cookery known as the cuisine bourgeoise.
The rule was, that as the tables filled, and
not till then, the dinner was served; so that
if you arrived a moment after the number of
occupants of table number one was completed,
you had, very probably, to wait a quarter of
an hour before table number two was
gladdened with the joyful appearance of the
soup.

It seemed to me, on this occasion, as if I
should have to wait all night. Lobb relapsed
into mental calculations—possibly about
Chilian bonds (deferred), and I was left entirely
to my own resources. The little man with the
supposed pigtail, who was my neighbour,
was either hopelessly deaf or obstinately
taciturn. To my remarks about the weather he
answered not a word. A man opposite me
with a large chest, a flapped waistcoat, and
the face of a horse (his wig was brushed up
over his eyes like blinkers), leaned over the
table, and fixed his gelatinous eyes—not on
me but—on the wall behind me; till he
filled me with a vague terror, and an
invincible tendency to picture him changing
into the figure-head of a ship bearing down
on me to transfix and scuttle me. A
palsied dotard with a head like a pear
grown on one side—and yet he was the most
brilliant wit of the party—wagged his toothless
jaws, and made a chop at me with his knife
—so it struck my fancy at least—although,
very likely, poor old man, he was only hungry
and impatient for his dinner. And the grim
silence of the men, and the unholy sounds
made by the inanimate objects, and the
dreadful ticking of the clock, beating the Dead
March in Saul on the muffled-drum of my
ear, so fretted, harried, exasperated, and crazed
me, that I would have given a hundred francs
for a woman to enter the room; five hundred
for permission to burst into a howl, to sing,
to stamp on someone's toes, to send a bottle
flying at the head of the man with the figure-
head face,—to do anything to provoke a
commotion in this dreadful, dreadful, Silent
Tomb.

There were thirteen guests mustered out of
the twenty-four, when I thought that I must
either speak or die. Lobb had slipped out to
confer with the landlady (there was a landlady),
and I had not even the consolation of abusing
him for bringing me to such a place. I tried
to divert myself by conjuring up images of
what the grim restaurant had been a
hundred years ago. To what marquis, Fermier
Général, or Sous-Intendant the great hotel had
belonged; who painted those stained panels,
who that misty apotheosis. Of what gay
scenes; what nights of revelry, these
uncommunicative halls of gloom had been
spectators. Some one must have talked there at
some time or other; the walls must once
have echoed to the laughter of the marchionesses
in brocaded sacks, of marquisses with
red-heeled shoes, with the madrigals of
enamoured chevaliers in bag-wigs, the
gallantries of grey mousquetaires, the pert
sayings of spruce little abbés, the epigrams of
snuffy wits who drank too much coffee and
wrote for the Encyclopédie. Oh for my
grandmother's ghost, to revisit, for a
moment, the haunts of her contemporaries
—if she would but open her mouth and
chatter!

At extremest length, when the wheel in a
cistern there seemed about to make its last
revolution, Lobb returned; the last man of
the twenty-four indispensable guests took
his place, and a solemn lady in black—
not my grandmother's ghost, though she
would not have dressed the character badly—
but the mistress of the establishment, glided
into the room. Then a spruce man in raven
black, who considerably resembled an
undertaker, took his. seat by me as chairman, and
proceeded to ladle the soup out of a huge
tureen.

I had grown so accustomed by this time to
take the Silent Tomb for granted, and to
consider myself pro-tem. as a member of a burial-
club, that, had a boiled death's head with
parsley and butter formed the first course,
I don't think I should have evinced much
surprise. I contemplated, too, with a
contented sort of stony apathy, four waiters,
like mutes, who came up, as I imagined
(my retina must have been affected by
this time), perpendicularly behind as many
chairs. I suppose they placed the array
of half-bottlesfull of wine which suddenly
appeared on the table, and which were
not there before. I did not care to inquire,
neither did it much matter, whether it were by
human agency or not, that a small clothes-
basketful of household bread was passed
around. One thing, however, became
manifest. If the guests were dumb, they were
not at least paralysed; for a fiercer or more
active attack upon a bread-basket I never saw.
The majority took two pieces; and the
reputed possessor of the pigtail carried off a
whole armful of the staff of life.

I am bound to admit that the victuals were
very good. The soup was made from meat.
Plates of carrots and spinach were handed
round for admixture in the broth, thus giving
us the opportunity of converting it into a
Jullienne on a large scale. Then came the
old, original, cuisine Bourgeoise Bouillon
BÅ“uf—fresh beef, boiled, in large stringy
lumps, with a coronal of fat, like Doctor
Sacheverel's curly wig. With mustard, oil,
and pepper, this was not bad. I could have
pronounced it true beef; I could have
praised the roast mutton that followed (a
leg cut up into hunks and handed round),
the salad, the haricots, the compote of pears
and the Roquefort cheese that concluded this
plain, substantial, and, on the whole, cheap
meal (for everybody was helped twice, and
there was an indiscreet amount of bread
consumed), if the people would but have spoken.
But they were dumb to the last. One