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learning in balloon training. Figuring that Fifi could not possibly be more than half his weight, he concluded (to his great satisfaction) that three fish tails would suffice; and he deftly cut them off with the edge of his spoon and fed them to her under the table when nobody else was looking.
    â€˜There’s a butcher on the Boulevard Poissonnière who’s feeding up a cat like that for Christmas,’ teased Monsieur Lafayette. ‘He’s going to present it as a turkey stuffed with mice and onion stuffing!’
    Eveline shot him a venomous glance while Jacques cried out in alarm: ‘You must never let her out, Sis. You must never let her out! And if you do,’ he conceded, ‘you must watch her!’
    â€˜I can’t watch her all the time, Jacques. Honestly, everyone in this family seems to think it’s my life’s duty just to do their bidding.’
    â€˜There are cat snatchers on the loose looking for prime meat like that one,’ Monsieur Lafayette went on unrelentingly. ‘How old is she now, boy?’
    â€˜S… seven,’ stammered Jacques warily, clutching Fifi to his chest.
    â€˜Ah, mature but still tender,’ Monsieur Lafayette leered at Eveline. ‘Just the way I like it. Clear eyes, wet nose… a butcher would give you seventy francs for such a juicy little bit.’
    â€˜How much?’ Mistigris leaned forward over the table.
    â€˜ Papa !’
    â€˜ Papa !’
    â€˜It comes to us all in the end, my boy,’ said Mistigris with a philosophical air. ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away! He took your mother a little early of course, but then again she went to meet him bless her soul the bloody whore!’
    â€˜Papa!’
    â€˜I might just follow her one fine day into the deep dark waters of the Seine. The waves tight about me. Green...’
    â€˜Have a heart, old man.’ Monsieur Lafayette slapped his friend on the back. ‘You’re giving me an indigestion nearly as bad as the one I got up at the ramparts when Colonel L. treated us to a slice of his Arab mare. There’s patriotism for you. Ultimate sacrifice for France and his men. He’d reared her from a foal apparently. A little fiery for my taste...’
    â€˜...and bloated,’ Mistigris finished mournfully. ‘Terribly, terribly bloated.’
    Eveline stared at him, white faced. ‘You have a vivid imagination. Papa,’ she muttered angrily. ‘If you remember rightly it was I who visited her in the morgue and she wasn’t green and bloated at all. In fact she was rather pale and peaceful looking.’
    â€˜Ah.’ Mistigris sat back, grateful tears springing to his eyes. ‘A wonderful woman your mother, Jacques. A street whore and a harlot but a wonderful woman all the same!’
    The rain pattered down outside and they were all quite warm and sleepy after the meal. Jacques told them about his exploits at the balloon factory: how he had fed Old Neptune, one of the homing pigeons, who could carry thirty thousand messages on his own because they were typed in columns like a newspaper. Eveline listened half-heartedly, hoping the rain would have stopped by the time she had to go out because she didn’t have any sugar water to straighten her curls with. She decided to wear her blue merino dress with the pink corsage and coloured stockings for the evening. She wanted to look smart but appropriate, the sort of girl you might expect to be living in a bright new house on the Place de l’Etoile, with a husband in the literary world. She wished she had some of the latest cosmetics that had been all the rage before the war broke out – the Queen Bee milk and honey preparations (by appointment to the Empress herself no less) but she reasoned that even if she had been able to afford them, she would have eaten them up by now, they smelled so nice and tasted so good. Youth and beauty will have to do, she told herself