Claude’s Challenge

—ROBERT HARDY ANDREWS, A CORNER OF CHICAGO

Claude and I had Just Finished Lunch at L’Artois in Paris, in the days when it was still under the ownership of the now-deceased Isidore Rouzeyrol and his wife, and still one of the best old-fashioned Auvergnat-style restaurants in the city. We had eaten the kind of meal we had often in those days: foie gras followed by simply roasted bécasse, or woodcock (commercial hunting of this bird, the most intensely delicious of all feathered game, had not yet been banned in France), on thick, wonderfully soggy croutons made from country-style bread. We had finished with big slabs of Cantal cheese the color of old ivory, and slices of sweet blue plum tart. We had consumed the wines we usually drank here—a bottle of san-cerre and a bottle of cahors—and were now sipping Rouzeyrol’s highly palatable vieille prune and smoking our luncheon-sized Monte Cristos.