L'HÔTEL DES BONS ENFANTS

It stands facing the Place de l'Église, with its back to the Route de ——. There is something medieval in its name; so is there in its surroundings and in its appearance. The gargoyles of the Église frown down upon its southern door. There is an old Flemish house facing it in the Place. It is Flemish and rambling in design itself. Its stables are low and capacious, like those of a Chaucerian inn. The rooms of the hotel are low-roofed, and each is large enough for an assembly ball. There is an air of generosity about the place. You have the feeling, as you enter, that these people enjoy living; they would have a love of life which is Italian in its deliberateness. They would taste life with a relish.

If you see madame you will be confirmed in this. She is rotund and high-coloured. The placidity of her feature is infectious. As soon as you see her (and it is not long before you will) you want to bask about the place. The pleasantness of her smile will tell you that her first concern is not lucre, but life. She must work to live. But neither work nor the money it brings are ends in themselves for her.

In her day she must have been very well featured. She is still. But rotundity is clouding the lines of her beauty in face and figure. She has a daughter of eight playing in the anteroom. She will be as handsome as her mother has been. She is pretty, with a regularity of feature uncommon in a child so young. A placid nurse-girl has the care of her. She is reading at one of the small round drinking-tables. In fact, it is the domesticity of the place which charms you as much as its quaint architecture. English officers in groups and French officers with their lady friends are entering and taking seats. But madame talks audibly and naturally of nursery matters with the nurse, the child herself is engaged upon her leÇon de l'École beside the buffet, and her nursemaid is at work upon a garment at the same table as two highly-finished Subalterns are taking their aristocratic ease and their MÉdoc.

But however homely the hotel may be in France, it is rarely free from the blemish of the upper room. Officers may dine gaily with their lady friends with as little obstruction from the management as is offered to the payment of the bill.

We had our Christmas dinner at the Bons Enfants. It was not home, but it was very jolly. Jolly is the word rather than happy. At home the grub would not have been French. There would have been sisters (and others) with whom to make merry afterwards. And we would (we hope) have been served by someone less unlovely than the well-meaning middle-aged woman whom madame detailed to wait upon our table. But we sang long and loud in chorus; and afterwards went into the hall and took possession of the piano and danced with each other; and those who couldn't dance improvised some sort of rhythmic evolutions about the room. At any rate, we were gay. We were determined that absence from home was not going to seem to make us sad. And perhaps some of us forced the merriment rather obviously. But madame, I believe, thought we were completely happy. She came and shook us all by the hand at parting, and gave us good wishes, and was happy she should have helped us so far to Christmas jollity in "a furrin clime." Someone reproached her with the plebeian features of our waitress when we had got out into the shelter of the street, and someone—I forget who—kissed her (i.e., madame) in the shadow of the porch; and she gave a gentle little scream of delight, retrospective of the days of her blooming youth when she was more prone to thoroughgoing reciprocity.

We returned some weeks later. Someone of the mess had a birthday, and went down in the morning to madame and in the sunny courtyard talked to her intimately of pullets, and poisson, and boisson, and omelettes, and wafers, and cheeses, and fruits; returned to the mess before lunch, furtively countermanded the standing orders amongst the servants for the evening meal, and at lunch flung out a general invitation to the Bons Enfants at eight. We lived again through the Christmas festivities—with the difference that madame detailed a less unhandsome wench to wait on table; and that we left earlier.