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Updated: June 25, 2025
"And my wife is very right," said Don Ricardo; "so, Caspar, call the other people; have some mats, and quatres, and mattresses carried down to the chapel, and we shall all remove, for, with half of the roof gone, it is but tempting the Almighty to remain here longer."
The body was deposited at the foot of the altar, and the ladies, having been wrapped up in cloaks and blankets, were safely lodged in quatres, while we, the gentlemen of the comfortless party, seated ourselves, disconsolately enough, on the wooden benches.
The handmaidens accordingly set to work to arrange two beds, or quatres, one on each side of the table where we were sitting, while Bang sat eyeing them askance, in a kind of wonderment as to the object of the preparations, which were by no means new either to the Captain or me, who, looking on them as matters of course, continued in close confabulation with Don Ricardo during the operations.
The Minister of Marine gave a gorgeous one, the clou of which was the entrance at midnight precisely of Les Quatres Continents, being four long corteges representing Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. I was quite provoked that they did not ask me to be in the American cortege. I should have loved to have been an Indian squaw, except that a blanket is a rather warm toilette de bal.
The remembrances I have of Paris Sundays decidedly possess a character of rest and recreation; of waking in the morning to a grateful sense of repose; of clean shirts and trimmed beards; and of delicious breakfasts at our Café aux Quatres Mendiants, of coffee and white bread, instead of the bouillon and confiture of the atelier. Did we not work, then?
Now it was an antique portrait bust of the days of decadent Rome, black marble with a bronze tiara; now a framed page of a fourteenth-century version of "Li Quatres Filz d'Aymon," with an illuminated letter of miraculous workmanship; or a Renaissance gonfalon of silk once white but now brown with age, yet in the centre blazing with the escutcheon and quarterings of a dead queen.
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