Inside a Pearl by Edmund White Read Free Book Online

soup sprinkled with cheese and croutons slathered in the reddish mayonnaise called “rust” (
rouille
). Followed by half of a roast chicken or three lamb chops. Then cheese and dessert and coffee. Delicious food. More than “correct.”
    The customers whispered. Even families with children. To speak in a normal voice would have been proof of vulgarity, a sign that one was badly brought up (
mal élevé
). The restaurant was owned and managed by a placid, watchful, evil woman who resembled the queen of England. She never enthused over her customers, not even regulars like me and my guests. Her shoulders sloped, she held one hand dangling bone-lessly in front of her; she was
molle
(flabby, flaccid, soft). She’d nod coolly, condescendingly, at a slight angle. Her face relaxed into an unchanging expression of sleepy contempt. If she was nearly indifferent to us, the sole waitress, Marie-Louise, was always animated and attentive. Over the course of many evenings at the hotel, we learned that Marie-Louise had been in service all her life since she was fifteen, half a century before then, when she’d begun working at La Mère Poularde on Mont Saint-Michel. Briefly she’d worked in Germany “in order to learn the wines”—a biographeme that startled us since as good French chauvinists we just assumed French wines were superior to those of any other country. It was a bit like a Renaissance Florentine traveling to Zagreb to study art.
    The hotel dining room had clean, gleaming tile floors and simple wood tables, crowned with pure white napery. The many windows were tall and let in the soft sunlight by day; at night the curtains, ugly orange and brown hunting scenes, were drawn against the perpetual winter fog. When my writing or my life was going badly I dreamed of living at the hotel upstairs in a room I somehow imagined was austerely platonic.
    One day an aristocratic party of twelve came in for lunch after the stag hunt, but even they whispered—a decline from the days when duchessesbarked at the servants and dukes audibly sneered at the bill after the tradesman or waiter presented it. Now the local nobility had taken up the same infernal mincing as their
roturier
(“commoner”) neighbors. Eleven of the group ordered the same dessert, but a twelfth woman chose the
feuilletines au chocolat
, justifying her supposed eccentricity by saying “I’m plunging into an adventure!” (
“Je me lance dans l’aventure!”
).
    One day we’d eaten so heartily that I told Marie-Louise I thought I would skip the dessert. We were the only customers. The queen of England was nowhere in sight. Marie-Louise leaned slightly in my direction and whispered, “Then would you possibly be willing to order the dessert with the chocolate leaves?”
    â€œSure. Of course. But why?”
    â€œYou could leave it for me. I’ve never tasted it.”
    â€œYou’ve worked here how many years?”
    â€œTwenty-five. Madame never lets the servants taste the desserts.”
    Another day Marie-Louise had obviously been weeping. She wasn’t her usual brisk, tidy self wearing her fake pearl necklace and with her hair up. Her eyes were smaller and her voice subdued, and I said, “Is anything wrong, Marie-Louise?”
    â€œMy brother died yesterday and he’s to be buried tomorrow in Brittany. I asked Madame for the day off. I could make it there and back in a day by train but she said no.
‘Mademoiselle, je ne peux pas vous épargner.’
[I can’t spare you.] It was the first time in twenty-five years I’d asked for a day off. I’d even found a young man in the village to fill in for me.”
    This sounded to us like something out of Mauriac’s
A Nest of Vipers.
Marie-Louise had only two consolations. One was that she was about to retire. The other was that Madame let her choose the busboy every summer when things got busy, and