or a cook, was no such very astonishing thing;
but that so corpulent a man should have served
in the light infantry exceeded reason and
probability.  He endeavoured to reconcile assertion
with fact, by stating that he had been
drum-major to the Thirty-seventh.  But his auditors
remained obstinately incredulous.  As a
sapper and miner, as a heavy cuirassier, as a
grenadier of the Old Guard, even, they were
willing to accept him; but they declined all
credence to his ever having been a "light
bob."

He appealed to his wife. "Madame Rataplan
was my comrade," he would say. "She was
cantinière to the Trente-septième. She gave her
own tabatière once to the Emperor, when he was
out of snuff. Davoust has taken la goutte from
her, over and over again. Monsieur le Prince
d'Eckmuhl was very partial to Madame
Rataplan."

To which, Madame, who was a meek brown
little woman, usually habited in a chintz bed-jacket
and a petticoat of blue serge, as though
she had never had time thoroughly to equip
herself in feminine attire after resigning the tunic
and pantaloons of a cantinière, would reply:
"T'as raison, mon homme. C'est moi-z-aussi
qu'a servi le Grand Homme."

They were all frantic in their fanaticism for
the memory of the great man. In a dozen rooms
of the Hôtel Rataplan, his portrait was hung.
There was a plaster statue of him in the hall;
an ormolu bust over a clock in the coffee-room.
Rataplan would have called his hostelry the
Hôtel Napoléon, but for the entreaties of his
wife, who represented that the establishment
was of so humble a character, that to affix the
name of the Great Man to it would be desecration.
He did a very comfortable business under
the more humble sign of the Hôtel Rataplan,
however.

M. Rataplan had two children. Désiré, his
son and heir, was away in France, head waiter
at Calais, until in the fulness of time it should be
his lot to assume the direction of the establishment
in Leicester-place. "I should have placed
him sous les drapeaux, to serve his country as a
soldier," said the paternal Rataplan, "but what
is that flag, what is that caricature of the tricolor
I see now!

Hélas! soudain tristement il s'écrie:
   C'est un drapeau que je ne connais pas.
Ah! si jamais vous vengez la patrie,
   Dieu, mes enfants, vous donne un beau trépas!"

He was very fond of quoting Béranger's Vieux
Sergent, although he certainly looked much more
like the foolish fat scullion in Tristram Shandy,
than a relic of the Empire.  He had a daughter,
Adèle, aged seventeen, whose only duties until
she was old enough to be married were, as her
parents understood those duties, to keep her
eyes cast down, and to divide her time between
needlework and the pianoforte.  She had a
tambour-frame in the office of the hotel, and a
pretty little cottage piano in her own little
sitting-room; and she played and sewed and
kept her eyes cast down, with exemplary
assiduity.

Stay! The list of the family is not quite
complete. There was a very large poodle dog by the
name of Azor, who in youth had been a sprightly
animal, capable of going through the martial
exercise and performing numerous other tricks,
by means of which poodles have ere this won
fame and fortune for their masters, on the public
stage.  But Azor had grown lazy from long
possession of the run of his teeth, in such a land of
honey as the kitchen of an hotel.  Formerly he
used to be shaved, but was now allowed to wear
the totality of his shaggy coat, so that he
resembled a small Polar bear quite as much as a
large poodle.

Finally, there was at the Hôtel Rataplan a
prodigious old woman, who was called La Mère
Thomas. Nobody could tell with precision who
she was. Some said she was Rataplan's
grand-mother.  Others, that she was madame's aunt.
She was evidently a kinswoman, for she tutoyéd
the whole family, called Rataplan mon bichon,
and his wife ma biche, and occasionally boxed the
ears of Adèle. La Mère Thomas was of
immense, but uncertain age. Her complexion was
of a fine mahogany colour, and she wore a
moustache that might have been envied by many a
subaltern in the Life Guards. On her chin, too,
there sprouted sundry hairs, which, but for her
otherwise jovial appearance, would have given
her an uncomfortable family likeness to one of
the witches in Macbeth. La Mére Thomas wore
a crimson and yellow pocket-handkerchief bound
lightly round her head and tied in a bow in front,
another silk handkerchief crossed over her ample
bosom and tied behind her very much in the
style adopted by the engaging damsels resident
in the neighbourhood of Ratcliff Highway, a
large gold cross at her neck, a skirt of some
indescribable fabric and of no colour at all—
people said it had originally been a flannel
petticoat pieced with a soot-bag–– and carpet
slippers, like an upholsterer's assistant.  She
snuffed continually from one of those Iittle tin
boxes with a perforated top, like those which are
used to keep gentles for fishing in. She was the
night porter at the Hôtel Rataplan; and
travellers, whom she had let in very late, declared
that she habitually smoked a short pipe after
two in the morning.  Her conversation was not
copious.  Her English was monosyllabic, and
not abundant, although she had been at least
ten years in this country. She was a hearty old
soul, however, and very fond of beer, which she
drank by the quart.

Such was the Rataplan family. They were a
good-natured group, all very fond of one another,
and quarrelling very seldom: as is the foolish
manner with these French people.

The hotel was conducted without the slightest
ostentation, but was, nevertheless, a sufficiently
prosperous speculation. It was eminently French.