solitary gleam of life (as connected with
Mammon) there was, when the solemn lady
came round after the bouilli, and collected
our respective thirty-six sous in a hand-
basket. The jingling did me good; but we
soon relapsed into our old Shillibeer jog-
trot. There was the clicking of the knives
and forks, and the occasional smothered
rattle of the plates; and the funeral-baked
meats did furnish forth the table-d'hôte,
and the only thing wanting to complete
this gastronomical Golgotha was the statue
of the Commendatore, from Seville,
whispering across the table that he was the
father of Doña Elvira, and did you know
if Don Juan were there, because he had an
appointment to sup with him?

The guests were no ghosts, though. Ghosts!
—wolves, rather. I never saw such a set
of trenchermen. I am certain that every man
there present must have put under his waist-
coat at least thirty-seven sous worth of solid
food. The concern must be a loss. The Silent
Tomb can't pay. Perhaps the proprietress is
a widow with large revenues, who likes to
spend it on these taciturn men. Perhaps it
is a tontine, and the surviving members eat
up the deceased. But it is certain—though
I should like to renew my acquaintance with
the beef—that I can never dine there again.
It is not good to eat and say nothing. Even
the pig grunts over the trough. Shall we be
less sociable than the pig?

By the time we had finished dinner, and
as I turned to give the waiter two sous (who,
perceiving my intent, and being plainly a
misanthrope, dropped his napkin and fled
into the next room), the table opposite to us
had attained its complement, and an exactly
similar dinner was commencing thereat. Do
they never stop dining at the Silent Tomb?
Is it always turn and turn about? Table
full and table empty? Soup and bully, salad
and roast? Will it ever be so till death slips
off his waiter's jacket, and the beef shall
give place to bones?

I dexterously gave Lobb the slip in the
court-yard, and there was a coolness between
us for some days. I plunged into the
noisiest café I could find, where there was a
crash of dominoes, a charivari of cups and
saucers, violent disputes between Jules and
Alphonse over sugar-and-water, and endless
shriekings of and for waiters. I went to the
Bouffes Parisiennes after that, and was quite
delighted with the noisiness of the music and
the absurdity of a pantomime; and I walked
home singing the Sire de Framboisy the whole
way. But I had the nightmare before morning.

As already stated, I have never been able
to find the Rue Pictonpin since. I do not
like to ask Lobb (though we have been
reconciled over kirschwasser), for reasons; and
were it not that I know him to be a man of
mortal mould, and an exemplary clerk in a
banking-house, I should be tempted to
believe that I had been spirited away to
some cave of glamour, and that I had feasted
in the Island of Saint Brandan, or spent the
evening with the Adalantado of the Seven
Cities.

But I was not disheartened. There was
more beef, I knew, in Paris than had yet
come out of it. I sought a great beef
establishment in the narrow street that runs
parallel to the east side of the Palais Royal
—a time-honoured place of refection by the
sign of the Bœuf à-la-mode. But I found
beef no longer in fashion there. The waiter,
who was far better dressed than I was, and
who was the possessor of a watch-chain I
can never hope to have the fellow of, looked
down upon me, and thought me a poor-
spirited creature—un homme de rien—
because I would not have oysters and white
wine before dinner. To ask for beef at the
Bœuf à-la-mode was, I found, about the same as
asking for a cup of coffee and a thin slice
of bread and butter at the London Coffee
House. Then I relapsed into the semi-
English houses again. At the John Bull;
at the True Roast Beef; at the Renown of
Roast Beef. But truth was a fiction and
renown a sham. They gave me flaps of flesh,
that made me ill; they fed me with promises,
and the performance was but gravy
and sinew. I wandered in a desert of
restaurants, and came upon no oasis of beef.
I began to despond.

But hence, loathed Melancholy— away with
thee, Penseroso! See, the Allegro comes
tripping soft with sweetest Lydian measure.
Here is Bully Beef in the Hall of
Montesquieu!

The illustrious author of the Esprit des Lois
has given his name to, or has had it taken for, a
vast saloon on the ground-floor of a street
called the Cour des Fontaines, leading from
the Palais Royal to the Galérie Véro-Dodat,
where all old Paris men will remember so
well M. Aubert's caricature shop, and its
admiring crowd of loafers and pickpockets,
staring at the inimitable pear-shaped portraits
of Louis Philippe, and the cent et un Robert
Macaires by Daumier. The Hall of
Montesquieu has had its mutabilities. I
remember it a dancing saloon, well conducted,
though the price of admittance was but fifty
cents. I have seen there a journeyman
butcher in his professional blue frock dancing
the Cellarius with a lady in puce velvet edged
with fur, and a pink bonnet (she was, I
declare, my washerwoman), with a gravity
and decorum that showed that he knew his
position, and hers, and respected both. There
used to be a waiter there—or, rather, an
overlooker, a sort of shop-walker, whose
duty it was to pace the galleries moodily, and
to cry out to couples who were sitting at the
tables, "II faut consommer, messieurs;" which
signified that, if they took seats, they must
also take refreshment. With this unchanging,
lugubrious cry, he always put me in mind of
the Trappist, crying "Brothers, we must die!"