THE PARIS CAFÉS.

Alimentary, and not literary, is the modern café. Times are so changed since Voltaire, Diderot and the rest sang and shouted in the Café Procope—jested, reasoned and made themselves immortal there—there are so many people who have the means to frequent cafés, and there is such an immense floating population, eager, curious and bent on sightseeing, that no clique can live. Its precincts, no matter how hallowed, are invaded by the leering mob and His many-headed Majesty the Crowd. Still, certain cafés are able to boast a clientèle, with the military, journalistic, artistic or commercial element in preponderating force—cafés where the stockbrokers, students or officers go—but the old historic café, the café of tradition, where you were sure to find some celebrity on exhibition—a first-class poet or a philosopher—may be said to be defunct. The Grand Café and the Café de la Paix under the Grand Hôtel, being very central, near the new Opéra, and gorgeously fitted up, are the chief rendezvous of the fashionable floating population, aristocratic loafers of all nations, where representatives from the remotest parts of the earth meet to stare at each other under the same roof—Persians, Greeks and Hindoos, Sandwich Islanders and Yankees. Tortoni's is a restaurant and café of the highest class, the most select in the city. Café Riche and Café Grétry, both fine cafés, are much frequented by stockbrokers, who in the evening are wont to assemble on the sidewalk near by, making the night air ring with their wild shouts of "give" and "take:" if dispersed by the police, as they often are, they generally gather into knots a little farther on. Café du Helder is appropriated almost exclusively to the military, officers in bourgeois dress, students from the Polytechnic and St. Cyr, and horse-jockeys. The Café des Variétés belongs to the actors—a noisy, brilliant place—whilst the Café Madrid is the literary café of the nineteenth century, if there is any. Under Napoleon III. it was the centre of the radical opposition, being frequented by all the shades of Red, from the delicate hue of the Débats to the deep crimson of Flourens and Rochefort. Under the Commune it continued to be notorious, and to-day it is the resort of lawyers, journalists and Bohemians—lesser lights who seem to like the location, on the confines of the bad Boulevard Montmartre, and have no objection to the cocottes who come there in the evening. Like La Fontaine's mule,

they talk only of literature, their nurse, and speak disparagingly—it is a peculiarity of the place—of all the fellow-beings she has suckled. It is the typical French café, in the central salon of which, in majestic repose, sits the dame de comptoir, who has a little gray moustache—the French like a little hair upon the upper lip of ladies—whilst overhead, forming a part of the extraordinary decoration, is a Madonna, goddess, angel—I can't say what—copied from one of the old masters in the palace of the Luxembourg. Gold-dust blown across a blue oval, with white-and-rose angels in the midst, shuts off the upward gaze in one of the other salons, whilst all around medallions large and small of heads and figures, male, female and infantile, with a variety of vine-wreathed Bacchuses and bow-drawing Cupids, which are considered especially fit to decorate cafés, cluster along the mouldings, encumber the panels or fill up the niches. Huge mirrors reflect the pea-green walls, the crystal chandeliers, the gilding, glass and divans; cats perambulate the apartments; people come and go—black, elegant fellows, with broad-rimmed hats, pretty canes, good clothes, good fits; absinthe-drinkers, with heavy jaws and dreamy, evil eyes. Billiard-balls are clicking in the back room; cards and dominoes are being played; cold-blooded, demoralized people lean forward, gossip and gesticulate—men who would man a barricade on occasion or put a sword-blade through a stomach.

