Sir Percy Hits Back by Emma Orczy — Read

On the spot where the Hotel Moderne now rears its more ambitous head, there stood at that time a cottage with sloping red-tiled roof and white-washed walls. It was owned by one Baptiste Portal, an old peasant of the Dauphine, who dispensed refreshments to travellers and passers-by, as his father and grandfather had done before him, in the shape of somewhat thin vin du pays and an occasional glass of eau-de- vie, while he spent his slack time chiefly in grumbling at the fact that the new posting-inn on the high road had taken all his trade away. He did not see the necessity of the posting-inn, did not old Baptiste, nor for that matter that of the high-road or the post- chaise. Before all these new notions had come into the heads of the government people up in Paris, travellers had been content to come squelching through the mud on the back of a good horse, or come ploughing through inches of dust in the old coche. So why not now? And was not the old wine of Les Amandiers as good and better than the vinegar dispensed at the more pretentious posting-inn? The place was called Les Amandiers because at the back of the house there were two anaemic almond-trees with gaunt, twisted arms which covered themselves in the spring with sickly blooms, and in the summer with dust. In the front of the house, up against the white-washed wall, there was a wooden bench on which Baptiste's priveleged customers were wont to sit on fine evenings, to drink their vin du pays and join the old man in his wholesale condemnation of the goverment "up in Paris" and its new- fangled ways. From this vantage-point a glorious view was obtained over the valley of the Bueche, and beyond Laragne as far as the peaks of Pelvoux: whilest to the right towered in the distance the grand old citadel of Sisteron with its turets and fortifications dating from the fourteenth century, and the stately church of Notre Dame. But views and winding rivers, snowy peaks, and medieval fortresses did not interest Baptiste Portal's customers nearly as much as the price of almonds or the alarming increase in the cost of living.

Now, on this particular afternoon in May the mistral was blowing mercilessly across the valley from over the snows of Pelvoux, and the cold and the dust had driven all of good Portal's customers indoors. The low-raftered room, decorated with strings of onions which hung from the ceiling together with a bunch or two of garlic, of basil and other pot-herbs, and perfumed also with the aroma of the pot-au-feu simmering in the kitchen, had acquired just that right atmosphere, cosy, warm, and odorous, beloved of every true man born in the Dauphine. It was a memorable afternoon, remembered long afterwards and retold by the gossips of Sisteron and Laragne in all its dramatic details. But at this hour, nothing more dramatic had occurred than the arrival of a detachment of soldiers, under the command of an under- officer, who had come up from Orange, so they said, in order to fetch away the young men who were wanted for the army. They had demanded supper and shelter for the night.