at good dinners they were!--and how long they sat over their coffee
and cigarettes under the trees in front of this little restaurant--often
ten and twelve at a time, until more tables had to be pushed together
for others of their good friends, who in passing would be hailed to join
them. And how Marguerite used to sing all through dinner and how they
would all sing, until it grew so late and so dark that they had to puff
their cigarettes aglow over their plates, and yell to Madame Giraud for
a light! And how the old lady would bustle out with the little oil lamp,
placing it in the center of the long table amid the forest of vin
ordinaires, with a "Voila, mes enfants!" and a cheery word for all these
good boys and girls, whom she regarded quite as her own children.

It seemed to them then that there would never be anything else but
dinners at Madame Giraud's for as many years as they pleased, for no one
ever thought of living out one's days, except in this good Bohemia of
Paris. They could not imagine that old Jacquemart would ever die, or
that La Belle Louise would grow old, and go back to Marseilles, to live
with her dried-up old aunt, who sold garlic and bad cheese in a little
box of a shop, up a crooked street! Or that Francine would marry Martin,
the painter, and that the two would bury themselves in an adorable
little spot in Brittany, where they now live in a thatched farm-house,
full of Martin's pictures, and have a vegetable garden of their own--and
a cow--and some children! But they DID!

[Illustration: A STUDIO DEJEUNER]

And those memorable dinners in the old studio back of the Gare
Montparnasse! when paints and easels were pushed aside, and the table
spread, and the piano rolled up beside it. There was the buying of the
chicken, and the salad that Francine would smother in a dressing into
which she would put a dozen different things--herbs and spices and tiny
white onions! And what a jolly crowd came to these impromptu feasts! How
much noise they used to make! How they danced and sang until the gray
morning light would creep in through the big skylight, when all these
good bohemians would tiptoe down the waxed stairs, and slip past the
different ateliers for fear of waking those painters who might be
asleep--a thought that never occurred to them until broad daylight, and
the door had been opened, after hours of pandemonium and music and
noise!

In a little hotel near the Odeon, there lived a family of ju