avoid the punishment which is due to assassins."
The doors were closed, and an armed
force had been sent for to arrest the guilty
pair. Fabert entreated the host to favour their
escape, but he refused at first to do so, and
it was only at the repeated instances of the
marshal that they were allowed to depart.
Eventually, when Fabert had recovered from
his wounds, he solicited and obtained their
pardon from the king.

In the time of Louis the Thirteenth, the
most celebrated taverns in Paris were the
cabaret of the Fox in the garden of Tuileries;
that of the Fine Air, near the Luxemburg;
the tavern called the Cross of the Trahoir,
famous for its cellar of muscat wine, and the
cabaret of the Three Golden Bridges, at
which the poet La Serre wiped out a long
score,—as Lambert, the singer, had done
before him at the Cross of the Trahoir,—
by marrying the tavern-keeper's daughter:
the last resource of needy topers. It was
from the cabaret of the Fox that Cyrano de
Bergerac, the celebrated duellist, whose long
nose was seamed with scars, sent out that
vaunting challenge, prohibiting the whole
human race from being alive within three
days under the penalty of falling beneath his
rapier. La Croix de Lorraine (The Cross
of Lorraine) was the most celebrated
cabaret in Paris, and dated, as its name implies,
from the days of the League. It was a haunt
of the poets, and Molière and Boileau were
frequent visitors there; as to Chapelle, the
satirical rival of Despréaux, he was seldom
to be found elsewhere, and was generally
half-seas over. But it was not to drink that the
melancholy Molière and the sprightly
Boileau went to the taverns: they were both
abstemious men, who lived almost on a regimen.
The observant dramatist gathered
there the materials of many a comic trait;
the shrewd satirist found an audience at all
times for his sparkling verse. The favourite
tavern of Racine was Le Mouton Blanc (The
White Sheep), kept by the widow Berrin,
near the cemetery of Saint John, with Boileau
and the Advocate Brilhac for his companions.
This house, or rather its sign, is said to be
still in existence, transferred from the cemetery
to the Rue de la Verrerie: it should,
of all others, be the place for drinking the
Mouton claret, which is now so much in
vogue. La Tête Noire (The Black Head)
and Le Diable (The Devil—reminding us of
our own Ben Jonson and his joyous crew),
were also honoured by the presence of the
great poets. But the most illustrious cabaret
of the period, the true literary tavern, was
unquestionably La Pomme de Pin, in the Rue
Licorne, in the city quarter. It was there
that Chapelle was enthroned every night,
surrounded by a brilliant circle, amongst
whom his wit shone the brightest. There
was no Parisian with any pretension to
literature who did not go at least twice a-week
to the Fir-cone to get tipsy with Chapelle.
The owner of this cabaret, whose name was
Grouyn, soon made a fortune, and his son,
who began his career as a waiter, ended it as
a man of vast wealth and importance.

The great noblemen of the Court had also
their place of predilection. This was the
cabaret of La Boisselière, near the Louvre.
It bore no special sign, being well enough
known by her name.  She was a very
beautiful woman; and, those who dined
there had to pay for it—a dinner at her
house costing five times as much as at any
other tavern in Paris. At the cabaret of La
Boisselière (long after her death) the
courtiers of Louis the Fourteenth drank the
best vin de Beaune, a wine which was
brought into fashion by that king, as sherry
was by George the Fourth, and for much the
same reason. The Grand Monarque having
fallen sick, Fagon, his doctor, who was a
Burgundian, ordered him to drink Beaune
instead of the wines of Spain or Italy, and
thenceforward all other wine was despised:
for the same slavish reason, the courtiers
would have swallowed ditch-water without a
grimace. In a curious collection intituled
Recueil de plus Excellents Ballets de ce Temps
(A.D. sixteen hundred and twelve), a nobleman's
bill of fare at La Boisselière's is amply
set out in doggerel verse, in which the dishes
are marshalled more according to the
exigencies of the rhyme than the natural order
of succession. Two hundred livres a-week
appears to have been the cost of master and
man, for the existence of the lackey was
always merged in that of the noble. The
most constant visitor to the cabaret of La
Boisselière, in the reign of Louis the
Fourteenth, was the Marquis d' Uxelles, a man of
high family, a soldier of great merit, and a
tippler of enormous capacity, who would
willingly forego every other enjoyment for a
carouse. The minister Louvois one day sent
him the much-coveted decoration of the blue
ribbon. "Offer my thanks to M. de Louvois,"
said the marquis to the minister's messenger,
"but tell him at the same time that I shall
refuse the order if I am expected to give up
the cabaret." Louvois smiled at the message,
but paid the marquis off by appointing the
Count d' Harcourt, a notorious drunkard, to
bestow the knightly accolade.

Besides those already mentioned, two other
houses, called Boucingo and La Guerbois, were
noted. Boucingo is immortalised in the verse
of Boileau, as being famous for the Sauce
Robert (which gives such piquancy to pork
cutlets); and the wine of Alicant, manufactured
by himself, and sold at fifty sous a
bottle, was preferred to the genuine kind.
The cabaret of La Guerbois was the
headquarters of the singing club established in the
quarter of Saint Roch; and Lainez, the
anacreontic poet, who wrote a long poem called
The Corkscrew, and lived close by, was a
constant guest. It was a great house for the
lawyers and financiers, who drank deeply and