e St.
Honore, where the red-cushioned seats, the mirrors, the white paint, the
discreet gilding, the air of retirement, the few elderly, rotund,
meditative diners, each dining with himself, were all typical of the old
classical Paris restaurant, and assured us beforehand of a good dinner
and a price in keeping. That we ate asparagus from Argenteuil and
_petites fraises des bois_ I know because the season was spring; that
the wine was good I also know because the reputation of Voisin's cellar
permitted of no other. And I am as sure that the _menu_ was so short
that ours would have seemed the dinner of an anchorite in the City of
London, for if we could not dine often we were masters of the art of
dining when we did, and we understood, as the Lord Mayor and the City
Companies of London, celebrated for their dinners, do not, that dining
is not an art when the last course cannot be enjoyed as much as the
first. As I keep the family accounts, I was obliged to pay in another
way for J.'s triumph at Voisin's when I got back to London and faced a
deficit that had to be balanced somehow in my weekly bills for the rest
of the month. But, at least, if abstaining has to be done, London is
the easiest place to abstain in as Paris is the best to dine in.

The Publisher who was with us that year gave his dinner at the LaPerouse
on the _Quai des Grands-Augustins_, and it was not his fault if he fell
short of J.'s triumph by a few francs. The giver of a dinner at the
LaPerouse in the happy past enjoyed the fearful pleasure of not knowing
how much he was spending until he called for his bill, price being too
trivial a detail for a place in the _menu_, and usually when the bill
came it exceeded his most ambitious hopes. The Publisher must have hit
upon Friday, for the perfume of _Bouillabaisse_ mingles with my memories
of the dinner in the little low _entresol_ where, by stooping down and
craning our necks, we could see the towers of _Notre-Dame_ from the
window, and where the big, tall, handsome, black-bearded _patron_,
alarmingly out of scale with the room, came to make sure of our pleasure
in his dishes--he would rather the bill had gone unpaid than have seen
the dinner neglected. I think there was a bottle of some special
Burgundy in its cradle, for rarely in his life, I fancy, has the
Publisher felt so in need of being fortified. Early in the day he had
been guilty of the astonishing indiscretion, as it then seemed, of
buying three V