There was no need for me to draw Rouletabille's attention; he had already left our omelette and had joined the landlord at the window.
"Who is that man?" asked Rouletabille, returning to his omelette.
"You don't appear to like him very much?" asked the reporter, pouring his omelette into the frying-pan.
The omelette ready, we sat down at table and were silently eating, when the door was pushed open and an old woman, dressed in rags, leaning on a stick, her head doddering, her white hair hanging loosely over her wrinkled forehead, appeared on the threshold.
Wragge, catching instantly at a word in connection with cookery, and harnessing her head to the omelette for the rest of the evening.
She had advanced her imaginary omelette to the critical stage at which the butter was to be thrown in -- that vaguely-measured morsel of butter, the size of your thumb.
She had advanced the imaginary omelette to the last stage of culinary progress; and she was now rehearsing the final operation of turning it over -- with the palm of her hand to represent the dish, and the cookery-book to impersonate the frying-pan.
He was entirely puzzled, but fortunately at that moment the
omelette came.
" 'By my salvation!' said he, 'when once my omelette is made we will see about satisfying that man yonder.'
"The woman breaks the eggs, fries the omelette, and dishes it up without any more grumbling; somehow this squabble began to make her feel very uncomfortable.
If his omelettes - if his fricandeaux were inestimable, what littérateur of that day would not have given twice as much for an "Idée de Bon-Bon" as for all the trash of "Idées" of all the rest of the savants ?
Yet in the indulgence of a propensity so truly classical, it is not to be supposed that the restaurateur would lose sight of that intuitive discrimination which was wont to characterize, at one and the same time, his essais and his omelettes. In his seclusions the Vin de Bourgogne had its allotted hour, and there were appropriate moments for the Cotes du Rhone.