With a very few exceptions, all the leading cafés of Paris have become restaurants. You breakfast, dine and sup there; and in place of coffee being the sole or leading article of consumption, an infinite variety of drinks is now at the disposal of the thirsty wayfarer. Mocha, that product of the East the preparation of which, like the making of bread, is the stumbling-block of housekeepers in both hemispheres, is served in three ways—as a capucin, a mazagran or a demi-tasse. A capucin (the name is but little used) is our cup of coffee—coffee with milk in it; a mazagran is coffee in a glass, accompanying which a decanter of water is brought. The name is derived from a village in Africa where the French had a brilliant feat of arms, and where the soldiers, in the absence of milk or brandy, had to water their coffee or drink it au naturel. The coffee itself is precisely the same as that furnished for the demi-tasse, which is served in a small china cup, accompanying which is a little decanter of cognac, with a fairy glass for measuring it; for the French, in place of cream, take brandy with coffee and rum with tea—to us an incomprehensible mixture. After breakfast and dinner the Frenchman desires coffee, and if he does not get it at home he goes to the café for it. To do without it, or to do without claret at meals, would be a dreadful alternative to which he would not long submit without, it might be, losing his reason and taking his life. Strong, black and fragrant, he would die without that beverage for which—and for Racine, by the way—Madame de Sévigné prophesied an ephemeral popularity. Taken immediately after meals, it removes the fumes of the claret and champagne he has drunk, and leaves him feeling as clear-headed as Plato and grateful as a pensioner of the king.

Just before meal-time the cafés are crowded with people indulging in one of the renowned trio of appetizers, one of the great triumvirate of anteprandial potations—bittère, vermouth and absinthe. Bittère is a clear grateful drink of Hollandic derivation, considered more wholesome than either of its fellows; vermouth is a wormwood wine the drinker does not like at first (please draw the inference that he becomes immensely fond of it at last); whilst absinthe—what shall we say of it? It is execrable stuff—the milk of sirens mingled with sea-water. Of a dirty-green color, pungent, all-powerful, it heats up the stomach, expending itself at the extremities in half-developed throbs, perpetual wavelets of rankling sting that break upon the shores of flesh. It mounts to the hair-roots, fills the entrails with a furnace-glow, goes everywhere. It is the worst of French drinks, representing and standing for what is worst in French character, worst in France. It cannot be tossed off at a throw: it must be toyed with, sipped. Stimulating, enervating, poisonous, horrible—all the more so perhaps because it is not intoxicating exactly—God has put a barrier against its use by making it distasteful; but, strange to say, all those things men run after: rum, tobacco, opium, absinthe, are always distasteful at first, if not for a long time afterward.

But the French do not drink rum, gin, whiskey or water to any great extent. With the exception of absinthe and considerable brandy, their drinking occupies a middle ground. They revel in a multitude of subtile, delightful mixtures—liqueurs, crêmes and sirops. Very dear to the heart of refined sensualists is the famous monks' liquor called chartreuse, which deservedly ranks at the head of the long list of liqueurs—anisette, curaçao, maraschino, rosolio, alkermès, ratafia, genièvre, etc. It is made by the monks of the Grande Chartreuse, near Grenoble, of certain aromatic herbs and brandy, the former gathered by them in their summer wanderings amongst the Jura Mountains. It is a sticky, sweet compound of a green or yellow color, and of such a fiery nature that it must be sipped, not drunk. Many a hater of the priesthood, holding up one of the little thimbleful glasses in which it is served, has exclaimed, "Blessed be monks for making thee! Compound of devil, dew and honey! in thee have they sought to indemnify themselves for lack of wife, and partially have they succeeded."

All these liqueurs, indeed, are rather ladies' drinks. So too are the crêmes—mocha, tea, noyau, cumin, mint, ether, etc.; also the sirops, including orgeat, very refreshing in the summer-time. Masculine preferences are for beer, immense quantities of which are drunk, especially in the evening, or for fine champagne, the name bestowed upon superior brandy. However, ladies and gentlemen unite in disposing of half-frozen punch (sorbets) or eating ices—say a tutti frutti at the Café Napolitain—ravishing mixtures of cold and passion, the fruits of the tropics imbedded in a slice of the North Pole.

French drinks are, like French dishes, artistic preparations, and the French cafés artistic, pretty places, indispensable to the scenic completeness of things in France, if not to the comfort and well-being of the people. A landscape without water, a bride without a veil, a house without windows, would be something like France (Paris especially) without cafés. To take away its cafés would be to pluck out its eyes, to leave it dull and dead—food without appetite, marriage without love or the honeymoon. Its industries may give it sinew, muscle, bone and nerve; the Institute may give it brains; but the cafés—they are its life-blood and its pulse.

The French cultivate even a love of home in going to the café. For what is a love of home? It is certainly not a mere local attachment, such as the cat has for the particular hearth-rug where she dozes by day or the particular tiles and water-spouts where she howls by night. It is rather the love of family and friendly union, in which the French take especial delight, gathering together in little knots by the open window, in the garden, on the sidewalk, or, it may be, in the café, talking in the leaping, emancipated, touch-and-go style, in the merry, vaulting style in which they excel, on all the lighter topics.

But the desire to economize keeps away a great many people, for the French are very economical. In the great army of the bourgeois, as well as in the great army of the blouses—many of whom could be bourgeois if they chose—whole families, husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, abstain from going to the café, either alone or accompanied, from Christmas to New Year's and New Year's to Christmas. Neither would you find MacMahon, Thiers or Victor Hugo at the café. The recognized great, the nobility and high officials, contrary to what perhaps is commonly supposed, are rarely to be seen there. They meet in some more private way.

But the café is nevertheless a very charming place. It is a place where it is permitted to you to surrender yourself to the most delicious reflections. You are in the presence of humming-birds, not ostriches or owls. The people are smoking cigarettes, or cigars at worst, not meerschaums. The establishment itself is a dazzle of decoration, a little corner of the Louvre. There is no shouting or swearing, but a pleasing hum. The calls of messieurs and the replies of garçons resolve themselves into a confused lulling sound. If you are well, and your conscience does not trouble you—and even if it does—you can select a quiet corner and dream away the livelong day. The air is nerve-slackening. You feel perfectly at your ease. You can think of nothing to apprehend—no incursion of your lady friends designing to reason with the proprietor and perhaps hold a prayer-meeting on the sidewalk; no incursion of the police, no row. Everybody is placable and quiet—preserves indeed a sort of deferential attitude toward his neighbor—and not only when he comes in, but again when he goes out, salutes the dame de comptoir—the lady superintendent, that is (not unfrequently the wife of the proprietor)—who sits enthroned in a little boxlike place superintending the delivery of drinks and making change. This matter of saluting, as the reader knows, is a deference which every Frenchman considers due to the great man or woman who, at the particular time of his entrance or exit, may chance to be in a particular apartment; and in the case of cafés, if the dame de comptoir were not in her place, he would salute the guests; and if there were but one guest, that one would be expected to return the salute, it being meant for him alone.

Sanctified in this way by the presence of a lady, the café does not seem such a very bad place; and it isn't. Even the estaminets and brasseries, which are but second-rate cafés, and the ordinary wine-shops, still lower in the scale, in which the coachman and commissionnaire regale themselves, taking a canon across the counter in the morning and playing a game of cards in the back shop at night, are by no means the hideous gulping-down places in which our land abounds. Drinking in public places in France is not so completely separated from all respectability and refinement as it is with us. It involves none of that horrid nomenclature, "slings," "punches," "cocktails," "smashes," which carry with them all the terror and awfulness of oaths. The French have pretty names for drinks, as well as a rather pretty, poetic way of alluding to a man's inebriation. "He is a little gray;" "He has a little corner in his head;" "He is in a condition for beating the wall;" "He is heading pins," etc., etc., are favorite expressions. Of course, the delicacy or waggishness with which we allude to an evil is no excuse for it, but the French have little absolute drunkenness to excuse. They are emphatically a sober people (being a good deal like intoxicated Yankees or Dutchmen, anyway), and even in their cups neither rude nor quarrelsome. Of the few French people I ever saw drunk (except peasants), all were begging pardon of the owners of imaginary toes, and making various other polite concessions to the people whom they believed to be around them. And yet they drink prodigiously. The customary allowance of every man who can afford it is a pint of claret at meals, themselves prefaced generally speaking by an appetizer, and supplemented almost invariably by a cup of coffee and cognac. He would be quite likely also in the course of the day to assist in the destruction of a bottle of champagne (almost certain to do so if a bon vivant), and during the afternoon and evening to drink several glasses of beer, perhaps taking a "night-cap" of hot wine before going to bed. All this would not necessarily make him drunk, but continued day by day it keeps him under the influence of a continual stimulus, which in time becomes indispensable and contributes to form the Hotspur character of which we hear so much. Strange it should not make drunkards outright, but it does not seem to produce that effect; and Paris, with all its luxuries in drink, is not a drunken city. You see more drunken people in a week in New York than in a year in Paris, and more people who, if not drunk, are unmistakable topers. They drink hard in Brittany (it is no unusual thing there to see a woman drunk), and so too in the manufacturing places of Normandy and other parts of France, especially those that produce no wine; and Champney, who doubtless studied from life, painted at Ecouen the picture of an old peasant-woman hauling her husband home in a hand-cart dead drunk; but, for all that, the French are emphatically a sober people, either constitutionally or from climatic or other reasons: I do not pretend to say which.

On the whole, therefore, the picture of the French cafés is a pleasant one, and it is a pity the bar-rooms of America and the gin-shops of England were not more like them. They are a compromise, it is true, but that is better than the prohibitionist's vain fight.

Tortoni's, the last survivor of whose founders died only the other day, has its historical reminiscences. Therein is to be found the salon, known as the "blue salon," once hallowed by the occupancy of M. de Talleyrand. The window is still pointed out at which the eminent diplomatist used to sit surveying the crowds that thronged the Boulevards, with his usual fine and cynical smile, like a Mephistopheles of the nineteenth century. A little later, and one has a vision of a young man of short stature, elegantly dressed, who every day or two rides up to door or window, springs from his horse, calls for a particular kind of ice, which he imbibes with a sort of nervous haste, and then disappears. This little dandy, always in a hurry, alert, nervous and sharp-eyed, is a future ruler of the nation: it is M. Thiers. Around Tortoni's there hovers too the souvenir of that other gracious and graceful dandy, king of fashion in his day, the count D'Orsay. It was at a breakfast at Tortoni's that the preliminaries were arranged for the famous duel wherein D'Orsay appeared as the champion of the Virgin Mary. Some irreverent jester having made some slighting remark respecting the Virgin, D'Orsay took the matter up and called the speaker to account. "For," said the count, "the Virgin is a woman, and as such ought not to be slandered with impunity."

The cafés chantants of Paris form a division by themselves. The most noted of these is the Eldorado, which has given more than one prominent performer to the Parisian stage—Theresa, who, once a dishwasher in a hotel, left her soap-suds and mop to become a Parisian celebrity, the instructress of a princess, and now a really talented comic actress and bouffe singer; Judic and Theo, the rival beauties of the Opera Bouffe; and lively little Boumaine, now one of the stars of the Variétés. The career of Madame Theo has been a strange one. She was originally a failure at the Eldorado, and used to cry her eyes out behind the scenes at her own ill-success. Finally, Offenbach discovered her and wrote for her his Jolie Parfumeuse. The little beauty cut off her hair, put on a blonde wig, and bloomed out a full-blown genius. Without voice, without talent, by dint of a lovely figure, a face of babyish prettiness and an innocent way of uttering speeches of atrocious naughtiness, she has become one of the theatrical successes of the hour, has brought back a harvest of diamonds from her recent Russian trip, and will probably retire into private life with a fortune before she is thirty.

Pass to the Café Anglais, that hypocrite of the Boulevards, whitewashed, decent, outwardly respectable, yet whose windows are ablaze all night long in the Carnival season, and whose latest legend is the tradition of "Big 16." "Big 16" is a private cabinet in the entresol, numbered after the fashion that has given it its title, and famed as being the scene of the orgies of the young duke de Grammont-Caderousse, that maddest of the mad viveurs of the Second Empire, and his friend the prince of Orange. The latter still maintains his reputation in Paris as the most dissipated of European princes. Twice has he essayed to win the hand of an English princess, or rather his high-minded and virtuous mother made the effort in his behalf, but neither his prospective heirship to the crown of Holland nor his Protestantism has availed to gain for him a royal English bride. He is known among the society that he most affects by the sobriquet of Citron (Lemon), bestowed upon him by the duke de Grammont-Caderousse at one of the little suppers of the day. The duke continued to call the prince Monseigneur, to which His Royal Highness objected, declaring that he wished all formality to be laid aside respecting his birth and title.

"Is that so?" cried the duke gayly. "Then, Citron, pass me the cheese."

And the nickname has survived the duke who gave it and the government under which it was given. Sometimes, after one of the masked balls, a pink domino at the Café Americain will call for champagne, with the announcement, "M. Citron pays," without for a moment imagining that she is speaking of the heir to a throne.

To take a final survey, let us enter the Café de la Paix, the most imperial, cosmopolitan and stylish of cafés. That well-preserved man sitting by himself is playing solitaire—a group of one. That white-haired old gentleman sitting in the alcove yonder is drinking sweetened water—surely not a beverage calculated to pollute the palate. Those round-headed men, whose bald pates are fringed with gray, are now settling up their score. It is only a franc or two, but each one pays his share, "treating" not being common. You are often asked to drink, and left to pay for what you drink—an arrangement greatly to be preferred, provided it be understood. That stylish-looking man reading the Figaro is drinking a green chartreuse, and every time he stoops to sip from the little goblet that stands before him, his huge moustache, folding over it, looks like two great black wings. That pale-faced man is probably a professor. He has just sweetened his coffee, and is now pocketing the lumps of sugar remaining over in the little dish (considered a perfectly proper thing to do); and that stripling from the province, he is taking account of everything—the velvet, marble, silver, glass, the flowers, vases, pictured panels, the waiters in their white aprons, the water-bottles in which the ice is frozen by artificial process, the crinkle-crankle, gilding, glare, the plants in the doorway and the queen behind her box.

Looking out upon the sidewalk, all the world is passing by—Guadeloupe negroes with white servants at their heels; artillerymen with dangling sabres; cocottes, Englishmen, zouaves; washerwomen and their daughters carrying skirts suspended from the tops of poles; old men with goggles and young men with canes and great show of cuffs; multitudes of distinguished-looking people, Français à l'outrance; people with beaked noses and olive complexions; clerks and shop-girls, gamins and bonnes; policemen of inferior stature, who though armed with swords, look incapable of dealing with desperate men; laborers in blouses and old ladies in caps.

Sitting once in front of the Café de la Paix at five o'clock in the afternoon, and looking through a line of promenaders such as that, I counted two hundred 'busses, private carriages and hacks, most (or many at least) of whose occupants were presumably bent on pleasure, to sixteen carts and other vehicles devoted exclusively to business—eight of which, by the way, were hand-carts. Oh the gay and happy town! I thought. Where the turn-outs bear such a proportion to the drays, no wonder cafés thrive, exquisite drinks are served, and a corky people, who have a happy faculty, as illustrated by the late war, of coming up the quicker the farther they are pressed down, find the thing enjoyable.

A café-front indeed is better than an omnibus-top for studying Paris, and the café itself is a club for everybody. People go to it to gossip and regale themselves, play games, talk politics, read the newspapers, write letters, transact business it may be, sit, think, dream, and rest themselves. To the Anglo-Saxon the life that is led in it seems a good deal like walking about in a botanical garden during the day and sleeping in an observatory at night—a decidedly artificial existence; but so long as we must drink or be amused at all, we shall do well to study the ways of the French. They alone know how to eat and drink properly and amuse themselves in a rational way.

Gilman C. Fisher.