The Price

The Price by Francis Lynde is about Griswold's life as a news writer and his final supper with his good friend, Bainbridge, a local blue-collar worker and conservative. Excerpt: "In the days when New Orleans still claimed distinction as the only American city without trolleys, sky-scrapers, or fast trains—was it yesterday? or the day before?—there was a dingy, cobwebbed café in an arcade off Camp Street which was well-beloved of newspaperdom, particularly of that wing of the force whose activities begin late and end in the small hours. "Chaudière's," it was called, though I know not if that were the name of the round-faced, round-bodied little Marseillais who took tolls at the desk. But all men knew the fame of its gumbo and its stuffed crabs, and that its claret was neither very bad nor very dear."