six o'clock
Madame Brossard -LRB- dark , thin , demure as of yore , a fine-looking woman with a fine manner and much the flavour of old Norman portraits -RRB- gave me a pleasant welcome , remembering me readily but without surprise , while Amedee , the antique servitor , cackled over me and was as proud of my advent as if I had been a new egg and he had laid me . The simile is grotesque ; but Amedee is the most henlike waiter in France . He is a white-haired , fat old fellow , always well-shaved ; as neat as a billiard-ball . In the daytime , when he is partly porter , he wears a black tie , a gray waistcoat broadly striped with scarlet , and , from waist to feet , a white apron like a skirt , and so competently encircling that his trousers are of mere conventionality and no real necessity ; but after six o'clock -LRB- becoming altogether a maitre d'hotel -RRB- he is clad as any other formal gentleman . At all times he wears a fresh table-cloth over his arm , keeping an exaggerated pile of them ready at hand on a ledge in one of the little bowers of the courtyard , so that he may never be shamed by getting caught without one . His conception of life is that all worthy persons were created as receptacles for food and drink ; and five minutes after my arrival he had me seated -LRB- in spite of some meek protests -RRB- in a wicker chair with a pitcher of the right Three Pigeons cider on the table before me , while he subtly dictated what manner of dinner I should eat . For this interval Amedee 's exuberance was sobered and his badinage dismissed as being mere garniture , the questions now before us concerning grave and inward matters .