The American in Paris; vol. 1 of 2

by John Sanderson

Louis Philippe, our citizen king, and proprietor of this garden, gets thirty-two thousand francs annually from letting out these chairs. Sit you down. It being after dinner, I will treat you to a regale; which is, a cup of pure coffee, with a small glass of liqueur, eau de vie, or rum, or quirsh. You can take them separate or together; in the latter case, it is called “gloria;” or you may put your cognac into a cup, with a large lump of sugar in the middle, and set it on fire, to destroy the effects of the alcohol upon your nerves. See how the area of the garden is already covered with its smoking, drinking, and promenading community; and how the smoke, as if loth to quit us, still lingers, until the whole atmosphere is narcotic with its incense. At a later hour, we shall find in the Rotunda, at the north end, and upon tables under these trees, ices in pyramids, and orgeat, and eau sucrée, and all the other luxurious refreshments. Those two oriental pavilions, with the gilded roofs, in front of the Rotonde, will distribute newspapers to the studious, and the whole garden will buzz with conversation and merriment, until the long twilight has faded into night.

Of the inside of the cafés and restaurants I must give you a few particulars. In each, there is a woman of choice beauty, mounted on a kind of throne. She is present always, and may be considered as one of the fixtures of the shop. When you enter any of these cafés, you will see, standing here and there through the room, an individual in a white apron; he has mustachios; he holds a coffee-pot in his left hand, and leaning gracefully over the right, reads his favourite journal—this is the waiter! When you have cried three times “Garçon!” the lady at the bureau will vibrate a little bell, and bring you instantly this waiter from his studies. If you are a very decent-looking man, she will let you cry only twice; and if you have an embroidered waistcoat, and look like a lord, and have whiskers, she will not let you cry at all. The chair occupied by this she-secretary, at the Mille Colonnes, cost ten thousand francs; and she who sat, some years ago, upon that of the “café des Aveugles,” the “belle Limonadière,” charmed all who had eyes, and amongst the rest, a brother of the greatest emperor in the world.

There are above a thousand of these cafés in Paris, and several of the most sumptuous overlook the gardens of the Palais Royal. Ceres has unlocked her richest treasures here, and has poured them out with a prodigality that is unknown elsewhere. Fish, of fresh and salt water; rare wines, of home and foreign production; and as for the confectionaries, sucreries, fruiteries, and charcuiteries—the senses are bewildered by the infinite variety. And the artists here have a higher niche in the temple of Fame than even those of the Boulevard Italien. Monsieur Véry supplied the allied monarchs at three thousand francs per day. The “Purveyor of Fish” to his Majesty, who is of this school, is salaried a thousand dollars above our chief justice of the Union; and Monsieur Dodat, who is immortal for making sausages and the “Passage Vero-Dodat,” has at Père la Chaise a monument towering like that of Cheops.

This is the true “Kitchen Cabinet” to which ours is no more to be compared than the dish water to the dinner. Véry is in the kitchen what the Emperor was in the camp; he is the Napoleon of gastronomy. All flesh is nothing in his sight. Why, he will transform you a rabbit to a hare, or an eel to a lamprey, as easily as you a Jackson-man to a Whig; and he turns cocks into capons, and vice versa, by the simple artifice of a sauce. You indeed condense the sense of a whole community into the single head of a senator, or a President; and he just as easily a whole flock of geese into a single goose. You, it is true, possess the wonderful art, all know in what excellence, of puffing a man up beyond the natural measure of his merits, and just so Monsieur Véry will puff you a goose’s liver, however unmathematical it may seem, beyond the size of the whole animal.

Now, in the midst of all this skill and profusion, “the devil’s in it if you cannot dine;” yet have I perished myself several times of hunger in the very midst of this Palais Royal. It is not enough that a table be loaded with its dishes, there must be science, to call them by their names, and taste, to discriminate their uses. What can you do with an Iroquois from the “Sharp Mountain,” who does not know that sauce for a gander is not sauce for a goose. Unless you have studied the nomenclature, which is about equal to a first course of anatomy, you are no more fit to enjoy a dinner at Véry’s than Tantalus in his lake. For example, the garçon will present you a bill of fare as big as your prayer-book; you open it; the first page presents you thirty soups, (classically, potages,) and there you are to choose between a “puré,” a “consommé,” “à la Julien, à la Beauvais, à la Bonne Femme,” &c. &c. I prefer the “consommé,” and I will tell you how it is made. It is a piece of choice beef and capon boiled many hours over a slow fire to a jelly, and the juices concentrated, and served without any extraneous mixture. The “Julien,” is a pot pourri of all that is edible or potable in the list of human aliments. It is a soup, for which, if rightly made, an epicure would give away his birth-right; it was invented, not by Julian the Apostate, but by Monsieur Julien, of the Palais Royal.

