"Because a breakfast chez Molino costs at least twenty-five francs per head--BECAUSE I have credit at Procope--BECAUSE I have not a sou in my pocket--and BECAUSE, milord Smithfield, I aspire to the honor of entertaining your lordship on the present occasion!" replied Müller, punctuating each clause of his sentence with a bow.
If Müller had not a sou, I, at all events, had now only one Napoleon; so the Café Procope carried the day.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE RUE DE L'ANCIENNE COMÉDIE AND THE CAFÉ PROCOPE.
The Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Près and the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie are one and the same. As the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Près, it dates back to somewhere about the reign of Philippe Auguste; and as the Rue de l'Ancienne Comèdie it takes its name and fame from the year 1689, when the old Théâtre Français was opened on the 18th of April by the company known as Moliêre's troupe--Moliêre being then dead, and Lully having succeeded him at the Théâtre du Palais Royal.
In the same year, 1689, one François Procope, a Sicilian, conceived the happy idea of hiring a house just opposite the new theatre, and there opening a public refreshment-room, which at once became famous, not only for the excellence of its coffee (then newly introduced into France), but also for being the favorite resort of all the wits, dramatists, and beaux of that brilliant time. Here the latest epigrams were circulated, the newest scandals discussed, the bitterest literary cabals set on foot. Here Jean Jacques brooded over his chocolate; and Voltaire drank his mixed with coffee; and Dorat wrote his love-letters to Mademoiselle Saunier; and Marmontel wrote praises of Mademoiselle Clairon; and the Marquis de Biévre made puns innumerable; and Duclos and Mercier wrote satires, now almost forgotten; and Piron recited those verses which are at once his shame and his fame; and the Chevalier de St. Georges gave fencing lessons to his literary friends; and Lamothe, Fréron, D'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, and all that wonderful company of wits, philosophers, encyclopaedists, and poets, that lit up as with a dying glory the last decades of the old régime, met daily, nightly, to write, to recite, to squabble, to lampoon, and some times to fight.
The year 1770 beheld, in the closing of the Théâtre Français, the extinction of a great power in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Près--for it was not, in fact, till the theatre was no more a theatre that the street changed its name, and became the Rue de L'Ancienne Comédie. A new house (to be on first opening invested with the time-honored title of Théâtre Français, but afterwards to be known as the Odéon) was now in progress of erection in the close neighborhood of the Luxembourg. The actors, meanwhile, repaired to the little theatre of the Tuilleries. At length, in 1782,[2] the Rue de L'Ancienne Comédie was one evening awakened from its two years' lethargy by the echo of many footfalls, the glare of many flambeaux, and the rattle of many wheels; for all Paris, all the wits and critics of the Café Procope, all the fair shepherdesses and all the beaux seigneurs of the court of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI., were hastening on foot, in chairs, and in chariots, to the opening of the new house and the performance of a new play! And what a play! Surely, not to consider it too curiously, a play which struck, however sportively, the key-note of the coming Revolution;--a play which, for the first time, displayed society literally in a state of bouleversement;--a play in which the greed of the courtier, the venality of the judge, the empty glitter of the crown, were openly held up to scorn;--a play in which all the wit, audacity, and success are on the side of the canaille;--a play in which a lady's-maid is the heroine, and a valet canes his master, and a great nobleman is tricked, outwitted, and covered with ridicule!
[2] 1782 is the date given by M. Hippolyte Lucas. Sainte-Beuve places it two years later.
This play, produced for the first time under the title of La Folle Journée, was written by one Caron de Beaumarchais--a man of wit, a man of letters, a man of the people, a man of nothing--and was destined to achieve immortality under its later title of Le Mariage de Figaro.