He eats for a hundred, lodges for fifty, and has the remainder for his wardrobe and amusements. The students of medicine are mostly poor and laborious, and being obliged to follow their filthy occupation of dissecting, are negligent of dress and manners. The disciples of the law are more from the richer classes, have idle time, keep better company, and have an air plus distingué.
The doctors of law in all countries take rank above medicine. The question of precedence, I recollect, was determined by the Duke of Mantua’s fool, who observed that the “rogue always walks ahead of the executioner.” Theology, alas! hides her head in a peaceful corner of the Sorbonne, where once she domineered, and begs to be unnoticed in her humble and abject fortunes. A student of Divinity eats a soup maigre, a riz-au-lait, flanked by a dessert of sour grapes. His meals would take him to Heaven, if he had no other merits.
The other resorts of eating, besides the restaurants, are as follow: the Gargotte, the Cuisine Bourgeoise, and, of a higher grade, the Pension Bourgeoise. In the Gargotte you don’t get partridges. Your dinner costs seven sous. You have a little meat, dry and somewhat stringy, veal or mutton, whichever Monsieur pleases. Whether it died the natural way, or a violent death by the hands of the butcher, it is impossible to know. You have, besides, a thick soup, a loaf of bread three feet long, standing in the corner by the broom, and fried potatoes; also, water and the servant girl à discretion. At seventeen sous, you have all the aforesaid delicacies, with a table cloth into the bargain; and at twenty, the luxurious addition of a napkin, and a fork of Algiers metal. This is the Gargotte.
When you have got to twenty-five sous, you are in the Cuisine Bourgeoise. Here your “couvert,” consists of a spoon, a fork, a knife, a napkin, a glass, and a small bottle, called a caraffon; your plate is changed—already a step towards civilization; and you have a cucumber a foot long, radishes a little withered, asparagus just getting to seed, and salt and pepper, artistly arranged; and a horse’s rump cooked into a beefsteak, and washed down with “veritable macon”—that is, the best sort of logwood alcoholised. You have, also, a little dessert here of sour grapes, wrinkled apricots, or green figs, which are exhibited for sale, at the window, between meals.
The flaps of mutton and the drumsticks of turkeys, which you get so tender, have been served up, once or twice, at the Hotel Ordinary; but they are preferred much to the original dishes. One likes sometimes better Ephraim’s gleanings, than Abiezer’s vintage. The French have a knack of letting nothing go to loss. Why they make more of a dead horse or cow than others of the living ones. They do not even waste the putrid offals of the butcheries; they sell the maggots to feed chickens.
But when you pay forty sous, that’s quite another affair. You are now in the monde gourmande. Spinage has butter in it; custards have sugar in them; soup is called potage;—everything now has an honest name; bouilli is bœuf à la mode; fried potatoes pomme de terre à la maitre d’hotel; and a baked cat is, lapin sauté a l’estragon. This is the gentleman’s boarding-house.
I mean by gentleman, a youth, who has just come over from England or America, to the lectures, or a French clerk of the corps bureaucratique, or an apprentice philosopher, who calls himself a “man of letters.” It is one of the advantages of this place, that you are not often oppressed by the intelligence and gravity of your convives, and have a chance of shining. It is in the power of any man to have wit, if he but knows how to select his company. In this pension, the dishes succeed one another, and are not crammed, as on our tables, roti fricandeau, salade, vol au vent—all into the same service, to distract and pall the appetite, or get cold waiting on each other.
The coquetry of a French kitchen keeps alive expectation, and enhances enjoyment by surprise. You have here, too, the advantage of a male cook; the kitchen prefers the masculine to the feminine, like the grammars; and, besides, you have the tranquillity of a private house. If you ask a dish at Flicoteau’s, the waiter bawls it down to the kitchen, and as they are continually asking, he is continually bawling. At the end of the feast, you will see, standing before you, a tumbler full of toothpicks, one of which you will keep fumbling in your mouth the whole afternoon, as an evidence you have dined; and especially if you have not dined—for then you must keep up appearances;—some grease their mouths with a candle, and then you think they have been eating paté de foie gras.
I am sorry to have forgotten the locomotive cook; I mean a woman with an appareil de cuisine about her neck, having meat and fish hung, by hooks, on both her haunches, and sausages, or fish, or potatoes, hissing in a frying-pan; and diffusing, for twenty yards around, a most appetising flavour. She haunts, usually, the Pont Neuf and its vicinity, and looks like gastronomy personified. She will give you, for four sous, of potatoes, with yesterday’s gazette, and, reclining under the parapet of the Quai—the king perhaps, all the while, envying you from the heights of the Louvre—you eat a more wholesome dinner at ten sous, than at the Place Sorbonne at twenty-four.
All the common world of Paris buys its provisions second-hand. The farmer arrives about two in the morning—he sells out to the hucksters, and these latter to the public, mixing in the leavings of the preceding day, a rotten egg with a fresh one, &c. A patient old woman, having nothing else to do, speculates over a bushel of potatoes, or a botte of onions, twice twenty-four hours; and your milkwoman, perhaps, never saw a cow; cows are expensive in slops and provender, and snails and plaster of Paris are to be had almost for nothing. The French eat greater quantities of bread than their neighbours—and why at a cheaper rate?—The price is fixed, by the police, every fortnight, and its average is two-and-a-half cents—sixty per cent. lower than in London; and how much lower than with us? 450 millions of lbs. are consumed in Paris annually; each man eating twelve dollars’ worth. If you establish a Frenchman’s expense at 100, you will find 19 parts for bread, 22 for meat, 27 for wine and spirits.