es presides over the
kitchen fire. The principal dish is the _raito_--a ragout made of
delicately fried fish served in a sauce flavoured with wine and
capers--whereof the tradition goes back a round twenty-five hundred
years: to the time when the Phokaean housewives brought with them to
Massalia (the Marseille of to-day) the happy mystery of its making from
their Grecian homes. But this excellent dish was not lost to Greece
because it was gained to Gaul: bearing the same name and made in the
same fashion it is eaten by the Greeks of the present day. It usually is
made of dried codfish in Provence, where the cod is held in high esteem;
but is most delicately toothsome when made of eels.

The second course of the Great Supper also is fish, which may be of any
sort and served in any way--in our case it was a perch-like variety of
dainty pan-fish, fresh from the Rhone. A third course of fish sometimes
is served, but the third course usually is snails cooked in a rich brown
sauce strongly flavoured with garlic. The Provencal snails, which feed
in a _gourmet_ fashion upon vine-leaves, are peculiarly delicious--and
there was a murmur of delight from our company as the four women brought
to the table four big dishes full of them; and for a while there was
only the sound of eager munching, mixed with the clatter on china of the
empty shells. To extract them, we had the strong thorns, three or four
inches long, of the wild acacia; and on these the little brown morsels
were carried to the avid mouths and eaten with a bit of bread sopped in
the sauce--and then the shell was subjected to a vigorous sucking, that
not a drop of the sauce lingering within it should be lost.

To the snails succeeded another dish essentially Provencal, _carde_. The
carde is a giant thistle that grows to a height of five or six feet, and
is so luxuriantly magnificent both in leaf and in flower that it
deserves a place among ornamental plants. The edible portion is the
stem--blanched like celery, which it much resembles, by being
earthed-up--cooked with a white sauce flavoured with garlic. The garlic,
however, is a mistake, since it overpowers the delicate taste of the
carde--but garlic is the overlord of all things eatable in Provence. I
was glad when we passed on to the celery, with which the first section
of the supper came to an end.

The second section was such an explosion of sweets as might fly into
space should a comet collide with a confectioner