simply, I told her to spread herself all over the whole enterprise, and act as much like a younger Rosalie as she could.

Vadja threw herself into the business of being a character with fine enthusiasm. She could be impudent with charm, without offending either high or low. She liked the dramatic aspects of her new work, and her cooking took on the spiritual qualities of dash and verve. Her dining-room manners grew apace. Her talents were approaching their perfect flower, and she was well along the way toward becoming the consummate actress-cook, when a man of whom she approved began proposing marriage to her by mail.

This seemed to throw her out of gear. Only gradually did she confide in me how great was her emotional perplexity. When she had come to work for me, her heart had, indeed, been free, and she was sure of it. She had promised to stay with me. She had, of course, never contracted not to fall in love, and she realized that to take a husband would mean a deviation from her purpose. ‘I feel so churned,’ she said, using one of her apt farming verbs to tell me of the ups and downs she suffered.

Desperate as I was, I could not oppose the marriage; so I resigned myself to the inevitable, and Vadja went away. She promised to name her first child for me, and I drew what remote comfort I could from that. But it did not soften my immediate fate of being left to cope with the restaurant singlehanded.

The interval after her departure was a series of nightmares. A Norman couple came — and tapped my wine kegs with increasing effectiveness. I haunted the employment bureaus at all hours, but found them categorical, unresponsive to the flexible needs of my ménage. My friends — the friends who had scrubbed so valiantly — grew weary of watching my struggles.

Then, suddenly, like a miracle from a clear sky, Vadja wrote me that her husband was tired of the country and wanted to work in Paris. Did I know of a job for him? I replied that I knew of a job for her, and down she came to me, fresh as a new beginning, followed by the husband. He found remunerative work as a janitor at Colarossi’s, which is just a block away, and lived in the room I furnished for Vadja, and ate in the restaurant after hours.

In the radiance of getting Vadja back, I was able to ignore, as trifles of no consequence, all the daily difficulties that had loomed so large to me heretofore. Both she and I were buoyant. Everything was ‘marching well,’ and the restaurant seemed a complete success.

VIII

Now that I have done it otherwise, I know that the story of a restaurant ought to be written in dollars and cents, illustrated by long columns of expense and income. Lacking these, what can I say now, in solemn summary, to wind up the account of the wayward enterprise which these pages have attempted to describe?

The last word must inevitably be about Rosalie. She had gone into retirement at Cagnes, among the older artists she had known and fed. She resisted their appeals to open a café, but of evenings, there at Cagnes, she reminisced, and almost satisfied their hunger for real food by chatting of it.

From there she kept tab on me, checking all my faults. News of me reached her through the generous giveand-take of artists’ gossip. Though she could not write, she sent me letters taken down by some friendly scribe — long, wordy comments on the beauties of the scenery or the glories of the sun, in which her admonitions lurked and sprang without warning to stab me. Once it was, tersely, ‘You clean too much!’ Another time, ‘You have gone servant-mad!’ And later, so desperate did she think my need of the moment that she sent me a letter painfully printed out by her own hand, with no beginning and no end, no padding, not a single word about the weather — nothing but the one stark, terrifying truth: ‘Men have been known to die from figures in the head!’

Every spring, when she returned to Paris, she would analyze the winter that was past, dwelling on it in all its details. And I could see that in her wisdom she had sifted hearsay of its dross and pieced together a running version of my failings that was accurate, and even dated. It was only then that she ever touched upon spaghetti, as if it were a topic too sacred for the written word.

‘Ma fille’, she said one spring, with severity and pleading, ‘I hear that in January of this year, for fifteen days, you made spaghetti without garlic in it.’ And then, as though her heart would break (for spaghetti was working its way off my daily menus), she added, — oh, so kindly, — ‘Tu n’es pas bête, quand même.’ To hear her say that I was not too stupid for further help was more encouragement than I could bear.

And my clients, too — they never let me know that it was a business I was running. Probably it was not. They made it all too personal, all so much surprising fun (and trouble). It was as if they had conspired to keep me from being bored. Could it be that I had united a reckless band of fellows who did not come primarily to eat, but to pay good money to take part in my adventures? Surely the fun I have found in business could not be as contagious as that.