But the desire to economize keeps away a great many people, for the French are very economical. In the great army of the bourgeois, as well as in the great army of the blouses—many of whom could be bourgeois if they chose—whole families, husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, abstain from going to the café, either alone or accompanied, from Christmas to New Year's and New Year's to Christmas. Neither would you find MacMahon, Thiers or Victor Hugo at the café. The recognized great, the nobility and high officials, contrary to what perhaps is commonly supposed, are rarely to be seen there. They meet in some more private way.
But the café is nevertheless a very charming place. It is a place where it is permitted to you to surrender yourself to the most delicious reflections. You are in the presence of humming-birds, not ostriches or owls. The people are smoking cigarettes, or cigars at worst, not meerschaums. The establishment itself is a dazzle of decoration, a little corner of the Louvre. There is no shouting or swearing, but a pleasing hum. The calls of messieurs and the replies of garçons resolve themselves into a confused lulling sound. If you are well, and your conscience does not trouble you—and even if it does—you can select a quiet corner and dream away the livelong day. The air is nerve-slackening. You feel perfectly at your ease. You can think of nothing to apprehend—no incursion of your lady friends designing to reason with the proprietor and perhaps hold a prayer-meeting on the sidewalk; no incursion of the police, no row. Everybody is placable and quiet—preserves indeed a sort of deferential attitude toward his neighbor—and not only when he comes in, but again when he goes out, salutes the dame de comptoir—the lady superintendent, that is (not unfrequently the wife of the proprietor)—who sits enthroned in a little boxlike place superintending the delivery of drinks and making change. This matter of saluting, as the reader knows, is a deference which every Frenchman considers due to the great man or woman who, at the particular time of his entrance or exit, may chance to be in a particular apartment; and in the case of cafés, if the dame de comptoir were not in her place, he would salute the guests; and if there were but one guest, that one would be expected to return the salute, it being meant for him alone.
Sanctified in this way by the presence of a lady, the café does not seem such a very bad place; and it isn't. Even the estaminets and brasseries, which are but second-rate cafés, and the ordinary wine-shops, still lower in the scale, in which the coachman and commissionnaire regale themselves, taking a canon across the counter in the morning and playing a game of cards in the back shop at night, are by no means the hideous gulping-down places in which our land abounds. Drinking in public places in France is not so completely separated from all respectability and refinement as it is with us. It involves none of that horrid nomenclature, "slings," "punches," "cocktails," "smashes," which carry with them all the terror and awfulness of oaths. The French have pretty names for drinks, as well as a rather pretty, poetic way of alluding to a man's inebriation. "He is a little gray;" "He has a little corner in his head;" "He is in a condition for beating the wall;" "He is heading pins," etc., etc., are favorite expressions. Of course, the delicacy or waggishness with which we allude to an evil is no excuse for it, but the French have little absolute drunkenness to excuse. They are emphatically a sober people (being a good deal like intoxicated Yankees or Dutchmen, anyway), and even in their cups neither rude nor quarrelsome. Of the few French people I ever saw drunk (except peasants), all were begging pardon of the owners of imaginary toes, and making various other polite concessions to the people whom they believed to be around them. And yet they drink prodigiously. The customary allowance of every man who can afford it is a pint of claret at meals, themselves prefaced generally speaking by an appetizer, and supplemented almost invariably by a cup of coffee and cognac. He would be quite likely also in the course of the day to assist in the destruction of a bottle of champagne (almost certain to do so if a bon vivant), and during the afternoon and evening to drink several glasses of beer, perhaps taking a "night-cap" of hot wine before going to bed. All this would not necessarily make him drunk, but continued day by day it keeps him under the influence of a continual stimulus, which in time becomes indispensable and contributes to form the Hotspur character of which we hear so much. Strange it should not make drunkards outright, but it does not seem to produce that effect; and Paris, with all its luxuries in drink, is not a drunken city. You see more drunken people in a week in New York than in a year in Paris, and more people who, if not drunk, are unmistakable topers. They drink hard in Brittany (it is no unusual thing there to see a woman drunk), and so too in the manufacturing places of Normandy and other parts of France, especially those that produce no wine; and Champney, who doubtless studied from life, painted at Ecouen the picture of an old peasant-woman hauling her husband home in a hand-cart dead drunk; but, for all that, the French are emphatically a sober people, either constitutionally or from climatic or other reasons: I do not pretend to say which.
On the whole, therefore, the picture of the French cafés is a pleasant one, and it is a pity the bar-rooms of America and the gin-shops of England were not more like them. They are a compromise, it is true, but that is better than the prohibitionist's vain fight.
