Her cuisine was the best I have ever eaten; and oh, the incredible abundance of those days! All the courses were served at once upon the immense table. The great silver soup-tureen, big enough for a baby's bath, and so tall that she had to stand up to it, was in front of Tante Rose, and before she began to ladle out the platefuls, with the light, accurate movements of her arms characteristic of her, a servant carefully fastened behind her her long sleeves _à la pagode_. It was really charming to watch her serving the soup, and I remember one guest asserting that he would eat _potage_ four times if Mme. Goury helped him to it. An enormous salmon usually occupied the center of the table, and there were six _entrées_, _four rôtis_, two hot and two cold, and various _entremets_ and desserts. A favorite _entrée_ was a _purée_ of pistachio nuts, with roasted sheeps' tails on silver spits stuck into it. The hot dishes stood on silver heaters filled with glowing charcoal. Between the courses little pots of cream, chocolate, vanilla, and coffee were actually passed and actually eaten! Chocolate cream to fill the gap between woodcock and _foie-gras_, for instance! Champagne-bottles stood in silver coolers at each corner of the table. I wonder that we all survived. On the other hand, when Tante Rose or my mother received the visits of their friends, there was no afternoon tea to offer them, as nowadays. The servants merely passed round little glasses of Spanish wines and plates of small biscuits. The good ladies of Landerneau afforded, I imagine, much amusement to my mother and to Tante Rose, who, though a native, was of a very different caliber. One little trait I remember was very illustrative of the bourgeois habit of mind. At that time, as now, lengths of velvet were included in every _corbeille_ offered to a bride by the bridegroom's family, and the velvet dresses made from them were dignified institutions worn year after year. One knows how marked and unsightly velvet soon becomes if sat upon, and it was a wise and crafty fashion to have a breadth of perfectly matching silk introduced between the full folds at the back of these dresses, so that when one sat down it was upon the silk. It was in regard to this sensible contrivance that the ladies of Landerneau were reported to declare that it was strange indeed to see the _noblesse_ so miserly that they could not afford a whole velvet dress, and therefore let silk into the back. [Illustration: "I had only to sweep up the rubbish ... and carry it out of the wood in my little wheelbarrow"]