just as she has learned that people in the Antipodes are standing on their heads relatively to herself. So though she is half-aware that grease cooking may not be our natural diet, she says with a grimace of disgust, "You can't like that horrible cooking in butter, faugh!" or, "I can't stomach oil, can you?" Just as Raymond her son-good-natured but tactless can understand that we should have a prejudice in favour of our own countrymen, but does not expect us seriously to contradict his assertion that in the war one French poilu was as good as any two Englishmen." Your Northern Frenchman would almost come to blows with the Southern over the virtues of the respective bases of the kitchen. We have, after three months of laudatory speeches, almost convinced Madame Soltress that cooking in grease is not distasteful to us -as she cooks, that is; but we have never, never dared to hint to her that yet another cookery school exists, the English or water school. It is true that Madame Soltress will serve bouilli, which is stringy meat with all the goodness diffused into the soupe, only the fibre being left; this we munch with gherkins, more as a duty than as a pleasure, to save her from disappointment. But if we were to reveal that we boil beef and mutton for the meat, that we boil vegetables such as young peas, French beans, cabbage, or Brussels sprouts, and serve up the result unjumped in the frying-pan, or undecorated with sauce, her opinion of us, which is high now, would drop to unrecoverable depths. One day we shook her credulity to its foundations by saying in England one eats red-currant jelly with mutton: she could bear the fact that we were heretics-repudiating, as they assert bluntly, the blessed Virgin,-but if we had insisted that mutton and jelly makes a delectable culinary combination, I am convinced that Madame Soltress would have given us notice to quit. As it was, we contrived to leave her with the impression that we were merely deploring the gastronomic barbarities of our fellow-countrymen. And we had to mind our P's and Q's. Tact was the order of the day. It isn't every week in these post-war conditions that one can discover in a queer, old, almost medieval village in France, such a place as we had discovered in the Hôtel Soltress. It called itself Hôtel Soltress, indeed, and had a cheap letterpaper with the title printed across, but the board which announced this prevarication to the public was decently buried in acacia leaves. The "Hôtel" Soltress was part drinking-shop, part country restaurant, part hat-shop, and part general drapers. It had indeed reversed the practice of our greater emporiums, in which the restaurant is an addendum, a convenience for customers, and feeding is incidental to shopping: here the shop was but an annexe to the restaurant, shopping being incidental to dining. Farther down the road the Hôtel Soltress had a stable, and over the stable two rooms. These two rooms having been vacated, owing to the death of a pensionnaire an old man with a white beard, which reached to below his waist; an old fellow who Monsieur Soltress always asserted to be "a knockout, the most contradictory fellow you ever could meet," these rooms, the only spare rooms owned by the "Hôtel," having been put at our disposal for the rent of ten francs a day a-piece, full pension and no extras, we were not going to get ourselves pushed out of clover like this just on account of a difference about the tasty harmonies of jelly with mutton. And with a Southern Frenchman one has to be careful; from jelly and mutton to the Ruhr might only be the work of a few sentences, things being ticklish just then. The 'Dépêche,' the local paper, had some very cutting things to say about England, which we hoped to live down by personal charm is not example more powerful than precept? But to return to Madame Soltress' immediate anxiety, we were beginning to pick a bit at our meat. You can't expect everything for ten francs a day, which, with the exchange at 75, equalled about 2s. 94d. We had not, indeed, expected Soupe, as much as we got. trout, veal, and tomatoes, to be followed by custard; by Roquefort cheese (real creamy Roquefort, not the dried mummy of Roquefort which reaches England), or by small fresh country cheeses brought in on bay leaves; cantaloup melon, and then coffee with a dash of cognac, makes a fair meal for a pensionnaire at two and ninepence odd per day. This was only an average sample; besides I have forgotten the wine. Red country wine ad lib. Clearly Monsieur and Madame Soltress - who have some reputation in the village, having clambered to their present state solely by their own efforts-must have been caught napping when they made so absurd a bargain. But they don't seem to repine. Madame Soltress grumbles not because we eat up her profits, but because we don't eat enough of them. Yet we are beginning to pick at our meat, we are beginning to be, what parents call, in children, dainty. We are Broad Church in this cooking quarrel; we will eat your oil, butter, lard, or goosegrease, nor will we repudiate young peas steamed with a sprig of mint for the delights of any orthodoxy. But we confess to two things-one, that after several months of the hottest French French midsummer, invariable fried meat, whether composed of veal, of mutton, of chicken, or of rabbit (even of partridge, at ten francs a day!), begins to pall, and it does seem to us after serious trial observant of the complexions that goose-grease is probably of the villagers. They are more consistently delectable as meridionals. Not So darka winter diet; secondly, that haired maybe as you might the foregoing list lacks one im- expect, still they hold to the portant item, beef. Beef is a darker side of complexion, all rarity for the French village- except the grand-daughter of dweller, at least in these parts the owner of Tuk-Tuk, a child of Languedoc eat beef, why, who is silver-gilt like a thing it would be like eating your translucent to the sunlight. traction-engine. But the in- Now meridional people after terdiction upon beef springs three months of sunning should from no sad sentiment: peas- be almost of an Indian tint. ants aren't sentimental about These are browned, it is true, animals. It is a question of but beneath this surface tanbulk. The village butcher dare ning there shows a pallor due risk no slaughter of a whole to lack of blood. There is a ox unless upon some very bloodless air about the place; special occasion. A calf he many of the young girls too can dispose of in the week, suffer from chlorosis. and more rarely a sheep, but even these meats are not too readily bought; the French peasant eats his bread by the joint, his meat in veritable teatable fingers; besides, has he not his basse-cour