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Updated: June 4, 2025
"What shall I do to-night?" Alone in the now empty salle-a-manger Domini asked herself the question. She was restless, terribly restless in mind, and wanted distraction. The idea of going to her room, of reading, even of sitting quietly in the verandah, was intolerable to her.
Here I found that what had once been the palace of a noble, presented, first, a ground-floor about three feet above the medium level of the Adriatic, composed of a broad vestibule crossing through from front to rear, with the inferior apartments on each side; second, a floor of good apartments, with an open hall in the centre right over the vestibule this hall adorned with pictures; third, a similar good floor, with another hall in the centre, which had been the banqueting or dining-room, and was now used as the salle-a-manger of the hotel and this salle had balconied windows at one end looking out upon the canal.
Here we sat down to an excellent dinner at one end of the salle-a-manger; at the other was a long table where a number of peasant farmers, carters, and graziers it was fair day were faring equally well: our driver was amongst them, and all were as quiet and well-behaved as possible, but given to spit on the floor, "as is their nature to."
At half-past seven, when the pupils and teachers were at study, and Madame Beck was with her mother and children in the salle-a-manger, when the half-boarders were all gone home, and Rosine had left the vestibule, and all was still I shawled myself, and, taking the sealed jar, stole out through the first-classe door, into the berceau and thence into the "allee defendue."
Poor Cydalise had never seen a finer mansion than the old chateau, with its sugar-loaf towers and stone terraces, and winding stairs, and tiny inconvenient turret chambers, and long dreary salon and salle-a-manger. She could picture to herself nothing more splendid. For Gustave to be offered the future possession of Cotenoir was as if he were suddenly to be offered the succession to a kingdom.
At about two in the morning of the 19th after a slow and icy journey she arrived at the inn, knocked up the aged servants, made herself a cup of chocolate out of her tea-basket and sat down to wait on my coming. She has described to me that time of waiting. A home-made candle in a tall earthenware candlestick lit up the little salle-a-manger, which was the one room in use.
That's one of the advantages of our profession. You can go about. It was a second-rate sort of place, and one evening, just before lighting-up time, I had the salle-a-manger all to myself, and had just taken up a paper when I hears the door open, and I turns round. I saw "her" coming down the room. There was no mistaking her. She wasn't that sort.
In the hotel the fair and plump Italian waiter, who had drifted to North Africa from Pisa, had swept up the crumbs from the two long tables in the salle-a-manger, smoked a thin, dark cigar over a copy of the Depeche Algerienne, put the paper down, scratched his blonde head, on which the hair stood up in bristles, stared for a while at nothing in the firm manner of weary men who are at the same time thoughtless and depressed, and thrown himself on his narrow bed in the dusty corner of the little room on the stairs near the front door.
The old Englischer Hof at Pontresina looked decidedly sleepy and misty at five o'clock on an August morning, when two sturdy British holiday-seekers, in knickerbockers and regular Alpine climbing rig, sat drinking their parting cup of coffee in the salle-a-manger, before starting to make the ascent of the Piz Margatsch, one of the tallest and by far the most difficult among the peaks of the Bernina range.
Everything is extremely simple and typical of the family methods of the small French inn, where excellent cooking goes along with many primitive usages. The cool salle-a-manger is reached through the general living-room and kitchen, which is largely filled with the table where you may see the proprietor and his family partaking of their own meals.
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