Free Saratoga Trunk by Edna Ferber Page B

cast an admiring glance at the plump black-garbed figure reigning behind the vast cashier’s desk at the rear. “All the delicious things Mama used to describe to me in Paris.”
    “She spoke of my food! In Paris!” He was immensely flattered. He snapped his fingers for Léon, the headwaiter, he himself flicked open her napkin and presented it to her with a flourish. Then the three heads came close—the restaurateur, the waiter, the audacious girl—intent on the serious business of selecting a Sunday morning breakfast from among the famous list of viands at Begué’s. Madame Begué’s renowned crayfish bisque? Not a dish for even Sunday New Orleans breakfast. Pompano? Begué’s celebrated calf’s liver à la bourgeoise? Filet de truite, Poulet chanteclair? With an omelette soufflée to follow? Grillades? Pain perdu?
    Clio, speaking her flawless Parisian French to the two attendant men, ordered delicately and fastidiously. Hippolyte Begué himself waddled off to the kitchen to prepare the dishes with his own magic hands.
    Clio Dulaine now leaned back in her chair and breathed a gusty sigh of relief and satisfaction. She looked about her with the lively curiosity of a small girl and the air of leisurely contemplation befitting her recently assumed title and station. She was attempting to produce the effect of being a woman of the world, a connoisseur of food, a femme fatale of mystery and experience. Curiously enough, with her lovely face made up as Aunt Belle had taught her, her rich attire, her bizarre attendants, her high, clear voice speaking the colloquial French of the Paris she had just left, she actually achieved the Protean role.
    That choice section of New Orleans which was engaged in the rite of Sunday breakfast at Madame Begué’s stared, whispered, engaged in facial gymnastics that ranged all the way from looking down their noses to raising their eyebrows.
    Well they might. Behind the newcomer’s chair stood Cupide, a figure cut from a pantomime. He brushed away a fly. He summoned a waiter with the Gallic “P-s-s-s-s-t!” He handed his mistress a little black silk fan. He glared pugnaciously about him. He stood with his tiny arms folded across his chest, a bodyguard out of a nightmare. His face was on a level with the table top as he stood. Each new dish, on presentation, he viewed with a look of critical contempt, standing slightly on tiptoe the better to see it as he did so.
    From time to time Clio handed him a bit of crisp buttered crust with a tidbit on it—a bit of rich meat or a corner of French toast crowned with a ruby of jelly, as one would toss a bite to a pampered dog.
    Breakfasting New Orleans snorted or snickered, outraged.
    “Not bad,” Clio commented graciously from time to time, addressing Kaka or the world at large. “The food here is really good— but really good.”
    Kakaracou sat at table an attendant, aloof from food and being offered none. Certainly Begué’s clients would have departed in a body had she eaten one bite. Her lean straight back was erect, disdaining to relax against Begué’s comfortable chair. The eyes beneath the heavy hoodlike lids noted everything about the table, about the room; she marked each person who entered at the doorway that led up the stair from the hot noonday glare of Decatur Street. For the most part her hands remained folded quietly in her neat lap, the while her eyes slid this way and that and the darting movement of her head set her earrings to swinging and glinting. Occasionally the purple-black hand, skinny and agile, darted forth like a benevolent spider to place nearer for her mistress’s convenience a sugar bowl, a spoon, a dish. She viewed the food with the hard clear gaze of the expert.
    “Red wine enough in that sauce, you think? . . . The pain perdu could be a shade browner.”
    The delicate and lovely girl slowly demolished her substantial breakfast with proper appreciation. She might have been a lifelong habituée dawdling