When you see in descending St. Jaques, a morose, surly, bibliomaniacal little man, entrenched behind a Homer, a Horace, and a Euclid’s Elements, that is the Collège de France; and when you stumble over a pile of the Martyrs, it is the Sorbonne; and as you approach the Ecole Médecine, five hundred Bichats and Richerands beckon you to its threshold. Besides, you will see ladies and gentlemen looking out from the neighbouring windows, and recommending themselves in their various anatomical appearances; en squellette, or half dissected, or turned wrong side out. There is a shop, too, of phrenological skulls, and a lady who will explain you the bumps; and if you like, you can get yourself felt for a franc or two, and she will tell you where is your Philo-pro—what do you call it? She told me our intellectual qualities were placed in front, and the sensual in the back part of the skull, very happily, because the former could look out ahead, and keep the latter in order. And next door is a shop of all the wax preparations of human forms and diseases, and here is another lady who will point you out their resemblances with originals, who will analyse you a man into all his component parts, and put him up again; and she puts up, also, “magnificent skeletons” and mannikins for foreign countries.
Now and then you will see arrive a cart, which pours out a dozen, or so, of naked men and women, as you do a cord of wood, upon the pavement, which are distributed into the dissecting rooms, after the ladies and gentlemen standing about have sufficiently entertained themselves with the spectacle. And just step into “Dupuytren’s Room,” and you will see all the human diseases, arranged beautifully in families; here is the plague, and there is the cholera morbus; here is the gout, and there is the palsy staring you in the face; and there are whole cabinets of sprained ankles, broken legs, dislocated shoulders, and cracked skulls. In a word, every thing is literary in this quarter. One evening you are invited to a party for squaring the circle, another for finding out the longitude; and another:—“My dear sir, come this evening, we have just got in a subject. The autopsis will begin at six.”
The medical students are about four thousand; those of law and theology about the same number; and many a one lodges, eats, and clothes himself, and keeps his sweetheart, all for twelve dollars per month. With the exception of the last, I am living a kind of student’s life. I have a room twenty feet square, overlooking, from the second story, the beautiful garden of the Luxembourg, and the great gate opening from the Rue d’Enfer. This is my parlour during the day, and a cabinet having a bed, and opening into it, converts the two into a bed-chamber for the night; and the price, including services, is eight dollars per month.
I find at ten, a small table covered with white porcelain, and a very neat little Frenchwoman comes smiling in with a coffee-pot in one hand, and a pitcher of boiling milk in the other, and pours me out with her rosy fingers a large cup of the best café au lait in the world, and sits down herself, and descants fluently on the manners and customs of the capital, and improves my facilities in French.
If you wish bad coffee, it is not to be had in this country. The accompaniments are two eggs, or some equivalent relish, a piece of fresh butter, and a small loaf of bread—all this for eighteen sous, (a sou is a twentieth less than our cent.) I dine out wherever I may chance to be, and according to the voracity or temperance of my appetite, from one and a half to five francs, at six o’clock. A French dinner comes at the most sociable hour, when the cares and labours of the day are past, and the mind can give itself up entirely to its enjoyments, or its repose.
I have dined sometimes at the illustrious Flicoteau’s on the Place Sorbonne, with the medical students, and have looked upon the rooms once occupied by J. Jaques Rousseau, and upon the very dial on which he could not teach Thérése, his grisette wife, to count the hours. I have dined, too, at Viot’s, with the law students, and have taken coffee with Molière, and Fontenelle, and Voltaire, at the Procope. The following is a bill at the Sorbonne.
| A service of | Soup, | 3 | Sous. |
| Vegetables, | 3 | “ | |
| Meat, | 6 | “ | |
| Fish, | 6 | “ | |
| Bread, | 2 | “ | |
| 20 |
You have also, which serves at once for vinegar and wine, a half bottle of claret, at six sous; and a dessert, a bunch of grapes or three cherries, for two; or of sweetmeats, a most delicate portion—one of those infinitesimals of a dose, such as the Homœopathists administer in desperate cases. Yet this—if a dish were only what it professes to be on its face, the soup, not the rinsings of the dishcloth, the fricassee not poached upon the swill-tub,—this would still be supportable—if a macaroni were only a macaroni; which in a cheap Paris fare, I understand, is not to be presumed. In sober sadness, this is very bad.
We have a right to expect that a thing which calls itself a hare, should not be a cat. But, alas! it is the end of all human refinement, that hypocrisy should take the place of truth. You can discern no better the component parts of a French dish in a French cookery, than you can a virtue in a condiment of French affability. But ——. It is an homage which a horse’s rump renders to a beefsteak. At my last dinner here, I had two little ribs held together in indissoluble matrimony of mutton. I tried to divorce them, but to no purpose, till the perspiration began to flow abundantly. I called the “garçon,” and exhibited to him their toughness.—“Cependant, Monsieur, le mouton était magnifique!” I offered him five francs if he would sit down and eat it; he refused. He had perhaps a mother or some poor relation depending on him; I did not insist.
M. Flicoteau belongs to the romantic school. I prefer the classical. I need hardly say that the French students, who dine here, have an unhealthy and shrivelled appearance—you recollect the last run of the shad on the Juniatta. It is the very spot on which the Sorbonne used to starve its monks, and M. Flicoteau, for his own sake, keeps starving people here ever since? Sixteen sous is a student’s ordinary dinner. His common allowance for clothing, and other expenses by the year, is three hundred dollars.