Chapter 19 - Musette’s Whims

Summary

One day, as you may recall, Marcel the painter sold his masterpiece—The Passage of the Red Sea—to Médicis the Jew, and it ended up as the sign over a grocery store. To celebrate the deal, Médicis put on a lavish dinner for the bohemians, and Marcel, Schaunard, Colline and Rodolphe woke up very late the next morning. Still groggy one and all from the lingering traces of the previous night's drunkenness, they could not, at first, remember what had transpired. At midday when the church bells rang out the Angelus, the call to prayer, they exchanged melancholy smiles.

“There it is. The bell whose pious notes call humanity to worship,” said Marcel.

“Indeed,” added Rodolphe, “we have arrived at the solemn hour when devout people proceed to the dining room.”

“In that case, we must become devout,” Colline muttered. For him, every day was Saint Appetite's Day.

“Ah,” Schaunard added, “my nursemaid's milk! The four daily meals of my infancy! Where have you gone? Where have you gone?” He repeated the question sorrowfully, in a soft and dreamy tone.

“I’d estimate that at this very moment, right here in Paris,” Marcel pronounced, “more than ten thousand cutlets are being grilled.”

“And just as many beef steaks,” Rodolphe added.

As an ironic antithesis, even as the four friends were discussing the terrible daily problem of lunch, the waiters in the restaurant on the ground floor below them were shouting out customers’ orders at the top of their lungs.

“Those wretches won't be silent,” Marcel said, “and every word is like a pickaxe driven into my stomach.”

“The wind is to the north,” Colline intoned gravely as he gestured toward a weather vane in motion on a neighboring rooftop. “We shall have no lunch today. The elements oppose it.”

“Please explain,” Marcel replied.

“It's an odd meteorological pattern I’ve observed. A wind from the north almost always signifies abstinence, just as a wind from the south generally indicates pleasure and good cheer. In philosophic terms, this is known as a warning from on high.”