The fluids being settled, you will turn then to the following page for the solids: “Papillottes de Levreaud,” “filet à la Napolitaine,” “vol-au-vent,” “scolope de saumon,” “œuf au miroir,” “riz sauté à la gláce,” “piqué aux truffles,” &c. &c. Alas, my poor roasting and frying countrymen! There is not a day but I see some poor Yankee scratching his head in despair over this crabbed vocabulary of French dishes. Your best way in this emergency is to call the garçon, and leave all to him, and sit still like a good child, and take what is given to you. I have known many a one to run all over Paris for a beef-steak, and when he has got it, it was a horse’s rump. My advice is, that no one come to Paris to dine in mean houses on cheap dinners, where you will eat cats for hares, and have snails and chalk for your cream, and the jelly of the “consommé,” from the barber’s. You are no more sure of the ingredients of a dish under the disguises of a French cookery, than of men’s sentiments from their faces or professions. You can get, to begin with, olives, and eggs, boiled and poached, all that remains of old simplicity, if you know how to ask for them; if not, carry the shells about with you in your pocket.

We will dine to-morrow at the “Mille Colonnes.” Ladies often step into this café to be reflected; you can see here all your faces, and behind and before you, as conveniently as Janus. One always enters this threshold with reverence: it has dined the Holy Alliance. Besides the usual officers and attendants, you will sometimes see here a little man, grave, distrait, and meditative; do not disturb him; he is, perhaps, busy about the projét of some new sauce. He will start off abruptly sometimes, and leave you in the middle of a phrase; it is not incivility, he has just conceived a dish, and is going out to execute it, or write it upon his tablets. Never ask for him in the mornings before one—“il compose.” The French are not copyists in cookery, any more than in fashions. They are inventors, and this keeps the imagination on the rack. You will remark, that people always excel in those things in which they invent, and are always mediocre in those things in which they imitate.

After your potage, which you must eat sparingly, and without bread, (for bread will satiate, and spoil the rest of your dinner,) you will take a little “vin ordinaire,” or pure Burgundy, waiting for your first course; and you will just cast a look over the official part of the Moniteur, for there is no knowing when one may be made a Peer of France; and on receiving one dish, always command the next. After the dessert you will read the news all round; the Messager, Gazette, Constitutionnel, Debats, Quotidienne, National, and the Charivari; and after coffee, you may amuse yourself at checkers, domino, or improve your morals by a game of chess. In looking about the room, you will see a great number of guests, perhaps a hundred, not in stalls, as in our eating-houses and the stables, but seated at white marble tables, in an open and elegant saloon; the walls tapestried with mirrors.

If it be a serious gentleman, reading deliberately the newspaper over his dessert, careless or contemptuous of what is going on around him, and drinking his bottle of champagne alone—that is an Englishman. If a partie carré, that is, a couple of ladies and their cavaliers, dining with much noise and claret, observing a succession and analogy of dishes, swallowing their wine drop by drop, as I read your letters, fearing lest it should come too soon to an end, and prolonging expressly the enjoyments of the repast—these are French people; or if you see a couple of lads, hurried and impatient, and rating the waiters in no gentle terms, “D—n your eyes, why don’t you bring in the dinner? and take away that broth, and your black bottle; who the devil wants your vinegar, and your dishwater, and your bibs too? And bring us, if you can, a whole chicken’s leg at once, and not at seven different times,”—these are from the “Far West,” and a week old in Paris.

How should these little snacks of a French table not seem egregiously mean to an American, who is used to dine in fifteen minutes, even on a holiday, and to see a whole hog barbacued? The French dine to gratify, we to appease, appetite; we demolish a dinner, and they eat it. The guests who frequent these cafés are regular or flying visiters; some are accidental, others occasional, dining by agreement to enjoy each other’s company; others again are families, who dine out for a change, or to give a respite to their servants; and others live here, a kind of stereotype customers altogether: and these houses serve, in addition to their province of eating and drinking, as places of conference, or clubs; it is here that men communicate on political subjects, that news is circulated, and public opinion formed; and that kings are expelled, and others are set up on their thrones.