THE PARIS CAFÉS.
Alimentary, and not literary, is the modern café. Times are so changed since Voltaire, Diderot and the rest sang and shouted in the Café Procope—jested, reasoned and made themselves immortal there—there are so many people who have the means to frequent cafés, and there is such an immense floating population, eager, curious and bent on sightseeing, that no clique can live. Its precincts, no matter how hallowed, are invaded by the leering mob and His many-headed Majesty the Crowd. Still, certain cafés are able to boast a clientèle, with the military, journalistic, artistic or commercial element in preponderating force—cafés where the stockbrokers, students or officers go—but the old historic café, the café of tradition, where you were sure to find some celebrity on exhibition—a first-class poet or a philosopher—may be said to be defunct. The Grand Café and the Café de la Paix under the Grand Hôtel, being very central, near the new Opéra, and gorgeously fitted up, are the chief rendezvous of the fashionable floating population, aristocratic loafers of all nations, where representatives from the remotest parts of the earth meet to stare at each other under the same roof—Persians, Greeks and Hindoos, Sandwich Islanders and Yankees. Tortoni's is a restaurant and café of the highest class, the most select in the city. Café Riche and Café Grétry, both fine cafés, are much frequented by stockbrokers, who in the evening are wont to assemble on the sidewalk near by, making the night air ring with their wild shouts of "give" and "take:" if dispersed by the police, as they often are, they generally gather into knots a little farther on. Café du Helder is appropriated almost exclusively to the military, officers in bourgeois dress, students from the Polytechnic and St. Cyr, and horse-jockeys. The Café des Variétés belongs to the actors—a noisy, brilliant place—whilst the Café Madrid is the literary café of the nineteenth century, if there is any. Under Napoleon III. it was the centre of the radical opposition, being frequented by all the shades of Red, from the delicate hue of the Débats to the deep crimson of Flourens and Rochefort. Under the Commune it continued to be notorious, and to-day it is the resort of lawyers, journalists and Bohemians—lesser lights who seem to like the location, on the confines of the bad Boulevard Montmartre, and have no objection to the cocottes who come there in the evening. Like La Fontaine's mule,
Qui ne parlait incessament
Que de sa mère la jument,
they talk only of literature, their nurse, and speak disparagingly—it is a peculiarity of the place—of all the fellow-beings she has suckled. It is the typical French café, in the central salon of which, in majestic repose, sits the dame de comptoir, who has a little gray moustache—the French like a little hair upon the upper lip of ladies—whilst overhead, forming a part of the extraordinary decoration, is a Madonna, goddess, angel—I can't say what—copied from one of the old masters in the palace of the Luxembourg. Gold-dust blown across a blue oval, with white-and-rose angels in the midst, shuts off the upward gaze in one of the other salons, whilst all around medallions large and small of heads and figures, male, female and infantile, with a variety of vine-wreathed Bacchuses and bow-drawing Cupids, which are considered especially fit to decorate cafés, cluster along the mouldings, encumber the panels or fill up the niches. Huge mirrors reflect the pea-green walls, the crystal chandeliers, the gilding, glass and divans; cats perambulate the apartments; people come and go—black, elegant fellows, with broad-rimmed hats, pretty canes, good clothes, good fits; absinthe-drinkers, with heavy jaws and dreamy, evil eyes. Billiard-balls are clicking in the back room; cards and dominoes are being played; cold-blooded, demoralized people lean forward, gossip and gesticulate—men who would man a barricade on occasion or put a sword-blade through a stomach.
With a very few exceptions, all the leading cafés of Paris have become restaurants. You breakfast, dine and sup there; and in place of coffee being the sole or leading article of consumption, an infinite variety of drinks is now at the disposal of the thirsty wayfarer. Mocha, that product of the East the preparation of which, like the making of bread, is the stumbling-block of housekeepers in both hemispheres, is served in three ways—as a capucin, a mazagran or a demi-tasse. A capucin (the name is but little used) is our cup of coffee—coffee with milk in it; a mazagran is coffee in a glass, accompanying which a decanter of water is brought. The name is derived from a village in Africa where the French had a brilliant feat of arms, and where the soldiers, in the absence of milk or brandy, had to water their coffee or drink it au naturel. The coffee itself is precisely the same as that furnished for the demi-tasse, which is served in a small china cup, accompanying which is a little decanter of cognac, with a fairy glass for measuring it; for the French, in place of cream, take brandy with coffee and rum with tea—to us an incomprehensible mixture. After breakfast and dinner the Frenchman desires coffee, and if he does not get it at home he goes to the café for it. To do without it, or to do without claret at meals, would be a dreadful alternative to which he would not long submit without, it might be, losing his reason and taking his life. Strong, black and fragrant, he would die without that beverage for which—and for Racine, by the way—Madame de Sévigné prophesied an ephemeral popularity. Taken immediately after meals, it removes the fumes of the claret and champagne he has drunk, and leaves him feeling as clear-headed as Plato and grateful as a pensioner of the king.
