early part of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth.
The alcoholic basis, sweetened with sugar and
enriched with perfumes, proved to be capable
of infinite shades of variation. The old
medical cordial became the new liqueur of the
dinner table. The last beverage the king
partook of on earth was a liqueur from Provence.

Louis the Fifteenth was essentially an
epicure, and nothing else. Louis the Fourteenth
had crossed the Rhine bravely, had driven his
coaches full of ladies round besieged places,
and had excelled at tennis and pall mall; but
Louis the Fifteenth excelled in nothing except
dining. His little suppers at Choisy were
gayer and more riotous than the formal parades,
or rather religious ceremonies that Louis the
Fourteenth organised at Versailles, as
magnificent and as tedious as the splendour of that
exhausting place. The conversation, the
abandonment of royalty, was not to be witnessed
by profane eyes, and some great mechanist,
patronised by the Pompadour, met this want by
inventing the tables volantes, which, descending
to the kitchen and rising again to the state
apartments, must have been perfect, except
that, through the opening trap door must have
arisen oily steams from below. It was to please
this voluptuous, vain, and selfish king that the
Duchess de Mailly wasted her ingenuity by
inventing the Gigot à la Mailly.

Louis the Sixteenth was too full of his key
making and ironmongering to care much for
eating. He neglected to keep his friends in
good humour by good dinners, or to win his
enemies by those matelottes and truffled turkeys,
for which the Duke of Orleans had been famous.
So naturally he succumbed before the Revolution.

The restaurants, commencing in 1770 with
the Champ d'Oiseau, Rue des Poulies, were
probably at first started in imitation of English
taverns, and indicated the advance of democratic
opinions. In 1789, the Parisian restaurants
had increased to one hundred, in 1804 to five
or six hundred, and they now far exceed a
thousand. The Almanac des Gourmands attributes
the growth of these useful establishments and
the consequent dissemination of refined and high
cooking among the masses to several reasons.
First, the inundation of legislators, who, dining
out, made it by degrees fashionable to
frequent the restaurants; secondly, the breaking
up of the houses of the rich secular and clerical
nobility, whose cooks took refuge and found a
generous asylum in the restaurants. Foremost
among these Mariuses was Robert (he who
invented the most intellectual of sauces)
ci-devant chef of an archbishop of Aix. Lastly,
it was generally supposed that the new rich
men of the Revolution, with the whizz of the
guillotine still in their ears, were not anxious to
flash their wealth in the eyes of a jealous
mistrustful and dangerous people, and, therefore,
hid away their hospitality, and devoted
themselves to the unobserved luxuries of the public
restaurant.

Napoleo ate like a soldier whenever the
appetite came, night or day, and eventually
shortened his life by it; but there was no real
royal epicureanism till Louis the Eighteenth
rolled back with the Bourbonists. His great
friend and adviser on culinary matters of state
was the Duke d'Escars. The prayer of this
able man's life was that he might be immortalised
by inventing a lasting dish; but he never did,
or if he did, he showed the true devotion of a
Decius, and let his friend and sovereign enjoy
the fame of the discovery.

History has not decided whether the favourite
dish of Duke d'Escars and Louis the Eighteenth
was truffes à la purée d'ortolans, or as some
writers insist on having it, a pâté des saucissons.
Whenever these two globular men, the Duke and
his royal master, closeted themselves together to
perfect this dish, or to discuss the first thought
of another, the following announcement always
appeared next day in the official journal,

"M. le Duc d'Escars a travaillé dans le
cabinet."

The duke fell a victim at last to the truffe
à la purée d'ortolans, a dish which the king
kept a secret from the servants and always
prepared with his own hands, aided by the duke.
This time the dish was larger than usual, and
at breakfast the noble pair ate the whole of it.
At night they were both taken dreadfully ill.
The duke was soon pronounced hopeless, but,
faithful to the last, he instantly ordered the
king to be awoke and warned of the danger
of a similar attack. The king was aroused and
told that the duke was dying.

"Dying?" the king exclaimed, with admirable
feeling, and more philosophy "dying of my
truffes à la purée? You see, then, I was right.
I always said that I had the better stomach of
the two."

Alas for human anecdotes! Other versions
of this story say that the king also suffered,
and that a witty and sarcastic French journal
announced the event, thus coarsely and in the
worst possible taste:

"Yesterday, his very Christian majesty was
attacked with an indigestion, of which M. the
Duke d'Escars died this afternoon."

Louis le Désiré was an epicure to the last.
With all his tact and sense and bon mots, he
was an eater quite as regardful of quantity as
quality. Between the first and second course
he would often have a plate of exquisite little
pork cutlets, dressed after a rare recipe, handed
to him by one of the pages. He would take
these trifles up one by one with his white fat
fingers, and clear the dish before the second
service could be arranged.

The Revolution brought in the pièces de
résistance and potatoes au nature!. The
celebrated Rocher de Cancale, established before
1804, and broken up since 1848, first gained
its name, by M. Baleire, its founder, bringing
oysters to Paris fresh at all seasons. The
Rocher was especially famous for frogs and (we
shudder to record it)—Robin Redbreasts—yes,
those innocent birds, who sing, like weeping
children, the dirge of the year and the fall of