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By Root 2380 0

was crowned with a magnificent mass of white hair, went off to do the marketing at Les Halles, the central markets, where she bought all the provisions, including flowers for the flat. I don’t think any shopping at all was done locally, except for things like milk and bread. She would return at about ten o’clock, two bursting black shopping bags in each hand, puffing, panting, mopping her brow, and looking as if she was about to have a stroke. Indeed, poor Madame, after I had been in Paris about a year, her doctor told her that high blood pressure made it imperative for her to diet. Her diet consisted of cutting out meat once a week. With Friday a fish day anyway, this actually meant two days without meat. On Wednesdays, the day chosen, Madame would sit at table, the tears welling up in her eyes as she watched us helping ourselves to our rôti de veau or bœuf à la cuillère. It was soon given up, that diet. Her grown-up children, two of whom were afflicted with a tragic eye disease and were probably going blind, simply could not bear to watch her sufferings—although, of course, they were not prepared to go so far as to share in her privations. Denise, the only able-bodied daughter, was the greediest girl I had ever seen. She worked as secretary to a world-famous Parisian surgeon, and came home every day to the midday meal. Before she took off her hat and coat she would shout out to Léontine to know what was for lunch. Munching through two helpings of everything she would entertain us to gruesome details of the operations performed by her employer.

It never occurred to me at the time to wonder whether she had really witnessed these harrowing sights or if it was just her own way of expressing her family’s morbid preoccupation with death and disaster, which reached its peak every Thursday. For Thursday was Madame’s jour, and not even the really remarkable turn-out of cakes and petits fours, mostly made by Léontine, reconciled us to the fact that courtesy demanded we put in an appearance and listen to stories of the appalling catastrophes which had befallen during the week la cousine Anne-Marie, Tante Berthe, her daughter Marguerite, mortally stricken with diabetes, and about half a dozen other ladies always dressed from head to foot in deepest black.

To make up for the ordeal of Thursday afternoon, the boarders (there were only three of us) soon got round to finding some pretext for not being present at Friday lunch. Ever since those days it has remained a mystery to me how people who were so fond of good food and who knew so much about it could endure to eat the boiled salt cod which was the regular Friday lunch. Grey, slimy, in great hideous flakes, it lay plonked on the dish without benefit of sauce or garnish of any kind. At that time I had not even heard of Provençal cooking, or of any of the excellent ways they prepare salt cod in the south, and did not of course know how the people of Provence would scoff at the very idea of a Norman cook producing a decent dish of morue. In any case, to avoid this horror, we used to treat ourselves to lunch in a students’ restaurant near the Sorbonne, where we thought ourselves lucky to eat egg mayonnaise and a dish of petits pois without being questioned by the family as to what the morning’s lectures had been about.

Another place where we enjoyed ourselves hugely was at the automatic restaurant, in the Boulevard St. Michel I think, all shining chromium and terribly noisy, where we got a plate of ham and an orange out of a slot machine for a few francs. Eating here was forbidden by Madame, who considered that neither the ambiance nor the food were suitable for young girls. We used to memorise the menu posted up outside some approved restaurant so that we should have an answer ready when she questioned us. We seldom got away with it, of course, because we were never able to describe the food in the detail required. What appalling ordures had been in the so-called vol-au-vent? Were the boulettes de viande made from beef or veal or lamb? Ah, tiens, des épinards à la crème, and did they