en who will not bully you, you have within
reach light sheets on which are printed winged thoughts, rapid, written
for you, which you are not forced to bind and preserve in a library when
they have ceased to please you. This place, the paradise of
civilization, the last and inviolable refuge of the free man, is
the cafe.

It is the cafe; but in the ideal, as we dream it, as it ought to be. The
lack of room and the fabulous cost of land on the boulevards of Paris
make it hideous in actuality. In these little boxes--of which the rent
is that of a palace--one would be foolish to look for the space of a
vestiary. Besides, the walls are decorated with stovepipe hats and
overcoats hung on clothes-pegs--an abominable sight, for which atonement
is offered by multitudes of white panels and ignoble gilding, imitations
made by economical process.

And (let us not deceive ourselves) the overcoat, with which one never
knows what to do, and which makes us worry everywhere,--in society, at
the theatre, at balls,--is the great enemy and the abominable
enslavement of modern life. Happy the gentlemen of the age of Louis
XIV., who in the morning dressed themselves for all day, in satin and
velvet, their brows protected by wigs, and who remained superb even when
beaten by the storm, and who, moreover, brave as lions, ran the risk of
pneumonia even if they had to put on, one outside the other, the
innumerable waistcoats of Jodelet in 'Les Precieuses Ridicules'!

"How shall I find my overcoat and my wife's party cape?" is the great
and only cry, the Hamlet-monologue of the modern man, that poisons every
minute of his life and makes him look with resignation toward his dying
hour. On the morning after a ball given by Marshal MacMahon nothing is
found: the overcoats have disappeared; the satin cloaks, the boas, the
lace scarfs have gone up in smoke; and the women must rush in despair
through the driving snow while their husbands try to button their
evening coats, which will not button!

One evening, at a party given by the wife of the President of the
Chamber of Deputies, at which the gardens were lighted by electricity,
Gambetta suddenly wished to show some of his guests a curiosity, and
invited them to go down with him into the bushes. A valet hastened to
hand him his overcoat, but the guests did not dare to ask for theirs,
and followed Gambetta as they were! However, I believe one or two of
them survived.

At the cafe no one carries o