Samuel and Fanfarlo had exactly the same ideas about cooking and the diet necessary to creatures of the élite. Silly meats, insipid fish were excluded from the suppers of this siren. Champagne rarely dishonoured her table. The most celebrated and most perfumed Bordeaux yielded place to the heavy serried battalion of the Burgundies, the wines of Auvergne, of Anjou and the south, and of the foreign wines, German, Greek, Spanish. Samuel was accustomed to say that a glass of real wine should resemble a bunch of black grapes, and that in it there was as much meat as drink. Fanfarlo loved bleeding meats, and wines laden with intoxication. However, she never got drunk. Both professed a sincere and profound esteem for the truffle. The truffle, that secret and mysterious vegetation of Cybele’s, that savoury malady which she has hidden in her entrails longer than the most precious metal, that exquisite matter which defies the science of the agronomist, as did gold that of the Paracelsuses; the truffle which marks the distinction between the old and the modern world,¹

As to the question of sauces, ragouts, and seasonings, a grave question which would demand a chapter as grave as a scientific paper, I can assure you that they were in perfect agreement, especially upon the necessity of calling in the whole pharmacy of nature to the aid of the kitchen. Pimentos, English powders, saffrons, colonial substances, exotic dusts, all would have seemed good to them, nay, even musk and incense. Were Cleopatra alive now, I am certain she would have liked to do up fillets of steak or roebuck with Arabian perfumes. It is certainly deplorable that the cordons bleus of to-day are not constrained by a special law to know the chemical properties of matter, and are incapable of discovering, for special cases, like that of an amorous banquet, almost inflammable culinary ingredients swift to invade the organic system, like prussic acid, or to volatilize, like ether.

Curiously enough, this harmony of opinions on the question of good living, this similitude of tastes, formed a strong bond of union; that profound understanding of sensual life which shone in every one of Samuel’s looks and words, struck Fanfarlo very forcibly. That speech, now brutal as a numeral, now delicate and perfumed as a flower or a sachet, that strange conversation, the secret of which was known to him alone, completely won for him the good graces of this charming lady. Besides, it was not without deep and lively satisfaction that he recognized, on inspecting the bedroom, a perfect confraternity of taste and sentiments in the matter of furniture and interior arrangements. Cramer hated profoundly, and in my opinion he was perfectly right, the straight line in apartments, and the introduction of architecture into the house. The huge rooms of old châteaux terrify me, and I pity the châtelaines for having been forced to make love in great dormitories which looked like cemeteries, in huge catafalques calling themselves beds, or great monuments which used to assume the pseudonym of arm-chairs. The apartments of Pompeii are the size of your hand; the Indian ruins that cover the coast of Malabar reveal the same system. Those great, voluptuous and wise races understood the question perfectly. The intimate sentiments can only be evoked in a very narrow space.

Fanfarlo’s bedroom, then, was very little, very low, cluttered up with soft things, perfumed and dangerous to touch; the air, laden with queer miasmas, made one want to expire slowly as if in a hot-house. The light of the lamp played on a confusion of laces and stuffs of a violent but equivocal hue. Here and there, on the wall, it lit up a few paintings full of Spanish voluptuousness; very white flesh-tints against very dark backgrounds. It was in the depths of this delightful hovel, which smacked at once of the bagnio and the sanctuary, that Samuel saw, advancing towards him, the new goddess of his heart in the radiant and sacred splendour of her nudity.

Where is the man who, even at the cost of half a lifetime, would not wish to see his dream, his real dream, pose unveiled before him, and the adored phantom of his imagination drop, one by one, the garments designed as a protection against the vulgar gaze? But here was Samuel, seized by a queer caprice, beginning to shout like a spoiled child: ‘I want Columbine. Give me back Columbine! Give her back to me as she appeared to me the evening she made me mad with her fantastic trappings and her mountebank’s corsage!’