Monsieur Pamplemousse on the Spot by Michael Bond Read Free Book Online Page B

most peculiar taste: an amalgam of flavours, some relatively fresh, others obviously deeply ingrained. The overall effect was, to say the least, uninviting, and with a view to tempering necessity with expediency, coupled with a desire to get the whole thing over as quickly as possible, he blew rather harder than he’d intended.
    The result was electrifying. Pommes Frites leapt to his feet and gave vent to a long-drawn-out shuddering howl.At least, to be pedantic and strictly for the record, he opened his mouth and emitted a noise which another member of the family canidae would have recognised at once for what it was: not so much a howl as a cry of surprise , pain and indignation all rolled into one. It embodied such intensity of feeling that had they been situated higher up the mountains, in the vicinity of Mont Blanc, for example, or Chamonix, it would have caused any St. Bernard who happened to be on night-duty to drop everything and come running with a keg of brandy round its neck at the ready.
    Fortunately, only Monsieur Pamplemousse himself was there to hear it, and for a moment he was convinced that he had been a party to, perhaps even the cause of, the early demise of his closest and dearest friend. It was not a happy thought.
    For a split second dog and master stared at one another, each busy with his own thoughts. Then Pommes Frites relaxed. To say that he wagged his tail would have been to overstate the case. He made a desultory attempt at wagging. His brain sent a half-hearted message in that direction, but it never reached its destination. Other factors intervened en route; ‘road-up’ signs proliferated, diversions abounded. Not to put too fine a point on it, Pommes Frites was feeling distinctly under the weather.
    It was a simple case of cause and effect. The cause wouldn’t have needed a Sherlock Holmes to trace, and the effect was there for all to see – or it would have been had low clouds not been obscuring the moon.
    Basically it had to do with the nature of Les Cinq Parfaits. Les Cinq Parfaits was many things to many people; the one claim it could not make was that of being the kind of restaurant where the clients made a habit of wiping their plates clean at the end of each course with large hunks of baguette. Bread, home-made, freshly baked, and of unimpeachable quality, was dispensed freely at the start of each meal, but sad to relate most of it remained uneaten.
    Sauces, on the whole, were not mopped up. They were either consumed with the aid of the appropriate implementor they were left on the plate, along with much of the food they had been intended to complement. The reason was not because the clientèle were any more polite or well-mannered than in lesser establishments; it was simply that a great many of them were past their best as trenchermen. Age had taken its toll, digestive systems ruined by overwork rendered them incapable of taking full advantage of the pleasures they were now well able to afford, whilst in the case of the wives, sweethearts or mistresses accompanying them, they were swayed by vanity and the need to keep a watchful eye on waistlines.
    The net result was that each day large quantities of rich food which had taken a great deal of time and energy and manpower to grow and to harvest, to transport and then to prepare for the table, found their way back to the kitchens untouched by knife and fork. Once there, such were the standards set by Monsieur Albert Parfait, it was immediately and unceremoniously consigned to a row of waiting swill-bins for onward delivery next day to a local pig farm whose residents had no such problems.
    It was one such bin, overflowing with riches, that Pommes Frites, taste-buds inflamed through watching his master’s antics on the other side of the dining-room window, his pride seriously injured, his stomach echoing like a drum, stumbled across in his wanderings earlier that evening. It had proved to be a veritable cornucopia of a