tantial dinner. When she
was unable, during her afternoon perambulations, to wheedle stallkeepers
into filling her bag for her, she was reduced to dining off the merest
scraps. So she now slyly made her way back to the butter pavilions,
where, on the side of the Rue Berger, at the back of the offices of the
oyster salesmen, there were some stalls at which cooked meat was
sold. Every morning little closed box-like carts, lined with zinc and
furnished with ventilators, drew up in front of the larger Parisian
kitchens and carried away the leavings of the restaurants, the
embassies, and State Ministries. These leavings were conveyed to the
market cellars and there sorted. By nine o'clock plates of food were
displayed for sale at prices ranging from three to five sous, their
contents comprising slices of meat, scraps of game, heads and tails of
fishes, bits of galantine, stray vegetables, and, by way of dessert,
cakes scarcely cut into, and other confectionery. Poor starving
wretches, scantily-paid clerks, and women shivering with fever were
to be seen crowding around, and the street lads occasionally amused
themselves by hooting the pale-faced individuals, known to be misers,
who only made their purchases after slyly glancing about them to see
that they were not observed.[*] Mademoiselle Saget wriggled her way to
a stall, the keeper of which boasted that the scraps she sold came
exclusively from the Tuileries. One day, indeed, she had induced the old
maid to buy a slice of leg of mutton by informing that it had come from
the plate of the Emperor himself; and this slice of mutton, eaten with
no little pride, had been a soothing consolation to Mademoiselle Saget's
vanity. The wariness of her approach to the stall was, moreover, solely
caused by her desire to keep well with the neighbouring shop people,
whose premises she was eternally haunting without ever buying anything.
Her usual tactics were to quarrel with them as soon as she had managed
to learn their histories, when she would bestow her patronage upon a
fresh set, desert it in due course, and then gradually make friends
again with those with whom she had quarrelled. In this way she made the
complete circuit of the market neighbourhood, ferreting about in every
shop and stall. Anyone would have imagined that she consumed an enormous
amount of provisions, whereas, in point of fact, she lived solely upon
presents and the few scraps which she was compelled to buy when people