There were some delightful shops in those arcades, where they sold
antique Flemish furniture, queer old pictures showing Arras in her
proud, treaty-making days (you know what a great place she was for
treaty-making!) and lovely faded tapestries said to be "genuinely" of
the time when no one mentioned a piece of tapestry save as an "arras."
But the shop I haunted was a cake-shop. It was called "_Au Coeur
d'Arras_," because the famous speciality of Arras was a heart-shaped
cake; but I wasn't lured there so much by the charm of _les coeurs_ as
by that of the person who sold them.
I dare say I described her to you in letters, or when I got back to
England after that trip. The most wonderful old lady who ever lived! She
didn't welcome her customers at all. She just sat and knitted. She had
an architectural sort of face, framed with a crust of snow--I mean, a
frilled cap! And if one furtively stared, she looked at one down her
nose, and made one feel cheap and small as if one had snored, or
hiccupped out aloud in a cathedral! But it seems I won her esteem by
enquiring if "_les coeurs d'Arras_" had a history. Nobody else had
ever shown enough intelligence to care! So she gave me the history of
the cakes, and of everything else in Arras; also, before we went away,
she escorted Brian and me into a marvellous cellar beneath her shop. It
went down three storeys and had fireplaces and a well! The earth under
La Grande Place was honeycombed with such _souterrains_, she said.
Pages:
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338