| TERRACE TAVERNE DU PANTHÉON |
One finds every type of restaurant, tavern, and café along the “Boul’ Miche.” There are small restaurants whose plat du jour might be traced to some faithful steed finding a final oblivion in a brown sauce and onions—an important item in a course dinner, to be had with wine included for one franc fifty. There are brasseries too, gloomy by day and brilliant by night (dispensing good Munich beer in two shades, and German and French food), whose rich interiors in carved black oak, imitation gobelin, and stained glass are never half illumined until the lights are lit.
A “TYPE”
All day, when the sun blazes, and the awnings are down, sheltering those chatting on the terrace, the interiors of these brasseries appear dark and cavernous.
The clientèle is somber too, and in keeping with the place; silent poets, long haired, pale, and always writing; serious-minded lawyers, lunching alone, and fat merchants who eat and drink methodically.
Then there are bizarre cafés, like the d’Harcourt, crowded at night with noisy women tawdry in ostrich plumes, cheap feather boas, and much rouge. The d’Harcourt at midnight is ablaze with light, but the crowd is common and you move on up the boulevard under the trees, past the shops full of Quartier fashions—velvet coats, with standing collars buttoning close under the chin; flamboyant black silk scarfs tied in a huge bow; queer broad-brimmed, black hats without which no “types” wardrobe is complete.
On the corner facing the square, and opposite the Luxembourg gate, is the Taverne du Panthéon. This is the most brilliant café and restaurant of the Quarter, forming a V with its long terrace, at the corner of the boulevard and the rue Soufflot, at the head of which towers the superb dome of the Panthéon.
It is 6 P.M. and the terrace, four rows deep with little round tables, is rapidly filling. The white-aproned garçons are hurrying about or squeezing past your table, as they take the various orders.