appears and bows:

"Excellency, the cook begs urgently to be allowed to speak to you in
person...."

"The cook?..."

She raises her beautiful face, dreaming, half-laughing, with its profile
like Cleopatra's, so Egyptian in its delicacy and symmetry, settles
herself a little higher on the couch and leans on her hand:

"Let him come in...."

Everything returns to her, reality, the actual day; and she smiles
because of it and shrugs her shoulders: such is life.

The footman goes out; the cook enters in his white apron and white cap:
he is nervous and, now that his mistress is already frowning her
eyebrows because of his disrespectful costume, he begins to stammer:

"Forgive me, excellency...."

And he points with an unhappy face to his apron, his white sleeves....

And he complains that the head gamekeeper has not provided sufficient
ortolans. He cannot make his pasty; he dares not take it upon himself,
excellency.

She looks at him with her sphinx-like eyes; she has a great inclination
to burst out laughing at his comical face, his despairing gestures, his
outstretched arms, to laugh and also to cry wildly and loudly.

"What are we to do, excellency, what are we to do?"

The town is too far away; there is no time to send there before dinner
and, for the matter of that, they never have anything in the town.
Besides, it is really the steward's fault, excellency; the steward
should have told her excellency....

"There are larks," she says.

"Those were to go to Lipara to-morrow, excellency, to his excellency the
duke!"

The duchess shrugs her shoulders, laughing a little:

"It can't be helped, my friend. His imperial highness the Duke of Xara
comes before his excellency, does he not? Make a _chaufroid_ of larks."

Yes, that is what he had thought of doing, but he had not ventured to
suggest it. Yes, that would do very well, admirably, excellency.

She gives another little laugh and then nods, to say that he can go. The
cook, evidently relieved, bows and disappears. She rises, looks at
herself in a mirror as she stands erect in her lazily creased folds of
pink and salmon-colour and old lace, stretches her arms with a gesture
of utter fatigue and rings for her maid, after which she enters her
dressing-room. Does she want to laugh again ... or to cry again? She
does not know; but she does know that she has to get dressed....
Whatever confront a person, love or ortolan-pasty, that person must
dress, must