The company would listen entranced to these recitals of the trim Marcelle’s daily experiences, and marvel at her fearlessness.
There was another genial comrade, Jeannette Brébant, whose forty odd years had left her frank, mannish and homely. There was no feminine pettishness to be found in Jeannette. She called a spade a spade, and dealt you whole shovelfuls of badinage, shook hands like a man and had a kind word for every one, even her old lovers. A well-groomed woman was Jeannette, with her Titian hair as neatly dressed at four o’clock as the smartest coiffeur in Paris could make it.
At eight, the faithful Louis, whose position as barkeeper and waiter made him indispensable, placed a Japanese screen in front of the door as a hint to warn intruders, pushed the three small tables together and laid the fresh cloth for dinner, bringing the vases of roses which had adorned the bar to the table. Lucille loved flowers, and a basketful of long-stemmed Jacqueminots came daily from the hot-house of her pretty place at Étretat, where Lucille rested during the hottest of the summer months when every Parisian who was able fled from the city.
Then Lucille closed the bar for its annual renovation and the faithful Louis was sent on a vacation to his family on the German frontier, where he rested from his cocktail-mixing and studied English, which he rarely had occasion to use and which was quite as bad as his French. The only thing American about this “American Bar” was the sign over the door, beneath which appeared a long list of American drinks with weird names, translated to him from a bartender’s guide published on the Bowery in the early sixties, not one concoction of which he had ever been able to mix.
During the summer period workmen invaded the Grillon and a general varnishing took place. The small tables were repolished and the chimney leading from the tiny kitchen cleaned. The piano was tuned and the cozy interior made spick and span for the grand opening in the fall. Then all of the old crowd would return; it was like the reunion of a family: Jeannette and Marcelle and the editor and the Count, from his villa by the sea, and the Spaniard, who never left Paris. Then such a dinner! So much had happened in the meantime, and there was so much to talk about. The Countess had been a month at Trouville.