The girl who waits on it has gold earrings dangling against her white
neck and a cap with turned up wings, like Moliere's soubrettes, and her
sparkling blue eyes would incline anyone to ask her for something more
than mere plates. But the guests! What guests! All _habitues_! At the
upper end sat a creature in a velvet jacket and a cashmere waistcoat. He
tied his napkin around the bottles that had been uncorked, in order to
be able to distinguish them. He ladled the soup. On his left, sat a man
in a light grey frock-coat, with the cuffs and collar trimmed with a
sort of curly material representing fur; he ate with his hat on and was
the professor of music at the local college. But he has grown tired of
his profession and is anxious to find some place that would bring him
from eight to twelve hundred francs at the most. He does not care so
much about the salary, what he desires is the consideration that
attaches to such a place. As he was always late, he requested that the
courses be brought up again from the kitchen, and if he did not like
them, he would send them back untouched; he sneezed and expectorated and
rocked his chair and hummed and leaned his elbows on the table and
picked his teeth.

Everybody respects him, the waitress admires everything he says, and is,
I am sure, in love with him. The high opinion he has of himself shows in
his smile, his speech, his gestures, his silence, and in his way of
wearing his hair; it emanates from his entire obnoxious personality.

Opposite to us sat a grey-haired, plump man with red hands and thick,
moist lips, who looked at us so persistently and annoyingly, while he
masticated his food, that we felt like throwing the carafes at him. The
other guests were insignificant and only contributed to the picture.

One evening the conversation fell upon a woman of the environs who had
left her husband and gone to America with her lover, and who, the
previous week, and passed through Saint-Pol on her way home, and had
stopped at the inn. Everybody wondered at her audacity, and her name was
accompanied by all sorts of unflattering epithets. Her whole life was
passed in review by these people, and they all laughed contemptuously
and insulted her and grew quite hot over the argument. They would have
liked to have her there to tell her what they thought of her and see
what she would say. Tirades against luxury, virtuous horror, moral
maxims, hatred of wealth, words with a double meaning,