running with chickens, and his cellar corners crowded with rabbit - hutches in which the furry victims seldom see the day till that of their extinction ? The butcher in Janac is far less prosperous than the baker. Of these varied meats which do not compensate us for the lack of beef, Tuk-Tuk prefers chicken; he is cannibal. TukTuk is, as I have said, a cockerel, but has this peculiarity, he is a regular Dempsey amongst cockerels. We have watched him grow. We remember his first fight when he stood looking rather like a ruffled toy feather-duster on two sticks opposed to an equally ruffled, equally toy duster, each frozen into belligerent stiffness, each waiting for an opening. Tuk-Tuk's subsequent battles in the triangular place mount into hundreds during a few months. We remember his first crow, when, his little neck stretched upwards as though he were being lynched by an invisible halter, he uttered what was meant for a clarion note, but which sounded very like I confess that after so many months we crave for beef, we crave for a bit o' steak done rare, for something with the juice running out. A fig for your anæmic fleshes. I would have a law interdicting the slaughter of calves as detrimental to the health of the nation. It is only since we have marked upon ourselves the effects of too much veal that we have become truly the scrape of a slate - pencil do not condemn me to become chicken during my next avatar. To Mimi, Kissme, or little Faust meal-time was a precarious moment, a morsel had to be simultaneously eaten and defended, or had to be flown with to some secret banqueting cell; but Tuk-Tuk, once having snatched his morsel from Jo's fingers, then enjoyed a meal which was more than mishandled by a vicious schoolboy. Tuk-Tuk became Jo's pupil as Mimi was mine. She taught him to jump for morsels held in the fingers, and we came to estimate his preferences by the heights to which he would spring for the tit-bit. It was not, indeed, a spring without risks. Mimi the cat, Kissme the dog, little Faust the pup, hung about us as eagerly as did Tuk-Tuk himself. The three-quarters Marathon. The latter, launching himself upwards to snatch from Jo's fingers the coveted dainty, could not always be sure that he might not descend unwittingly upon the fearful backs of his competitors, Mimi of the claws, or Kissme of the teeth. Placed together all three on the level, neither Mimi nor Kissme would have dared to offer injury to Tuk-Tuk-they respected property; but what if this property were to descend suddenly, whirlingly aflutter, on to their backs? They were both nervous animals; the actions of fright are often made without reflection. For chicken TukTuk would brave the adventurous leap of some four feet vertically; for lesser meats but three feet six or so. Soft bread tempted him to three feet on hungry days; crust he would not deign to consider. The thing which most astonished us was the power of his eyesight. He could distinguish at once what was and what was not a prize worth the effort, and we seldom saw him jump, mistaking dross for gold. I hope that my manifest sins tit-bit once fairly embeaked, a crowd of envious fowl would swoop upon him; off he would dash with a leggy stride. He would dip and dodge like a clever three quarter getting through the enemy's scrum, but, alas! no goal-line was there for him, nowhere could he touch down with safety. It is awkward enough dining when your hand and your mouth is the same utensil, but it becomes a torture when a host of greedy hand-mouths are waiting to rip away your prize. Tuk-Tuk perhaps got his dinner at about three pecks per hundred yards. Pray Buddha I don't become a hen. I also think that I'd rather not become a cat in a French village. Not that Mimi receives active ill-treatment; I don't think indeed that anybody could ill-treat Mimi, she is the soul of elusion. Visually she is a black cat with sloping hindquarters; orally she is also; but tangibly she does not exist. At least she does not exist tangibly to us: stretch we our hand ever so cautiously, she is a millimetre beyond our finger-tips; but she is tangible enough to Kissme and to little Faust, who utter nerve-racking yells from beneath our table whenever in some question of reparations Mimi plants her claws into the others' tender noses. We are apt to look upon cats as domesticated animals, but I wonder. In England maybe the cat is now a domesticated animal, but after having lived in France and Spain, especially in the country districts, I'm not sure of the true status of the cat. I think that the cat is only just becoming a domesticated animal; previously it was but tolerated vermin allowed to prey upon rats and mice, the intolerable vermin. Kipling's Just So' story is all wrong, even in Europe to-day. Nor do I wish to be changed to a French village dog. dog. Kissme and little Faust are French village dogs. You may think that the names are invented by a whimsical author, but they are exactly as we found them. Raymond Soltress, the son of the house, secrétaire at the Mairie, for which he receives 3000 francs, or about £45 per annum, knew beforehand that Kissme was an English word, though its significance surprised him. How the pup became Faust is a problem. We asked the reason, but no hint of the legend nor yet of the play or of the opera has filtered through to Janac. "C'est un nom du chien, quoi," replied Raymond. Faust, prototype of the soul seller, hero for Marlowe and for Goethe, inspiration for Berlioz and for Gounod, has come to be a mere nom du chien. It's as bad as "Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay, Will stop a hole to keep the draught away. Kissme is anything but its name, except when there is food to be coaxed. She is a little brown, wriggling, lunareyed, cringing, yapping, generally obnoxious piece of dogflesh called generically un rattier. The true territory of the "Hôtel ceases at the edge of the pavement, which they rent from the village placier for 25 francs a year, but Kissme, like David Copperfield's aunt, has extended a claim over threeparts of the road which lie before the house. No donkeys on the sacred sward were ever assailed by Miss Trotwood with more energy than Kissme assails anything moving which encroaches within this territory -oxen, horses, dogs, motorcars, chickens, ducks, children, donkeys, and pigs are saluted with ear-splitting objections, in which Kissme has a Janet represented by little Faust. The Southern races have no nerves for noise; the thready shrillings of these two animals almost rip the drum of the ear, but no correction is ever applied. Indeed, we are reminded of a conversation overheard in the train. A French soldier returning from the Ruhr was discussing Germany. What had struck him most of all was that |