II. PARIS DINING.

When the Great Hotel feasts us, it becomes
a very sumptuous and important business.
Down in the reading salon the Americans and
English begin to cluster thick, a little hungry
and impatient. There is a little theatrical air
in the preparations, and one feature is very
artful as a specimen of la haute politique.
Grooms of the chamber make their appearance
—mutes in very shiny black and with silver
chains on their shoulders in the lord mayor
fashion—and at the same instant a series of
blinds along a row of stately windows are drawn
up simultaneously, and we see the glittering
semicircular hall within, blazing with lights,
gorgeous with colours, and laid out with tables
of refreshing snowiness. The soldiers are at
their posts, ready, their weapons under their
arms. Flowers bloom everywhere, and the
whole seems an Arabian Nights' scene. The
hungry man, who is just leaving, and says the
whole is "a monstrous imposition," stops short,
irresolutely, looking in wistfully. He has a
journey down town before him, but that prospect
decides him. The "administration" enters;
a bureau is improvised for tickets; a strange
little cupboard opens afar off for coats and
hats, which is grandly described as the
"VESTIAIRE;" with a loud clatter the glass doors
open, and the flood pours in.

It is a semicircular room, decorated in the
Kursaal style, all gold and colour, and Louis
Quinze figures, and the largest Algerian onyx
clock ever seen, supported by noble bronze
figures the size of life. Everything is luxury.
The waiters are like noblemen's servants, the
service admirable, the cookery not to be
gainsaid. There was an ambition and variety in the
courses: we had two sorts of fish; preparations
with the unfailing truffles; sweetbreads and
small delicacies, with sweets of "the higher
order," unfamiliar to the ordinary hotel curriculum,
like "the Macedonian;" while a superior
ordinaire, which indeed so styles itself with a
misplaced modesty, but which might take the
title of claret—importers with less claims have
done so—was renewed with an abundance that
almost reached waste. More chamberlains
with chains walked about in a stately fashion.
The worst was the ceremony was rather too
protracted—the crying evil of table d'hôtes;
and for this two hours' magnificence, the
complacent sense of being thus royally served, the
charge was but the fee an attorney charges,
"to attendance, &c.," namely, a paltry six and
eightpence.

We may pass by the more well-known temples;
"The Three Brothers Provincial," Vefour,
Vercy, and the newer Bignon. Their appas
is more or less familiar, and old ground.
But the "system Duval," latest gastronomical
development, deserves, to use the epistolary
formula, "the assurance of our highest
consideration." This exploitation is very significant,
and has been so successful that it bids
fair to revolutionise the science of popular
eating. The French, it is well known, eat for
amusement sake; it is one of the many
pleasures they discount to the last shilling, so long
as they "have a coat to their backs," or even
after they have lost the more indispensable one
to their stomachs. With so many of the nation
always eating abroad, and wishing to eat abroad
simply and cheaply, it was requisite to find
some greater field than could be discovered in
the restricted and old-fashioned area of the
café's. Duval, who was brought to the horizon
in his fullest splendour about the date of the
last Exhibition, is the new reformer. He may
have taken the hint from the great Glasgow
eating houses, but his design reaches many
stages higher, and belongs to a more refined
level. The problem he wished to solve and
has solved, was to combine the comfort and ease
of a café, with the very highest development of
cheapness. This was attempted before, in the
cheap and nasty results of the "fixed price"
places, where though the cost was certain
(dinner at two francs fifty cents, vin compris),
everything else was uncertain, and mysterious,
and confused, and horrible. Dinner was more
a speculation as to the nature of substances
than a meal. But the café Cagmag has been
already reported on in this journal.

We find our way to Duval's, in one of
the streets beyond the Palais Royal. It has
quite a châlet air, and into which the people
are pouring literally en masse. Entering, we
find a vast hall, in the small Crystal Palace
style, only with the châlet element, the
varnished and stained wood, predominant,
and light galleries running round. It is well
lit, and is as cheerful and bright and comfortable
a place as could be conceived. It is
full of little tables, and full at that moment
of people who are dining, to the number of
some six or seven hundred. Having got a
seat and a table to oneself, a new cloth is
brought, never used before, which is your own
for the time and shall be no one else's; and
then a waiter comes with a little tabulated
list which is to be your bill, and scores down
one penny opposite the word cloth. He comes
presently with a roll, snowy and fresh as the
cloth, said to be the best bread in Paris, and
scores that down, one penny. Thus we make a
beginning. Then a list of soups—julienne, spring,
&c., which arrives, excellent, fragrant, appetising.
It goes down, twopence half-penny. Fish
—mackerel, eperlans, threepence. Fricandeau—
in short, a choice from a long list, at about three
pence the portion, with an excellent ordinaire
at tenpence the bottle. The clatter is terrific,
the rattle of knives on plates is like the
mitraille of infantry, yet all round are well-dressed
strangers, families, in fact of the regular café
complexion. And there is not the least of that
rather rough, coarse, working-man air which
pervades similar attempts in our own country.
Everything is good, cheap, and refined. At
the end the little list is totted up by one of the
smartest and brightest young girls, not one of
the conventional café empresses, and we find
some such result as this: