THE PHILOSOPHY OF BREAKFAST.
"Now this, mon cher," said Müller, taking off his hat with a flourish to the young lady at the comptoir, "is the immortal Café Procope."
I looked round, and found myself in a dingy, ordinary sort of Café, in no wise differing from any other dingy, ordinary sort of Café in that part of Paris. The decorations were ugly enough to be modern. The ceiling was as black with gas-fumes and tobacco smoke as any other ceiling in any other estaminet in the Quartier Latin. The waiters looked as waiters always look before midday--sleepy, discontented, and unwashed. A few young men of the regular student type were scattered about here and there at various tables, reading, smoking, chatting, breakfasting, and reading the morning papers. In an alcove at the upper end of the second room (for there were two, one opening from the other) stood a blackened, broken-nosed, plaster bust of Voltaire, upon the summit of whose august wig some irreverent customer had perched a particularly rakish-looking hat. Just in front of this alcove and below the bust stood a marble-topped table, at one end of which two young men were playing dominoes to the accompaniment of the matutinal absinthe.
"And this," said Müller, with another flourish, "is the still more immortal table of the still more supremely immortal Voltaire. Here he was wont to rest his sublime elbows and sip his demi-tasse. Here, upon this very table, he wrote that famous letter to Marie Antoinette that Fréron stole, and in revenge for which he wrote the comedy called l'Ecossaise; but of this admirable satire you English, who only know Voltaire in his Henriade and his history of Charles the Twelfth, have probably never heard till this moment! Eh bien! I'm not much wiser than you--so never mind. I'll be hanged if I've ever read a line of it. Anyhow, here is the table, and at this other end of it we'll have our breakfast."
It was a large, old-fashioned, Louis Quatorze piece of furniture, the top of which, formed from a single slab of some kind of gray and yellow marble, was stained all over with the coffee, wine, and ink-splashes of many generations of customers. It looked as old--nay, older--than the house itself.
The young men who were playing at dominoes looked up and nodded, as three or four others had done in the outer room when we passed through.
"Bonjour, l'ami," said the one who seemed to be winning. "Hast thou chanced to see anything of Martial, coming along!"
"I observed a nose defiling round the corner of the Rue de Bussy," replied Müller, "and it looked as if Martial might be somewhere in the far distance, but I didn't wait to see. Are you expecting him?"
"Confound him--yes! We've been waiting more than half an hour."
"If you have invited him to breakfast," said Müller, "he is sure to come."
"On the contrary, he has invited us to breakfast."
"Ah, that alters the case," said Müller, philosophically. "Then he is sure not to come." "Garçon!"
A bullet-headed, short-jacketed, long-aproned waiter, who looked as if he had not been to bed since his early youth, answered the summons,
"M'sieur!"
"What have you that you can especially recommend this morning?"
The waiter, with that nasal volubility peculiar to his race, rapidly ran over the whole vegetable and animal creation.
Müller listened with polite incredulity.
"Nothing else?" said he, when the other stopped, apparently from want of breath.
"Mais oui, M'sieur!" and, thus stimulated, the waiter, having "exhausted worlds and then imagined new," launched forth into a second and still more impossible catalogue.
Müller turned to me.
"The resources of this establishment, you observe," he said, very gravely, "are inexhaustible. One might have a Roc's egg à la Sindbad for the asking."
The waiter looked puzzled, shuffled his slippered feet, and murmured something about "oeufs sur le plat."
"Unfortunately, however," continued Müller, "we are but men--not fortresses provisioning for a siege. Antoine, mon enfant, we know thee to be a fellow of incontestible veracity, and thy list is magnificent; but we will be content with a vol-au-vent of fish, a bifteck aux pommes frites, an omelette sucrée, and a bottle of thy 1840 Bordeaux with the yellow seal. Now vanish!"
The waiter, wearing an expression of intense relief, vanished accordingly.
Meanwhile more students had come in, and more kept coming. Hats and caps cropped up rapidly wherever there were pegs to hang them on, and the talking became fast and furious.
I soon found that everybody knew everybody at the Café Procope, and that the specialty of the establishment was dominoes--just as the specialty of the Café de la Régence is chess. There were games going on before long at almost every table, and groups of lookers-on gathered about those who enjoyed the reputation of being skilful players.
Gradually breakfast after breakfast emerged from some mysterious nether world known only to the waiters, and the war of dominoes languished.
"These are all students, of course," I said presently, "and yet, though I meet a couple of hundred fellows at our hospital lectures, I don't see a face I know."
"You would find some by this time, I dare say, in the other room," replied Müller. "I brought you in here that you might sit at Voltaire's table, and eat your steak under the shadow of Voltaire's bust; but this salon is chiefly frequented by law-students--the other by medical and art students. Your place, mon chér, as well as mine, is in the outer sanctuary."
"That infernal Martial!" groaned one of the domino-players at the other end of the table. "So ends the seventh game, and here we are still. Parbleu! Horace, hasn't that absinthe given you an inconvenient amount of appetite?"
"Alas! my friend--don't mention it. And when the absinthe is paid for, I haven't a sou."
"My own case precisely. What's to be done?"
"Done!" echoed Horace, pathetically. "Shade of Apicius! inspire me...but, no--he's not listening."
"Hold! I have it. We'll make our wills in one another's favor, and die."
"I should prefer to die when the wind is due East, and the moon at the full," said Horace, contemplatively.
"True--besides, there is still la mère Gaudissart. Her cutlets are tough, but her heart is tender. She would not surely refuse to add one more breakfast to the score!"
Horace shook his head with an air of great despondency.
"There was but one Job," said he, "and he has been dead some time. The patience of la mère Gaudissart has long since been entirely exhausted."
"I am not so sure of that. One might appeal to her feelings, you know--have a presentiment of early death--wipe away a tear... Bah! it is worth the effort, anyhow."
"It is a forlorn hope, my dear fellow, but, as you say, it is worth the effort. Allons donc! to the storming of la mère Gaudissart!"
And with this they pushed aside the dominoes, took down their hats, nodded to Müller, and went out.
"There go two of the brightest fellows and most improvident scamps in the whole Quartier," said my companion. "They are both studying for the bar; both under age; both younger sons of good families; and both destined, if I am not much mistaken, to rise to eminence by-and-by. Horace writes for Figaro and the Petit Journal pour Rire--Théophile does feuilleton work--romances, chit-chat, and political squibs--rubbish, of course; but clever rubbish, and wonderful when one considers what boys they both are, and what dissipated lives they lead. The amount of impecuniosity those fellows get through in the course of a term is something inconceivable. They have often only one decent suit between them--and sometimes not that. To-day, you see, they are at their wits' end for a breakfast. They have run their credit dry at Procope and everywhere else, and are gone now to a miserable little den in the Rue du Paon, kept by a fat good-natured old soul called la mère Gaudissart. She will perhaps take compassion on their youth and inexperience, and let them have six sous worth of horsebeef soup, stale bread, and the day before yesterday's vegetables. Nay, don't look so pitiful! We poor devils of the Student Quartier hug our Bohemian life, and exalt it above every other. When we have money, we cannot find windows enough out of which to fling it--when we have none, we start upon la chasse au diner, and enjoy the pleasures of the chase. We revel in the extremes of fasting and feasting, and scarcely know which we prefer."
"I think your friends Horace and Théophile are tolerably clear as to which they prefer," I remarked, with a smile.
"Bah! they would die of ennui if they had always enough to eat! Think how it sharpens a man's wits if--given the time, the place, and the appetite--he has every day to find the credit for his dinners! Show me a mathematical problem to compare with it as a popular educator of youth!"
"But for young men of genius, like Horace and Théophile..."
"Make yourself quite easy, mon cher. A little privation will do them no kind of harm. They belong to that class of whom it has been said that 'they would borrow money from Harpagon, and find truffles on the raft of the Medusa.' But hold! we are at the end of our breakfast. What say you? Shall we take our demi-tasse in the next room, among our fellow-students of physic and the fine arts?"