"Bravo, _petit Asticot de mon coeur_! The nightmare is over, and we can enjoy the sunshine again. We will drag Blanquette from the Rue des Saladiers which does not lay itself out for jollity, and we will dine at a reckless restaurant. Blanquette shall eat the snails which she adores and I shall eat pig's feet and you an underdone beefsteak to nourish your little body. And we shall all eat with our dinner '_le pain bénit de la gaîté_.'" He strode off eager as usual to put his idea into immediate execution. He talked all the way to the Rue des Saladiers. Poor Blanquette! He had been neglecting her. A girl of her age needed some amusement; we would go to the Théâtre, the Porte Saint-Martin, like good bourgeois, and see a melodrama so that Blanquette could weep. "They are playing 'Les Eventreurs de Paris.' I hear they rip each other up on the stage and everybody is reeking with blood--good honest red blood--carried in bladders under their costumes, my son. You turn up what you can of your snub little superior artistic nose--but Blanquette will be in Paradise." Blanquette was in the slip of a kitchen and a flurried temper when we entered. "But, Master, you said you would not be home for dinner. There is nothing in the house--only this which I was cooking for myself," and she dived her fork into the pot and brought up on the prongs a diminutive piece of beef. "And now you and Asticot demand dinner, as if dinners came out of the pot of their own accord. Ah men! They are always like that." I put my arm round her waist. "We are all dining out together, Blanquette; but if you don't want to come, you shall stay at home." "And without dinner," said Paragot, taking the fork from her hand and throwing the meat to Narcisse. "_Ah, mais non!_" cried Blanquette, whose sense of economy was outraged. But when Narcisse sprang on the beef and finding it too hot, lay growling at it until it should cool, she broke out laughing. "After all, it would have been very tough," she admitted. "Then why in the sacred name of shoe leather were you going to eat it?" asked Paragot. "Food is to be eaten, not thrown away, Master," she replied sententiously.