'Ah, monsieur'—she smiled with a roguishness that completely unsettled him for the remainder of the day—'have you no sympathy for my headache?'
CHAPTER VII.
THE CAFÉ ROUGE.
I.
Monsieur Anton Beauchamp was the proprietor of the Café Rouge in London. Monsieur Anton Beauchamp was once proprietor of the Café Bleu in Paris.
For many years he had cast envious eyes on London. Did not always his guests, those strange blonde people with the clothes like blankets, pay his prices without question? Did they not drink bad wine and never add the bill? Pardi! if he could have only English as patrons, madame and himself could purchase that wine-shop in the Bou' Mich', and never worry again.
For years the thought of London haunted Anton; and then one day, in a superb moment of decision, he announced his intention of journeying thither. A large entourage followed him to the Gare du Nord, and, with much the same feelings as those of an explorer leaving for the North Pole, he bade a dramatic farewell, and almost missed his train by running back to give a final embrace to Madame Beauchamp.
With no undue mishap he reached London the same night, and next day he lunched at a famous London restaurant. At night he dined at a fashionable establishment in Shaftesbury Avenue. In both places he received ordinary food served without distinction, reckoned up the bill, and found that in each case l'addition was correct—and rushed madly back to Paris, where he sold the Café Bleu, packed up his belongings, and explained matters to his wife, doing all three things simultaneously.
'The dinner,' he exclaimed in a fever of excitement, 'is served—so! As a funeral. I order what I like, and the waiter he stands there comme un gendarme, as if it is my name I give. "Any vegetables?" demands he. Mon Dieu! As if vegetables they are no more to him than so much—so much umbrellas. I say, "Garçon, la carte des vins!" and, quite correct, he hands it me with so many wines he has not got, just as in Paris, but—que penses tu?—he permits me to order what wine I choose, so—by myself. C'est terrible! I give him three pennies and say, "Garçon, for such stupidity you should pay the whole bill."'
Monsieur Beauchamp was a man of shrewdness. He knew he could not compete with the established solidity of the Trocadero, the Ritz, the Piccadilly, or the garishness of Frascati's, so he purchased and remodelled an unobtrusive building in an unobtrusive street between Shaftesbury Avenue and Oxford Street, but clear of Soho and its adherents. He decorated the place in a rich red, and arranged some cabinets particuliers upstairs, where, by the screening of a curtain, Madame the Wife and Monsieur the Lover could dine without molestation of vulgar eyes.