om a
dozen years of matrimony so often converts the blooming American girl
has no apparent correlative in the French race. A majestic plumpness
flourished all around me--the plumpness of triple chins and deeply
dimpled hands. I mused upon it, and I concluded that it was the result
of the best breakfasts and dinners in the world. It was the corpulence
of ladies who are thoroughly well fed, and who never walk a step that
they can spare. The assiduity with which the women of America measure
the length of our democratic pavements is doubtless a factor in their
frequent absence of redundancy of outline. As a "regular boarder" at the
Hotel Blanquet--pronounced by Anglo-Saxon visitors Blanket--I found
myself initiated into the mysteries of the French dietary system. I
assent to the common tradition that the French are a temperate people,
so long as it is understood in this sense--that they eat no more than
they want to. But they want to eat so much! Their capacity strikes me as
enormous, and we ourselves, if we are less regulated, are certainly much
more slender consumers.

The American breakfast has, I believe, long been a subject of irony to
the foreign observer; but the American breakfast is an ascetic meal
compared with the French _dejeuner a la fourchette_. The latter, indeed,
is simply a dinner without soup; it differs neither generically nor
specifically from the evening repast. If it excludes soup, it includes
eggs, prepared in a hundred forms; and if it proscribes champagne, it
admits beer in foaming pitchers, so that the balance is fairly
preserved. I think it is rarely that an American will not feel a certain
sympathetic heaviness in the reflection that a French family that sits
down at half past eleven to fish and entrees and roasts, to asparagus
and beans, to salad and dessert, and cheese and coffee, proposes to do
exactly the same thing at dinner time. But we may be sure at any rate
that the dinner will be as good as the breakfast, and that the breakfast
has nothing to fear from prospective comparison with the dinner; and we
may further reflect that in a country where eating is a peculiarly
unalloyed pleasure it is natural that this pleasure should be prolonged
and reiterated. Nothing is more noticeable among the French than their
superior intelligence in dietary matters; every one seems naturally a
judge, a dilettante. They have analyzed tastes and savors to a finer
point than we; they are aware of differences a