QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.

CHAPTER IX. INTRODUCTORY TO A WILD ANIMAL.

RATAPLAN was entirely deficient in the
Rhododendron characteristic. It was a very late
house. Nobody dreamt of going to bed till one
or two o'clock in the morning, save Mademoiselle
Adele, who retired at eleven, comme il convenait
à une jeune personne. The French are
accustomed to treat their daughters like children
till they are twenty years of age, and their sons
like grown up persons when they are ten. The
paternal Rataplan came up from the regions of
the kitchen towards eleven, and played cards or
smoked a cigar with one of his guests for a
couple of hours. People used to treat him to
innumerable small glasses to hear him brag of
his exploits during his campaigns with the Grand
Army, and his colloquy with the Emperor at
Montereau; although there were those of a
malevolent turn of mind who insinuated that he
had never been at the Beresina or at Montereau;
but that happening to keep a small wine-shop at
the corner of a street in Paris during the three
glorious days of July, 1830, a barricade had been
erected close to his door, and at a critical
moment he had rushed out, and crying "Vive la
Charte!" had stricken down a corporal of grenadiers
with a soup ladle, whereupon he had become
a décoré de Juillet.

It was half-past twelve on a summer night—
I need not further particularise it, for I have not
yet passed the limits of the four-and-twenty
hours in the course of which all the events
hitherto narrated have occurred—when Monsieur
Jean Baptiste Constant, in his master's Spanish
cloak, entered the marble hall of the Hotel Rataplan,
and passed into the salle à manger, as one
well accustomed to the locality.

Rataplan was alone, smoking and sipping his
"gzogs" (as he was accustomed to call a very
little brandy with a great deal of sugar and lukewarm
water), and endeavouring to spell through
one of the seven days' old Siècles. The gallant
warrior-cook's education was defective. His
womankind kept his books and wrote his letters
for him.

"How goes it, mon vieux? Touchez-là!" said
the valet. And he extended his palm, and Rataplan
smote his own palm thereupon, and went on
reading.

"Will you smoke?" asked Rataplan, after a
moment.

"Business to attend to"—the two men spoke
French—"else I would first have presented my
homages to the ladies. Is the countess at
home?"

"Half an hour ago. Is having her supper
now."

"And her little temper?"

"Ouf! n'en parlez pas. The whole menagerie
of the Jardin des Plantes does not contain such
a wild animal. The bear, Martin, when the nurse
refused to throw him the second of her babies,
when he had played off the little practical joke
of eating the first, was never in such a temper.
Temper! It is a mania! A delirium, an ecstasy
of spasmodic and anarchical passions. That
woman is all the furies rolled into one, plus
Frédégonde, Clytemnestra, and Madame
Croquemitaine."

Rataplan had been a great frequenter of the
Boulevard theatres in his youth, and piqued himself
on his familiarity with dramatic literature.
He was given, besides quoting Beranger, to
spouting long harangues from tragedies, both in
prose and verse.

"What is the matter with the countess?"

"Matter! what else but her diabolical, sulphureous,
Mount Etna of a temper can be the
matter with her? They are not words, but red-hot
lava streams, that flow from her lips. You
are Herculaneum and Pompeii before her, and
she engulphs you. But, pardieu, she is not the
Muette de Portici! She has a tongue as long as
an academic discourse. There is no stopping,
no satisfying, no pacifying, her. She is implacable
in her rages. She comes in here, after
midnight; and, without the slightest salutation,
says, 'Papa Rataplan, is my supper ready?' I
make her a reverence. I say, taking off my
cook's cap—an act of homage I would not
render to Louis Philippe, roi des Franpais et des
pékins—'Madame told me on going out that
she would take no supper.' 'What?' responds
she. 'Papa Rataplan, you are a ganache! On
the instant let me have oysters of Colchesterre, a
trout fried, all that you have in the way of cutlets,
a sweet omelette, a Charlotte aux pommes,
a salade de maches, some champagne, Burgundy,
Bordeaux, and so forth.' And all this on the