Tortoni's, the last survivor of whose founders died only the other day, has its historical reminiscences. Therein is to be found the salon, known as the "blue salon," once hallowed by the occupancy of M. de Talleyrand. The window is still pointed out at which the eminent diplomatist used to sit surveying the crowds that thronged the Boulevards, with his usual fine and cynical smile, like a Mephistopheles of the nineteenth century. A little later, and one has a vision of a young man of short stature, elegantly dressed, who every day or two rides up to door or window, springs from his horse, calls for a particular kind of ice, which he imbibes with a sort of nervous haste, and then disappears. This little dandy, always in a hurry, alert, nervous and sharp-eyed, is a future ruler of the nation: it is M. Thiers. Around Tortoni's there hovers too the souvenir of that other gracious and graceful dandy, king of fashion in his day, the count D'Orsay. It was at a breakfast at Tortoni's that the preliminaries were arranged for the famous duel wherein D'Orsay appeared as the champion of the Virgin Mary. Some irreverent jester having made some slighting remark respecting the Virgin, D'Orsay took the matter up and called the speaker to account. "For," said the count, "the Virgin is a woman, and as such ought not to be slandered with impunity."
The cafés chantants of Paris form a division by themselves. The most noted of these is the Eldorado, which has given more than one prominent performer to the Parisian stage—Theresa, who, once a dishwasher in a hotel, left her soap-suds and mop to become a Parisian celebrity, the instructress of a princess, and now a really talented comic actress and bouffe singer; Judic and Theo, the rival beauties of the Opera Bouffe; and lively little Boumaine, now one of the stars of the Variétés. The career of Madame Theo has been a strange one. She was originally a failure at the Eldorado, and used to cry her eyes out behind the scenes at her own ill-success. Finally, Offenbach discovered her and wrote for her his Jolie Parfumeuse. The little beauty cut off her hair, put on a blonde wig, and bloomed out a full-blown genius. Without voice, without talent, by dint of a lovely figure, a face of babyish prettiness and an innocent way of uttering speeches of atrocious naughtiness, she has become one of the theatrical successes of the hour, has brought back a harvest of diamonds from her recent Russian trip, and will probably retire into private life with a fortune before she is thirty.
Pass to the Café Anglais, that hypocrite of the Boulevards, whitewashed, decent, outwardly respectable, yet whose windows are ablaze all night long in the Carnival season, and whose latest legend is the tradition of "Big 16." "Big 16" is a private cabinet in the entresol, numbered after the fashion that has given it its title, and famed as being the scene of the orgies of the young duke de Grammont-Caderousse, that maddest of the mad viveurs of the Second Empire, and his friend the prince of Orange. The latter still maintains his reputation in Paris as the most dissipated of European princes. Twice has he essayed to win the hand of an English princess, or rather his high-minded and virtuous mother made the effort in his behalf, but neither his prospective heirship to the crown of Holland nor his Protestantism has availed to gain for him a royal English bride. He is known among the society that he most affects by the sobriquet of Citron (Lemon), bestowed upon him by the duke de Grammont-Caderousse at one of the little suppers of the day. The duke continued to call the prince Monseigneur, to which His Royal Highness objected, declaring that he wished all formality to be laid aside respecting his birth and title.
"Is that so?" cried the duke gayly. "Then, Citron, pass me the cheese."
And the nickname has survived the duke who gave it and the government under which it was given. Sometimes, after one of the masked balls, a pink domino at the Café Americain will call for champagne, with the announcement, "M. Citron pays," without for a moment imagining that she is speaking of the heir to a throne.
To take a final survey, let us enter the Café de la Paix, the most imperial, cosmopolitan and stylish of cafés. That well-preserved man sitting by himself is playing solitaire—a group of one. That white-haired old gentleman sitting in the alcove yonder is drinking sweetened water—surely not a beverage calculated to pollute the palate. Those round-headed men, whose bald pates are fringed with gray, are now settling up their score. It is only a franc or two, but each one pays his share, "treating" not being common. You are often asked to drink, and left to pay for what you drink—an arrangement greatly to be preferred, provided it be understood. That stylish-looking man reading the Figaro is drinking a green chartreuse, and every time he stoops to sip from the little goblet that stands before him, his huge moustache, folding over it, looks like two great black wings. That pale-faced man is probably a professor. He has just sweetened his coffee, and is now pocketing the lumps of sugar remaining over in the little dish (considered a perfectly proper thing to do); and that stripling from the province, he is taking account of everything—the velvet, marble, silver, glass, the flowers, vases, pictured panels, the waiters in their white aprons, the water-bottles in which the ice is frozen by artificial process, the crinkle-crankle, gilding, glare, the plants in the doorway and the queen behind her box.