V for Vengeance by Dennis Wheatley

good. She suggested the Vieux Logis, a place famed for its Alsatian dishes, which was situated up on the heights at no great distance from the Sacré Cœur. Only a limited number of taxis were still running, but having walked as far as the Opéra they managed to get one and then drove up the famous hill that such countless thousands of people of all nations had mounted in happier days to nights of gaiety which ended only with the dawn.
    But the Vieux Logis had nothing in common with a Montmartre boîte or the larger, more celebrated, places such as the Bal Tabarin, the Moulin Rouge, Café de l’Enfer or L’Abbé Téleme. It was a fair-sized raftered room, having the appearance of an old barn which had been converted into a restaurant. There was no band, but a quiet sedate air reigned, appropriate to the serving and enjoyment of good food. It was only about half-full, but some of the more discerning German officers had discovered even this quiet haunt, andgroups of them occupied three tables.
    Having ordered their meal, they examined with amusement a gigantic pear, pickled in spirit, inside a water-carafe, which was on a nearby window-ledge. Obviously, it could not have been pushed through the narrow neck of the bottle, so the only explanation of this phenomenon was that the pear had been inserted, when quite small, and the carafe tied on to the branch of the pear tree until the fruit had reached its amazing size, through having grown in what would have amounted to a miniature hot-house of its own.
    Madeleine had just remarked with a sigh that she wondered how long it would be before people had the leisure to devote to growing such oddities again when she noticed an elderly priest sit down at a table behind Kuporovitch and directly facing herself. There was nothing very remarkable about the priest, save that he was an exceptionally small man, and his lovely silvery hair, which, as he wore it quite long, made a strange contrast to his bronzed, wrinkled little face.
    Restaurant meals were now restricted by law to one main dish, but the more expensive places were still able to provide a good selection of side-dishes. The
hors d’œuvre
at the Vieux Logis proved excellent, and they followed them with a partridge
en casserole
, cooked in peasant fashion with young cabbages, carrots, turnips, onions, mushrooms and beans. They then had
crêpes Suzette
, and Stefan insisted that they should finish up with
pâté de foie gras.
    This admirable meal was made ten times more enjoyable by the fact that for weeks past they had lived upon the most simple fare, and that it was washed down with a bottle of 1923 Chambertin. With their coffee they drank some old Alsatian Kirsch, and they were both in the highest of good humours when, to their intense annoyance, a wireless was suddenly turned on full blast.
    The Germans had decreed that all news bulletins were to be given in every public place in the city, and it was one of the things which grievously aggravated the French that if they happened to be in a café or restaurant at the time the news came on they were compelled to listen to it whether they wanted to or not.
    With evident relish the announcer gave the most gorydetails of the Luftwaffe’s latest activities. For the past two nights great fleets of German bombers had been over London. It was stated with sickening hypocrisy that this was in retaliation for night raids made by the British against the Rhineland and Berlin. Thousands of tons of explosives had been dropped so that during the first night’s attack the docks and a great portion of the East End of London had been set ablaze. The fires had been so extensive that they were still burning when the German airmen arrived over their targets on the second night to spread further devastation. In one breath the announcer declared that, unlike the brutal British, the Germans had confined themselves to military objectives, yet in the next he stated