“I went towards the exercising ground, where we were all to meet, when I was dumfounded at the sight of a gigantic negro dressed in white duck and wearing a straw hat.  It was Timbuctoo.  He was beaming and was walking with his hands in his pockets in front of a little shop where two plates and two glasses were displayed.

“‘What are you doing?’ I said.

“’Me not go.  Me good cook; me make food for Colonel Algeria.  Me eat Prussians; much steal, much.’

“There were ten degrees of frost.  I shivered at sight of this negro in white duck.  He took me by the arm and made me go inside.  I noticed an immense flag that he was going to place outside his door as soon as we had left, for he had some shame.”

I read this sign, traced by the hand of some accomplice

     “’Armykitchen of M. Timbuctoo,
     “’Formerly Cook to H. M. the Emperor. 
     “‘A Parisian Artist.  Moderate Prices.’

“In spite of the despair that was gnawing at my heart, I could not help laughing, and I left my negro to his new enterprise.

“Was not that better than taking him prisoner?

“You have just seen that he made a success of it, the rascal.

“Bezieres to-day belongs to the Germans.  The ‘Restaurant Timbuctoo’ is the beginning of a retaliation.”

TOMBSTONES

The five friends had finished dinner, five men of the world, mature, rich, three married, the two others bachelors.  They met like this every month in memory of their youth, and after dinner they chatted until two o’clock in the morning.  Having remained intimate friends, and enjoying each other’s society, they probably considered these the pleasantest evenings of their lives.  They talked on every subject, especially of what interested and amused Parisians.  Their conversation was, as in the majority of salons elsewhere, a verbal rehash of what they had read in the morning papers.

One of the most lively of them was Joseph de Bardon, a celibate living the Parisian life in its fullest and most whimsical manner.  He was not a debauche nor depraved, but a singular, happy fellow, still young, for he was scarcely forty.  A man of the world in its widest and best sense, gifted with a brilliant, but not profound, mind, with much varied knowledge, but no true erudition, ready comprehension without true understanding, he drew from his observations, his adventures, from everything he saw, met with and found, anecdotes at once comical and philosophical, and made humorous remarks that gave him a great reputation for cleverness in society.

He was the after dinner speaker and had his own story each time, upon which they counted, and he talked without having to be coaxed.

As he sat smoking, his elbows on the table, a petit verre half full beside his plate, half torpid in an atmosphere of tobacco blended with steaming coffee, he seemed to be perfectly at home.  He said between two whiffs: