rs
settled by Holy Church, who stood ready to enforce her edicts by the
logic of the rack and the fagot. An inference from the above remarks is
that what one brings from a church depends very much on what he carries
into it.

The next place to visit could be no other than the Cafe Procope. This
famous resort is the most ancient and the most celebrated of all the
Parisian cafes. Voltaire, the poet J. B. Rousseau, Marmontel, Sainte
Foix, Saurin, were among its frequenters in the eighteenth century. It
stands in the Rue des Fosses-Saint Germain, now Rue de l'Ancienne
Comedie. Several American students, Bostonians and Philadelphians,
myself among the number, used to breakfast at this cafe every morning. I
have no doubt that I met various celebrities there, but I recall only
one name which is likely to be known to most or many of my readers. A
delicate-looking man, seated at one of the tables, was pointed out to me
as Jouffroy. If I had known as much about him as I learned afterwards, I
should have looked at him with more interest. He had one of those
imaginative natures, tinged by constitutional melancholy and saddened by
ill health, which belong to a certain class of poets and sentimental
writers, of which Pascal is a good example, and Cowper another. The
world must have seemed very cruel to him. I remember that when he was a
candidate for the Assembly, one of the popular cries, as reported by the
newspapers of the time, was _A bas le poitrinaire!_ His malady soon
laid him low enough, for he died in 1842, at the age of forty-six. I
must have been very much taken up with my medical studies to have
neglected my opportunity of seeing the great statesmen, authors,
artists, orators, and men of science outside of the medical profession.
Poisson, Arago, and Jouffroy are all I can distinctly recall, among the
Frenchmen of eminence whom I had all around me.

The Cafe Procope has been much altered and improved, and bears an
inscription telling the date of its establishment, which was in the year
1689. I entered the cafe, which was nearly or quite empty, the usual
breakfast hour being past.

_Garcon! Une tasse de cafe._

If there is a river of _mneme_ as a counterpart of the river
_lethe_, my cup of coffee must have got its water from that stream
of memory. If I could borrow that eloquence of Jouffroy which made his
hearers turn pale, I might bring up before my readers a long array of
pallid ghosts, whom these walls knew well in