QUITE ALONE

    BOOK THE SECOND: WOMANHOOD

CHAPTER XXXVI. BEHIND THE MADELEINE

BEHIND the church of the Madeleine,
Rataplan—ex-drummer of the Imperial Guard,
ex-landlord of the Hôtel Rataplan, hard by
Leicester-square, London—kept a tavern for the
accommodation of English visitors to the only
city in the world worth living in.

Rataplan was old, his eye was glassy, his hand
tremulous, his voice husky, and his frame feeble,
but he was as fat as ever. His adiposity was
pendulous and flabby now, not firm and juicy,
but it was fat, nevertheless, and, at his age, that
was something to be thankful for.

Rataplan had given up cooking. It fatigued
him too much, he said. It was much if the
visitors to his hostelry could obtain a biftek aux
pommes, or an underdone slice from an ill-roasted
joint. Rataplan's long residence in Albion had
not disabused his mind of the impression that
all English people liked their meat very nearly
raw; and whenever an English groom (say) or a
workman employed at some factory in Paris
ordered a beefsteak to be cooked in the English
fashion, Rataplan would answer, "I know, ver
well red, n'est-ce-pas? Well bleeding, bien
saignant, hein?"

Nor had the good man's protracted sojourn in
the perfidious country enabled him to attain
anything approaching a copious, or even fluent,
acquaintance with its language. A stock of
idiomatic expressions he had, indeed, laid up,
which would have seemed to argue some
familiarity with our vernacular, but he still, to all
intents and purposes, spoke English execrably.

He wore the attire of a petty bourgeois now,
in lieu of his old and unvarying culinary costume.
It did not improve his personal appearance much.
He had looked as well, if not better, in his white
jacket, apron, and nightcap, cloudy in hue as
those habiliments habitually were, than in a
shabby snuff-coloured surtout with a cotton
velvet collar, a dingy nankeen waistcoat, striped
trousers much too short for him, and a cloth cap
with a peak to it.

Affairs had not gone prosperously with him at
the Hôtel Rataplan. He had failed to make
anything like a competency, much less a fortune,
out of that establishment. In the first place,
Mademoiselle Adele, his daughter, had made a
mésalliance: having, in defiance of her father's
commands, not only encouraged the addresses of
a dissolute fiddler at the French Plays, but
absolutely got up very early one morning and allied
herself in marriage to that objectionable person.
It was a terrible blow for Rataplan. "Encore,"
he was wont to say, "if they had gone to the
Bavarian chapel in Warwick-street! But
Mademoiselle must needs immolate herself at a church
of I know not what sect of the Anglican dissidence
in the Soho. She had abjured, forsooth, the
errors of the Romish communion! Wicked men
with white neckcloths and little paper books had
been, it appears, pursuing her for months. She
became what you call a convert. She was the
victim of their machinations sourdes. Parlez-
moi de ça. You sacrifice yourself like the pelican
of the wilderness. You tear out your entrails to
nourish a viper, and behold, the viper turns
round and stings you. Encore, had it been in
France, my daughter would have been compelled
to address to me three solemn citations—trois
sommations respectueuses—before she could
have dared to commit the fatal act. But she
has accomplished her act of disobedience and
folly, and now this vagabond of a fiddler beats
my Adèle. Ma parole d'honneur, c'est à faire
blanchir les cheveux. It is enough to make one's
hair turn white."

It would have taken an extreme degree of
agony to turn Papa Rataplan's hair white. He
had none to turn; he was quite bald.

Then la Mère Thomas died, and Rataplan had
to bury her. Then his customers fell off, and he
lost the most profitable of his guests, the hot-
tempered countess, who suddenly disappeared.
Then Rataplan got into trouble with the police
for winking at the contraband amusements of a
select society of cooks in the employ of divers
noblemen, gentlemen, and hotel-keepers in the
British metropolis, who were accustomed to dine
at the Hôtel Rataplan, and afterwards to play
vingt-et-un all night. He was threatened with
the loss of his license. The threat did not do
him much harm, for the butcher sued him, and
then the distiller put an execution into the
premises, and finally there came collapse, and
Rataplan passed through the Bankruptcy Court.

He bore his downfal with becoming