Just before meal-time the cafés are crowded with people indulging in one of the renowned trio of appetizers, one of the great triumvirate of anteprandial potations—bittère, vermouth and absinthe. Bittère is a clear grateful drink of Hollandic derivation, considered more wholesome than either of its fellows; vermouth is a wormwood wine the drinker does not like at first (please draw the inference that he becomes immensely fond of it at last); whilst absinthe—what shall we say of it? It is execrable stuff—the milk of sirens mingled with sea-water. Of a dirty-green color, pungent, all-powerful, it heats up the stomach, expending itself at the extremities in half-developed throbs, perpetual wavelets of rankling sting that break upon the shores of flesh. It mounts to the hair-roots, fills the entrails with a furnace-glow, goes everywhere. It is the worst of French drinks, representing and standing for what is worst in French character, worst in France. It cannot be tossed off at a throw: it must be toyed with, sipped. Stimulating, enervating, poisonous, horrible—all the more so perhaps because it is not intoxicating exactly—God has put a barrier against its use by making it distasteful; but, strange to say, all those things men run after: rum, tobacco, opium, absinthe, are always distasteful at first, if not for a long time afterward.
But the French do not drink rum, gin, whiskey or water to any great extent. With the exception of absinthe and considerable brandy, their drinking occupies a middle ground. They revel in a multitude of subtile, delightful mixtures—liqueurs, crêmes and sirops. Very dear to the heart of refined sensualists is the famous monks' liquor called chartreuse, which deservedly ranks at the head of the long list of liqueurs—anisette, curaçao, maraschino, rosolio, alkermès, ratafia, genièvre, etc. It is made by the monks of the Grande Chartreuse, near Grenoble, of certain aromatic herbs and brandy, the former gathered by them in their summer wanderings amongst the Jura Mountains. It is a sticky, sweet compound of a green or yellow color, and of such a fiery nature that it must be sipped, not drunk. Many a hater of the priesthood, holding up one of the little thimbleful glasses in which it is served, has exclaimed, "Blessed be monks for making thee! Compound of devil, dew and honey! in thee have they sought to indemnify themselves for lack of wife, and partially have they succeeded."
All these liqueurs, indeed, are rather ladies' drinks. So too are the crêmes—mocha, tea, noyau, cumin, mint, ether, etc.; also the sirops, including orgeat, very refreshing in the summer-time. Masculine preferences are for beer, immense quantities of which are drunk, especially in the evening, or for fine champagne, the name bestowed upon superior brandy. However, ladies and gentlemen unite in disposing of half-frozen punch (sorbets) or eating ices—say a tutti frutti at the Café Napolitain—ravishing mixtures of cold and passion, the fruits of the tropics imbedded in a slice of the North Pole.
French drinks are, like French dishes, artistic preparations, and the French cafés artistic, pretty places, indispensable to the scenic completeness of things in France, if not to the comfort and well-being of the people. A landscape without water, a bride without a veil, a house without windows, would be something like France (Paris especially) without cafés. To take away its cafés would be to pluck out its eyes, to leave it dull and dead—food without appetite, marriage without love or the honeymoon. Its industries may give it sinew, muscle, bone and nerve; the Institute may give it brains; but the cafés—they are its life-blood and its pulse.
The French cultivate even a love of home in going to the café. For what is a love of home? It is certainly not a mere local attachment, such as the cat has for the particular hearth-rug where she dozes by day or the particular tiles and water-spouts where she howls by night. It is rather the love of family and friendly union, in which the French take especial delight, gathering together in little knots by the open window, in the garden, on the sidewalk, or, it may be, in the café, talking in the leaping, emancipated, touch-and-go style, in the merry, vaulting style in which they excel, on all the lighter topics.