hy tables, where the serviettes of regular customers, each thrust
through a numbered ring of crystallized tin plate, were laid by their
places. Flicoteaux I. only changed the serviettes of a Sunday; but
Flicoteaux II. changed them twice a week, it is said, under pressure of
competition which threatened his dynasty.

Flicoteaux's restaurant is no banqueting-hall, with its refinements
and luxuries; it is a workshop where suitable tools are provided, and
everybody gets up and goes as soon as he has finished. The coming and
going within are swift. There is no dawdling among the waiters; they
are all busy; every one of them is wanted.

The fare is not very varied. The potato is a permanent institution;
there might not be a single tuber left in Ireland, and prevailing
dearth elsewhere, but you would still find potatoes at Flicoteaux's.
Not once in thirty years shall you miss its pale gold (the color
beloved of Titian), sprinkled with chopped verdure; the potato enjoys
a privilege that women might envy; such as you see it in 1814, so
shall you find it in 1840. Mutton cutlets and fillet of beef at
Flicoteaux's represent black game and fillet of sturgeon at Very's;
they are not on the regular bill of fare, that is, and must be ordered
beforehand. Beef of the feminine gender there prevails; the young of
the bovine species appears in all kinds of ingenious disguises. When
the whiting and mackerel abound on our shores, they are likewise seen
in large numbers at Flicoteaux's; his whole establishment, indeed, is
directly affected by the caprices of the season and the vicissitudes
of French agriculture. By eating your dinners at Flicoteaux's you
learn a host of things of which the wealthy, the idle, and folk
indifferent to the phases of Nature have no suspicion, and the student
penned up in the Latin Quarter is kept accurately informed of the
state of the weather and good or bad seasons. He knows when it is a
good year for peas or French beans, and the kind of salad stuff that
is plentiful; when the Great Market is glutted with cabbages, he is at
once aware of the fact, and the failure of the beetroot crop is
brought home to his mind. A slander, old in circulation in Lucien's
time, connected the appearance of beef-steaks with a mortality among
horseflesh.

Few Parisian restaurants are so well worth seeing. Every one at
Flicoteaux's is young; you see nothing but youth; and although earnest
faces and grave, gloomy, anxious faces are