Florence Wilkinson

From “Latin Quarter Ways”

Montparnasse

SLEEK, pleasant, pompous and paternal

Is our Eugene;

High priest and saint and alchemist of

His copper-bright cuisine.

He knows us all, translates us into French—

Sonia the Muscovite,

Lee, of Kentucky, with his Pan’s bold eyes,

And Neville Denzil Whyte.

“Petite Marmotte,” and “Drôle,” and “Bon Sujet,”—

He’s handy with his phrase,

The while he masks his horror at a misapplied

Sauce Béarnaise.

He supervises with a noble air

The ignorant’s menu:

The little mademoiselle from Maine?—“Mais oui,

Red wine and pot-au-feu.”

Some twenty years ago he boiled the mash

For pigs, in rough Savoy,

Crumbling the black bread from his hairy hand—

A peasant boy.

Belloy, that Beaux-Arts chap who dines alone,

Saw once the ancestral stock,

The father of Eugene, glued to the soil

As lichen to its rock.

Eugene had bought him with his hoarded sous

The Auberge d’Or at Gex;

The old man to his neighbors brags of ’Gene,

Their simple souls to vex—

How since he took the Grand’ route years agone,

A lord he is become, “Englees he spig.”

So saying, flourishes in their awed faces,

His broom of twig.