Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/158

146 can't judge of that; but the pork chops and the stewed fish were excellent.'

'You fancy so. You see I know what they buy at the market. That scoundrelly cook who has been trained in France buys a cat and skins it and sends it up to table for a hare.'

'Faugh, what unpleasant things you say!' said his wife.

'Well, my love! That's how they do things; it's not my fault, that's how they do things, all of them. All the refuse that our Alkulka throws, if I may be permitted to say so, into the rubbish pail, they put into the soup, yes, into the soup! In it goes!'

'You always talk about such things at table,' his wife protested again.

'Well, my love,' said Sobakevitch, 'if I did the same myself, you might complain, but I tell you straight that I am not going to eat filth. If you sprinkle frogs with sugar I wouldn't put them into my mouth, and I wouldn't taste oysters, either: I know what oysters are like. Take some mutton,' he went on, addressing Tchitchikov. 'This is saddle of mutton with grain, not the fricassees that they make in gentlemen's kitchens out of mutton which has been lying about in the market-place for days. The French and German doctors have invented all that; I'd have them all hanged for it. They have invented a treatment too, the hunger cure! Because they have a thin-blooded German constitution, they fancy they can treat the Russian stomach too. No,