LE PASTISSIER FRANÇOIS Où est enseignée la manière de faire toute sorte de pastisserie Très-utile à toutes sortes de personnes; Ensemble le moyen d'apprester toutes sortes; d'œufs pour les jours maigres et autres En plus de soixante façons. AMSTERDAM CHEZ LOUIS ET DANIEL ELZÉVIER 1655 "Ah! ah!" I said to myself, "now I have it! This well-mannered gentleman is surely a gourmand of the first order,--M. Grimod de la Reyniere perhaps, whom I have so often heard described as a rival of Cambacérès and of d'Aigrefeuille;--but stay, this gentleman has hands and M. Grimod de la Reyniere has only stumps." At that moment, the polite gentleman let his hand and the book he held fall on his knees; then, casting his eyes upward, he appeared to be lost in profound reflection. He was, as I have said, a man of forty or forty-two years of age, with an essentially gentle face, kindly and sympathetic; he had black hair, blue-grey eyes, a nose slightly bent to the left through an excrescence, a finely cut, clever-looking, witty mouth--the mouth of a born story-teller. I was yearning to get up a conversation with him--I, a hobbledehoy of a country bumpkin, ignorant of everything, but _anxious to learn_ as they put it in M. Lhomond's elementary lessons. His benevolent countenance encouraged me. I took advantage of the moment when he stopped reading to address a word or two to him. "Monsieur," said I, "pray forgive me if my question seems impertinent, but are you extremely fond of eggs?" My neighbour shook his head, came gradually out of his reverie, and, looking at me with a distraught expression, he said, in a very pronounced Eastern French accent-- "Pardon me, monsieur, but I believe you did me the honour of addressing me ...?" I repeated my sentence. "Why do you suppose that?" he said. "The little book you are reading so attentively, monsieur,--excuse my rudeness, but my eyes fell involuntarily on the title,--contains recipes, does it not? for cooking eggs in more than sixty different ways?" "Oh yes, true...." he said. "Monsieur, that book would have been of great use to an uncle of mine, a curé, who was, or rather still is, a great eater, and a fine sportsman: one day he made a bet with one of his _confrères_ that he would eat a hundred eggs at his dinner; he was only able to discover eighteen or twenty ways of serving them ... yes, twenty ways, for he ate them by fives at a time. You see, if he had known sixty ways of cooking them, instead of a hundred, he could have eaten two hundred." My neighbour looked at me with a certain attention which seemed to imply that he was asking himself, "Am I by any chance seated next to a young lunatic?" "Well?" he said.