"Mais goûtez-en," said the lady, presenting a specimen of the same kind as that she was herself eating: "ils sont excellens."
"No, no! it is enough to look at them!" said her cavalier, almost shuddering. "There is no lightness, no elegance, no grace in any single gâteau here."
"Mais goûtez quelque chose," reiterated the lady.
"Vous le voulez absolument!" exclaimed the young man; "quelle tyrannie! ... and what a proof of obedience I am about to give you!... Voyons donc!" he continued, approaching a plate on which were piled some truly English muffins—which, as you know, are of a somewhat mysterious manufacture, and about as palatable if eaten untoasted as a slice from a leathern glove. To this gâteau, as he supposed it to be, the unfortunate connoisseur in pâtisserie approached, exclaiming with rather a theatrical air, "Voilà donc ce que je vais faire pour vos beaux yeux!"
As he spoke, he took up one of the pale, tough things, and, to our extreme amusement, attempted to eat it. Any one might be excused for making a few grimaces on such an occasion,—and a Frenchman's privilege in this line is well known: but this hardy experimentalist outdid this privilege;—he was in a perfect agony, and his spittings and reproachings were so vehement, that friends, strangers, boutiquier, and all, even down to a little befloured urchin who entered at the moment with a tray of patties, burst into uncontrollable laughter, which the unfortunate, to do him justice, bore with extreme good humour, only making his fair countrywoman promise that she would never insist upon his eating English confectionary again.
Had this scene continued a minute longer, I should have missed seeing what I should have been sorry not to have seen, for I certainly could not have left the pastry-cook's shop while the young Frenchman's sufferings lasted. Happily, however, we reached the Boulevard des Italiens in time to see King Louis-Philippe, en simple bourgeois, passing on foot just before Les Bains Chinois, but on the opposite side of the way.
Excepting a small tri-coloured cockade in his hat, he had nothing whatever in his dress to distinguish him from any other gentleman. He is a well-looking, portly, middle-aged man, with something of dignity in his step which, notwithstanding the unpretending citizen-like style of his promenade, would have drawn attention, and betrayed him as somebody out of the common way, even without the plain-speaking cocarde tricolore. There were two gentlemen a few paces behind him, as he passed us, who, I think, stepped up nearer to him afterwards; but there were no other individuals near who could have been in attendance upon him. I observed that he was recognised by many, and some few hats were taken off, particularly by two or three Englishmen who met him; but his appearance excited little emotion. I was amused, however, at the nonchalant air with which a young man at some distance, in full Robespierrian costume, used his lorgnon to peruse the person of the monarch as long as he remained in sight.
The last king I saw in the streets of Paris was Charles the Tenth returning from a visit to one of his suburban palaces, escorted and accompanied in kingly state and style. The contrast in the men and in the mode was striking, and calculated to awaken lively recollections of all the events which had occurred to both of them since the last time that I turned my head to look after a sovereign of France.
My fancy flew to Prague, and to the three generations of French monarchs stationed there almost as peaceably as if they had taken up their quarters at St. Denis!