Caroline spends two or three days in inquiries before she learns how the Italians dress mushrooms.  She discovers a Corsican abbe who tells her that at Biffi’s, in the rue de Richelieu, she will not only learn how the Italians dress mushrooms, but that she will be able to obtain some Milanese mushrooms.  Our pious Caroline thanks the Abbe Serpolini, and resolves to send him a breviary in acknowledgment.

Caroline’s cook goes to Biffi’s, comes back from Biffi’s, and exhibits to the countess a quantity of mushrooms as big as the coachman’s ears.

“Very good,” she says, “did he explain to you how to cook them?”

“Oh, for us cooks, them’s a mere nothing,” replies the cook.

As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except how a cook may feather his nest.

At evening, during the second course, all Caroline’s fibres quiver with pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain suggestive dish.  She has positively waited for this dinner as she had waited for her husband.

But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure, there is, to the souls of the elect—­and everybody will include a woman who adores her husband among the elect—­there is, between these two worlds of expectation, the difference that exists between a fine night and a fine day.

The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges his spoon in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline’s extreme emotion, to several of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers who visit Milan do not for a long time recognize; they take them for some kind of shell-fish.

“Well, Adolphe?”

“Well, dear.”

“Don’t you recognize them?”

“Recognize what?”

“Your mushrooms a l’Italienne?”

“These mushrooms!  I thought they were—­well, yes, they are mushrooms!”

“Yes, and a l’Italienne, too.”

“Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, a la milanaise.  I abominate them!”

“What kind is it you like, then?”

“Fungi trifolati.”

Let us observe—­to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels everything, which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this moment classifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects, giving them all the termination us, so that a Silbermanus is the same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissect a butterfly’s legs with pincers—­that we still want a nomenclature for the chemistry of the kitchen, to enable all the cooks in the world to produce precisely similar dishes.  It would be diplomatically agreed that French should be the language of the kitchen, as Latin has been adopted by the scientific for botany and entomology, unless it were desired to imitate them in that, too, and thus really have kitchen Latin.

“My dear,” resumes Adolphe, on seeing the clouded and lengthened face of his chaste Caroline, “in France the dish in question is called Mushrooms a l’Italienne, a la provencale, a la bordelaise.  The mushrooms are minced, fried in oil with a few ingredients whose names I have forgotten.  You add a taste of garlic, I believe—­”