orders given, and later I would assist at the eating of the meal (to
which Gogo would invariably do ample justice), and it was just as my
mother had ordered. Mystery of mysteries!

What a pleasant life it was they led together, these ghosts of a by-gone
time! Such a genial, smooth, easygoing, happy-go-lucky state of
things--half bourgeois, half Bohemian, and yet with a well-marked
simplicity, refinement, and distinction of bearing and speech that were
quite aristocratic.

The servants (only three--Therese the house-maid, Francoise the cook,
and English Sarah, who had been my nurse and was now my mother's maid)
were on the kindliest and most familiar terms with us, and talked to us
like friends, and interested themselves in our concerns, and we in
theirs; I noticed that they always wished us each good-morning and
good-night--a pretty French fashion of the Passy bourgeoisie in Louis
Philippe's time (he was a bourgeois king).

Our cuisine was bourgeoise also. Peter Ibbetson's mouth watered (after
his tenpenny London dinner) to see and smell the steam of "soupe a la
bonne femme," "soupe aux choux," "pot au feu," "blanquette de veau,"
"boeuf a la mode," "cotelettes de porc a la sauce piquante,"
"vinaigrette de boeuf bouilli"--that endless variety of good things on
which French people grow fat so young--and most excellent claret (at one
franc a bottle in those happy days): its bouquet seemed to fill the room
as soon as the cork was drawn!

Sometimes, such a repast ended, "le beau Pasquier," in the fulness of
his heart, would suddenly let off impossible fireworks of vocalization,
ascending rockets of chromatic notes which would explode softly very