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keeping with the grand air of the place, and, albeit that neither of the
three or four succeeding proprietors made a fortune, or anything
approaching it, was never relaxed.

On looking over these notes, I am afraid that the last paragraph will be
intelligible only to a small section of my readers, consequently I
venture to explain. Improved communication has brought to Paris during
the third quarter of the century a great many Englishmen who, not being
very familiar either with French or with French customs in their better
aspect, have come to look upon the stir and bustle of the ordinary Paris
restaurant, upon the somewhat free-and-easy behaviour of the waiters,
upon their eccentricities of diction, upon their often successful
attempts at "swelling" the total of the dinner-bill as so much matter of
course. The abbreviated nomenclature the waiter employs in
recapitulating the bill of fare to the patron is regarded by him as
merely a skilful handling of the tongue by the native; the chances are
ten to one in favour of the patron trying to imitate the same in his
orders to the attendant, and deriving a certain pride from being
successful. The stir and bustle is attributed to the more lively
temperament of our neighbours, the free-and-easy behaviour as a wish on
the waiter's part to smooth the linguistically thorny path of the
benighted foreigner, the attempt to multiply items as an irrepressible
manifestation of French greed.

Wherever these things occur, nowadays, the patron may be certain that he
is "in the wrong shop;" but in the days of which I treat, the wrong shop
was legion, especially as far as the foreigner was concerned; the Cafe
de Paris and the Cafe Hardi were the notable exceptions. Truly, as
Alfred de Musset said of the former, "you could not open its door for
less than fifteen francs;" in other words, the prices charged were very
high; but they were the same for the representatives of the nations that
conquered as for those who were vanquished at Waterloo. It would be more
correct to say that the _personnel_ of the Cafe, from the proprietor and
manager downward, were utterly oblivious of such distinctions of
nationality. Every one who honoured the establishment was considered by
them a grand seigneur, for whom nothing could be too good. I remember
one day in '45 or '46--for M. Martin Guepet was at the head of affairs
then--Balzac announcing the advent of a Russian friend, and asking
Guepet to put his b