- Albert Quentin: Look, Suzanne, you're a model wife. Yes, you have great qualities. And your figure has stayed as I'd have wished. You're happiness stored in a box! If I had to do it all over again, I'd marry you again. But you're a pain.
- Suzanne Quentin: Albert.
- Albert Quentin: In a nice way, affectionately and with love, but a right royal pain - in - the arse!
- Suzanne Quentin: It's an odd time to arrive, especially in this weather.
- Albert Quentin: That's what travelers do: travel. The weather doesn't come into it.
- Albert Quentin: I'll die drunk, but on my feet. I don't care about gossip! History will be the judge.
- Albert Quentin: [singing] It's a long way to Tipperary, It's a long way to go. It's a long way to Tipperary...
- Suzanne Quentin: Albert, don't get angry.
- Albert Quentin: "Don't get angry"? Bloody hell! I give you tricolor rivers, mountains of flowers, and holy temples, and you turn it into a knocking shop! You plonk your Normandy Babylon in the China Sea!
- Albert Quentin: The Yangtze Kiang is not a river, it's an avenue, a 5,000-km avenue, tumbling from Tibet down to the Yellow Sea, with junks and sampans floating by on either side. In the middle there are whirlpools and floating islands, with orchids as tall as trees. The Yangtze Kiang, Comrade, is millions of cubic meters of gold flowing towards Nanking, with, all along, floating villages where you can buy anything you want: rice alcohol, religions, slatterns and opium. I can confirm, Madame, that the marines were for along time a permanent fixture of the tea houses. In those days we knew how to have fun.
- Albert Quentin: Hey, native girl show some manners! We know all about your "customers". Those Wehrmacht lechers and that fornicating Feldwebe!
- Suzanne Quentin: If you drank less, you'd be scared too.
- Albert Quentin: If I drank less, I wouldn't be me. I don't fancy that.
- Le chauffeur de taxi: Quentin's place is open. But it's no barrel of laughs.
- Gabriel Fouquet: I didn't come here to laugh.
- Suzanne Quentin: I heard that the Germans will blow everything up before they leave.
- Albert Quentin: It's their right. A soldier in retreat is allowed certain recreational compensations.
- Gabriel Fouquet: Gentlemen, your hospitality overwhelms me, but will not affect my judgement. I have travelled a fair bit: on the basis of that I can tell you that this hole is so awful it shouldn't be allowed, and that the weather here is filthy!
- Gabriel Fouquet: Get back, Eskimos! I'll go home alone. A matador always goes home alone. The greater he is, the lonelier. I'll leave you to your ice floes, your igloos, your penguins.
- Gabriel Fouquet: My people will be coming. They're Gypsies. Treat them like me.
- Esnault: I'll treat you to a boot up the backside!
- Gabriel Fouquet: I think I missed the Madrid train.
- Albert Quentin: When one has the dreams that you have, one doesn't fret over a missed train. Know what you remind me of? One of those monkeys that wander around lost when winter comes in China.
- Gabriel Fouquet: At least I didn't offend you.
- Albert Quentin: Oh, you have to get up very early to offend me. Or go to bed much later.
- Suzanne Quentin: What happened?
- Albert Quentin: He had one too many, that's all.
- Suzanne Quentin: What did you talk about?
- Albert Quentin: Oh, monkeys. Monkeys and monkey business.
- Marie-Jo: Monsieur Quentin never gossips. Yesterday is yesterday.
- Gabriel Fouquet: And today is today. Your boss is good sense personified.
- Albert Quentin: A prince of the tipple! A lord! The kind you once drank with, but whose spirit you never shared. Such lords scorn you and your befuddled customers. They're a thousand drinks away, up there with the angels.
- Gabriel Fouquet: I've never been a nasty drunk. More an affectionate one. Grotesquely so. My charm was in being unexpected.
- Albert Quentin: Oh-la-la. That's where you've got it all wrong. They like certainty. They hate it when you're different from their expectations. Especially as it's rarely a nice surprise.
- Gabriel Fouquet: Be it revolution or paella, nothing they do in Spain is ever simple. A paella without shellfish is lamb without garlic.
- Albert Quentin: What could happen to me? I have a wife taking care of me, a job that keeps me busy, and bon-bons to distract me. I might give up the bon-bons, though.
- Suzanne Quentin: Why? If it's not a bad habit?
- Albert Quentin: There are no good habits. A habit is a sort of slow death.
- Suzanne Quentin: The beguine was all the rage. Remember the song by Dranem?
- [singing]
- Suzanne Quentin: This the beguine, There's nothing so naughty...
- Albert Quentin: I'm not buried yet, but it's coming. You don't seem to realize. I haven't had my share of the unexpected. I want more. Do you hear? More!
- Gabriel Fouquet: Tell me, Monsieur Quentin, since we're being indiscreet, in China, did you smoke opium?
- Albert Quentin: Oh, nothing indiscreet about that. On occasion, yes. In Shanghai, Hong Kong. All it did was make one daydream.
- Gabriel Fouquet: Don't you like dreams?
- Albert Quentin: It depends on their quality. These were the dreams of a Marine. Admiral Guépratte kissing my ear, the tea tasting of aniseed. Intoxicating fancies, nothing more.
- Gabriel Fouquet: And now?
- Albert Quentin: Now I dream of smoking opium.
- Suzanne Quentin: Monsieur Fouquet, your paella was splendid. Whoever marries you will be a lucky woman.
- Gabriel Fouquet: I fear one doesn't win a woman with culinary virtues. Or any kind of virtues.
- Suzanne Quentin: I think we can appreciate a tribute served on a plate. If Albert had ever deigned to cook just for me, I'd have taken it as a compliment. But not even an omelette.
- Gabriel Fouquet: Monsieur Esnault, if traitement for stupidity isn't covered by social security, you'll end up penniless!
- Albert Quentin: Forward!
- Albert Quentin, Gabriel Fouquet: [singing] Nights in China, tender nights, Nights of love, Nights of drunkeness and tenderness...
- Gabriel Fouquet: What's this place of yours?
- Albert Quentin: Gourmets call it a brothel, lechers, a Chinese restaurant.
- Gabriel Fouquet: You can't teach me. I've spent my life leaving and returning. Instability, it's called.
- Gabriel Fouquet: You laid it on a bit thick, but there were grandiose flourishes.
- Albert Quentin: Always! What a lovely night, eh?
- Marie: Do we have time for another story? Just one.
- Albert Quentin: All right, but this is the last. And it's a true one. So listen. In China, when it turns cold, in the streets of all the towns you see all these little monkeys, orphaned and lost. No one knows if they come out of curiosity or because they're afraid of the winter, but since the people there believe that even monkeys have souls, they pay to send them back to their forests, to find their old haunts and friends. So you see trains full of little monkeys heading to the jungle.
- Albert Quentin: She ended up penniless for a ginger wise-guy, A Jew he was, his garlic smell high, Leaving Formosa, he took her from a brothel in Shanghai.
- Suzanne Quentin: That's lovely.
- Albert Quentin: It's not mine. Verses come back to me as I sail down the river.
- Esnault: I thought it was an avenue.
- Albert Quentin: Who knows? Maybe it's just a dream, cast into the river.
- Albert Quentin: Hong Kong! La Cucaracha! Singapore! La Petite Tonkinoise!
- Gabriel Fouquet: La Puerta del Sol!
- Albert Quentin: And the fun goes on!
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