In the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, a single empty omnibus was toiling up the steep glassy slope, the horses slipping and recovering themselves in response to the whip- cracking, which sounded in the streets as in an empty vault.
Higher up, in the Rue Fontaine, one of the few shops that were open displayed this announcement:
"A large selection of cheeses for New Year's gifts."
They laughed.
"Last year at this moment," said Chirac, "I was thinking of only one thing--the masked ball at the opera.
I could not sleep after it.
This year even the churches, are not open.
And you?"
She put her lips together.
"Do not ask me," she said.
They proceeded in silence.
"We are triste, we others," he said.
"But the Prussians, in their trenches, they cannot be so gay, either!
Their families and their Christmas trees must be lacking to them.
Let us laugh!"
The Place Blanche and the Boulevard de Clichy were no more lively than the lesser streets and squares.
There was no life anywhere, scarcely a sound; not even the sound of cannon.
Nobody knew anything; Christmas had put the city into a lugubrious trance of hopelessness.
Chirac took Sophia's arm across the Place Blanche, and a few yards up the Rue Lepic he stopped at a small restaurant, famous among the initiated, and known as
"The Little Louis."
They entered, descending by two steps into a confined and sombrely picturesque interior.
Sophia saw that they were expected.
Chirac must have paid a previous visit to the restaurant that morning.
Several disordered tables showed that people had already lunched, and left; but in the corner was a table for two, freshly laid in the best manner of such restaurants; that is to say, with a red-and-white checked cloth, and two other red-and-white cloths, almost as large as the table-cloth, folded as serviettes and arranged flat on two thick plates between solid steel cutlery; a salt-cellar, out of which one ground rock-salt by turning a handle, a pepper-castor, two knife-rests, and two common tumblers.
The phenomena which differentiated this table from the ordinary table were a champagne bottle and a couple of champagne glasses.
Champagne was one of the few items which had not increased in price during the siege.
The landlord and his wife were eating in another corner, a fat, slatternly pair, whom no privations of a siege could have emaciated.
The landlord rose.
He was dressed as a chef, all in white, with the sacred cap; but a soiled white.
Everything in the place was untidy, unkempt and more or less unclean, except just the table upon which champagne was waiting.
And yet the restaurant was agreeable, reassuring.
The landlord greeted his customers as honest friends.
His greasy face was honest, and so was the pale, weary, humorous face of his wife.
Chirac saluted her.
"You see," said she, across from the other corner, indicating a bone on her plate.
"This is Diane!"
"Ah! the poor animal!" exclaimed Chirac, sympathetically.
"What would you?" said the landlady.
"It cost too dear to feed her.
And she was so mignonne!
One could not watch her grow thin!"
"I was saying to my wife," the landlord put in, "how she would have enjoyed that bone--Diane!"
He roared with laughter.
Sophia and the landlady exchanged a curious sad smile at this pleasantry, which had been re-discovered by the landlord for perhaps the thousandth time during the siege, but which he evidently regarded as quite new and original.
"Eh, well!" he continued confidentially to Chirac.
"I have found for you something very good--half a duck." And in a still lower tone: "And it will not cost you too dear."
No attempt to realize more than a modest profit was ever made in that restaurant.
It possessed a regular clientele who knew the value of the little money they had, and who knew also how to appreciate sincere and accomplished cookery.
The landlord was the chef, and he was always referred to as the chef, even by his wife.
"How did you get that?" Chirac asked.