And, in the middle of
the apartment, some forty persons were packed together at the /table
d'hote/, which was scarcely eleven yards in length and did not supply
proper accommodation for more than thirty people; whilst at the little
tables standing against the walls upon either side another forty persons
sat close together, hustled by the three waiters each time that they went
by. You had scarcely reached the threshold before you were deafened by
the extraordinary uproar, the noise of voices and the clatter of forks
and plates; and it seemed, too, as if you were entering a damp oven, for
a warm, steamy mist, laden with a suffocating smell of victuals, assailed
the face.
Pierre at first failed to distinguish anything, but, when he was
installed at the little table--a garden-table which had been brought
indoors for the occasion, and on which there was scarcely room for two
covers--he felt quite upset, almost sick, in fact, at the sight presented
by the /table d'hote/, which his glance now enfiladed from end to end.
People had been eating at it for an hour already, two sets of customers
had followed one upon the other, and the covers were strewn about in
higgledy-piggledy fashion. On the cloth were numerous stains of wine and
sauce, while there was no symmetry even in the arrangement of the glass
fruit-stands, which formed the only decorations of the table. And one's
astonishment increased at sight of the motley mob which was collected
there--huge priests, scraggy girls, mothers overflowing with superfluous
fat, gentlemen with red faces, and families ranged in rows and displaying
all the pitiable, increasing ugliness of successive generations.
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