Many and bountiful and excellent were the meals eaten _en famille_ in the room back of the shop, often enough in company with a _beau-frère_, who came frequently from Cavaillon, and a niece and her husband, who was an attorney, and who lived in a great Renaissance stone house opposite the fountain of Nostradamus, St. Rémy’s chief titular deity. These were the occasions when eating and drinking was as superlative an expression of the joy of life as one is likely to have experienced in these degenerate days when we are mostly nourished by means of patent foods and automatic buffets. “My brother has a pretty taste in wine,” says the _beau-frère_ from Cavaillon, as he opens another bottle of the wine of St. Rémy, grown on the hillside just overlooking “_les antiquités_.” Those relics of the Roman occupation are the pride of the citizen, who never tires of strolling up the road with a stranger, and pointing out the beauties of these really charming historical monuments. Truly M. Farges did have a pretty taste in wine, and he had a cellar as well stocked in quantity and variety as that of a Riviera hotel-keeper. Not the least of the attractions of M. Farges’s board was the grace with which his Arlesienne wife presided over the good things of the casserole and the spit, that long skewer which, when loaded with a chicken, or a duck, or a dozen small birds, turned slowly by clockwork before a fire of olive-tree roots on the open hearth, or rather, on top of the _fourneau_, which was only used itself for certain operations. Baked meats and _rôti_ are two vastly different things in France. “Marcel, he bakes the bread, and I cook for him,” says the jauntily coiffed, buxom little lady, whose partner Marcel had been for some thirty years. In spite of the passing of time, both were still young, or looked it, though they were of that ample girth which betokens good living, and, what is quite as important, good cooking; and madame’s taste in cookery was as “pretty” as her husband’s for bread-making and wine. Given a casserole half-full of boiling oil (also a product of St. Rémy’s; real olive-oil, with no dilution of cottonseed to flatten out the taste) and anything whatever eatable to drop in it, and Madame Farges will work wonders with her deftness and skill, and, like all good cooks, do it, apparently, by guesswork. It is a marvel to the writer that some one has not written a book devoted to the little every-day happenings of the French middle classes. Manifestly the trades of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker have the same ends in view in France as elsewhere, but their procedure is so different, so very different.