However, I am not claiming that all French cookery is ultra-exorbitant in price or of excessively low grade.  We had one of the surprises of our lives when, by direction of a friend who knew Paris, we went to a little obscure cafe that was off the tourist route and therefore—­as yet—­unspoiled and uncommercialized.  This place was up a back street near one of the markets; a small and smellsome place it was, decorated most atrociously.  In the front window, in close juxtaposition, were a platter of French snails and a platter of sticky confections full of dark spots.  There was no mistaking the snails for anything except snails; but the other articles were either currant buns or plain buns that had been made in an unscreened kitchen.

Within were marble-topped tables of the Louie-Quince period and stuffy wall-seats of faded, dusty red velvet; and a waiter in his shirtsleeves was wandering about with a sheaf of those long French loaves tucked under his arm like golf sticks, distributing his loaves among the diners.  But somewhere in its mysterious and odorous depths that little bourgeois cafe harbored an honest-to-goodness cook.  He knew a few things about grilling a pig’s knuckle—­that worthy person.  He could make the knuckle of a pig taste like the wing of an angel; and what he could do with a skillet, a pinch of herbs and a calf’s sweetbread passed human understanding.

Certain animals in Europe do have the most delicious diseases anyway—­notably the calf and the goose, particularly the goose of Strasburg, where the pate de foie gras comes from.  The engorged liver of a Strasburg goose must be a source of joy to all—­except its original owner!

Several times we went back to the little restaurant round the corner from the market, and each time we had something good.  The food we ate there helped to compensate for the terrific disillusionment awaiting us when we drove out of Paris to a typical roadside inn, to get some of that wonderful provincial cookery that through all our reading days we had been hearing about.  You will doubtless recall the description, as so frequently and graphically dished up by the inspired writers of travelogue stuff—­the picturesque, tumbledown place, where on a cloth of coarse linen—­white like snow—­old Marie, her wrinkled face abeam with hospitality and kindness, places the delicious omelet she has just made, and brings also the marvelous salad and the perfect fowl, and the steaming hot coffee fragrant as breezes from Araby the Blest, and the vin ordinaire that is even as honey and gold to the thirsty throat.  You must know that passage?

We went to see for ourselves.  At a distance of half a day’s automobile run from Paris we found an establishment answering to the plans and specifications.  It was shoved jam-up against the road, as is the French custom; and it was surrounded by a high, broken wall, on which all manner of excrescences in the shape of tiny dormers and misshapen little towers hung, like Texas ticks on the ears of a quarantined steer.  Within the wall the numerous ruins that made up the inn were thrown together any fashion, some facing one way, some facing the other way, and some facing all ways at once; so that, for the housefly, so numerously encountered on these premises, it was but a short trip and a merry one from the stable to the dining room and back again.