the occupants of the cottage in any of my numerous visits to this open
air restaurant, but once, towards eleven o'clock the crowd in the
square becoming too noisy, the upper windows were suddenly thrown up
and a pailful of water descended.... "_Per Baccho!_" quoth the
inn-keeper for, it must be known, the Restaurant Cou-Cou is Italian by
nature of its _patron_ and its cooking.

This night, I say, had been as the others. The Cou-Cou is (and in this
respect it is not exceptional in Paris) safe to return to if you have
found it to your liking in years gone by. Perhaps some day the small
boy of the place will be grown up. He is a real _enfant terrible_. It
is his pleasure to _tutoyer_ the guests, to amuse himself by
pretending to serve them, only to bring the wrong dishes, or none at
all. If you call to him he is deaf. Any hope of _revanche_ is
abandoned in the reflection of the super-retaliations he himself
conceives. One young man who expresses himself freely on the subject
of Pietro receives a plate of hot soup down the back of his neck,
followed immediately by a "_Pardon, Monsieur_," said not without
respect. But where might Pietro's father be? He is in the kitchen
cooking and if you find your dinner coming too slowly at the hands of
the distracted maid servants, who also have to put up with Pietro, go
into the kitchen, passing under the little vine-clad porch wherein you
may discover a pair of lovers, and help yourself. And if you find some
one else's dinner more to your liking than your own take that off the
stove instead. At the Cou-Cou you pay for what you eat, not for what
you order. And the Signora, Pietro's mother? That unhappy woman
usually stands in front of the door, where she interferes with the
passage of the girls going for food. She wrings her hands and moans,
"_Mon Dieu, quel monde!_" with the idea that she is helping vastly in
the manipulation of the machinery of the place.

And the _monde_; who goes there? It is not too _chic_, this _monde_,
and yet it is surely not _bourgeois_; if one does not recognize M.
Rodin or M. Georges Feydeau, yet there are compensations.... The girls
who come attended by bearded companions, are unusually pretty; one
sees them afterwards at the bars and _bals_ if one does not go to the
Abbaye or Pages.... It makes a very pleasant picture, the Place du
Calvaire towards nine o'clock on a summer night when tiny lights with
pink globes are placed on the tables. The little square t