under the tables by the reckless and
quarrelsome set that frequented the place; and his friend remarked, that
if all the bread so thrown about were collected, it would feed half the
_quartier_. Fabrice said nothing; but he was in search of an idea, and
he took up his friend's. The next day, he called on the restaurateur,
and asked him for what he would sell the broken bread he was accustomed
to sweep in the dustpan. The bread he wanted, it should be observed, was
a very different thing from the fragments left upon the table; these had
been consecrated to the marrow's soup from time immemorial. He wanted
the dirty bread actually thrown under the table, which even a Parisian
restaurateur of the Quartier Latin, whose business it was to collect
dirt and crumbs, had hitherto thrown away. Our restaurateur caught
eagerly at the offer, made a bargain for a small sum; and Master Fabrice
forthwith proceeded to about a hundred eating-houses of the same kind,
with all of whom he made similar bargains. Upon this he established a
bakery, extending his operations till there was scarcely a restaurant in
Paris of which the sweepings did not find their way to the oven of Pere
Fabrice. Hence it is that the fourpenny restaurants are supplied; hence
it is that the itinerant venders of gingerbread find their first
material. Let any man who eats bread at any very cheap place in the
capital take warning, if his stomach goes against the idea of a
_rechauffe_ of bread from the dust-hole. Fabrice, notwithstanding some
extravagances with the fair sex, became a millionaire; and the greatest
glory of his life was--that he lived to eclipse his old master, the
rag-merchant."

The same writer also gives a graphic description of one class of
restaurants in Paris--the pot-luck shops:

"Pot-luck, or the _fortune de pot_, is on the whole the most curious
feeding spectacle in Europe. There are more than a dozen shops in Paris
where this mode of procuring a dinner is practiced, chiefly in the back
streets abutting on the Pantheon. About two o'clock, a parcel of men in
dirty blouses, with sallow faces, and an indescribable mixture of
recklessness, jollity, and misery--strange as the juxtaposition of terms
may seem--lurking about their eyes and the corners of their mouths, take
their seats in a room where there is not the slightest appearance of any
preparation for food, nothing but half-a-dozen old deal-tables, with
forms beside them, on the side of the roo