"Carry him away," said Condé, "and take
every care of him; he shall have the stewardship
and the money!"

La Guiche obtained both; but never, as
long as he lived, touched another shoulder of
mutton. This gluttonous adventure is
recorded in a pamphlet printed at Dijon in the
year sixteen hundred and ninety-three, and
intituled: The admirable way of La Guiche
to eat methodically a joint of mutton while
twelve o'clock is striking (L'art admirable
de la Guiche pour manger méthodiquement
un membre de mouton pendant que douze
heures sonnent).

The cabaret of the Bons Enfans (Good
Fellows), to which the comedians were
principally in the habit of resorting, was an
excellent house of its kind. Molière used to go
there, with the greater part of his company.
Amongst the rest was Champmeslé, the
husband of the famous tragedian, whom Racine
loved and Boileau has praised with so much
enthusiasm. The poor man, who had little
jealousy in his composition, used to drown
what cares he had, at the Bons Enfans, in
champagne, which, report said, was paid for
by Racine. Even when he had lost his wife
and grown old, and no wealthy friend
remained to reward his complaisance, he still
continued to haunt the cabaret, in which, in
fact, he ended his days. One morning, with
a strange presentiment upon him, he went to
the church of the Cordeliers, to order two
masses to be sung—one for the repose of his
mother, the other for that of his wife—and
gave a piece of thirty sous to the sacristan,
who observed that he had given him ten sous
too much. "Very well," rejoined
Champmeslé, "keep them for a mass for myself."
He then left the church, and went back to
the Bons Enfans. He found several friends
of his seated on a bench in front of the
cabaret—they were talking about dining
together, and Champmeslé, joining the group,
observed that he would be of the party. The
words were hardly uttered before he fell
heavily on the ground; his friends raised
him instantly, but there was no dinner for
him that day: he was dead!

The comedians of Paris did not, however,
limit their patronage to one tavern. Besides
the Bons Enfans, they frequented Les Deux
Faisants (The Two Pheasants), which was
struck by lightning and burnt to the ground
while at the height of its reputation; Les
Trois Maillets (The Three Mallets), and
L'Ange (The Angel), where the indomitable
Chapelle fell into a tipsy slumber one evening
while a tragedy was being recited in which a
single combat took place, and, waking up
suddenly, the poet fancied he was in a row
on the Pont Neuf, and, shouting with all his
might, ran out of the house as fast as his legs
could carry him. The musicians of Paris
gave the preference to no tavern in
particular. They drank freely everywhere; but
the dancers had their chosen locality, which
was at the Epée de Bois (The Wooden Sword)
in the Rue de Vénise; and whatever member
of that fraternity was caught tippling
elsewhere had to pay a heavy fine.

The priests and monks must not be
forgotten. As the proverb went, "The
Capuchins drink sparingly, the Céléstins copiously,
the Jacobins cup for cup, and the Cordeliers
empty the cellar;" and one thing was
specially observable in their drinking— they
never put water in their wine. The priests
indulged more covertly, fearing the gibes of
their parishioners, but that their lips were
familiar with the flagon is tolerably certain
from the number of satirical poems which
were made against them. The ecclesiastical
taverns, so to designate them, were, Le Riche
Laboureur (The Rich Labourer), in the
enclosure of the Foire St. Germain; La Table
Roland (Roland's Table), in the Valley of
Misery (the name given to that part of Paris
which is now called the Quai de la
Mégisserie); and Le Treillis Vert (The Green
Trellis), in the Rue Saint Hyacinthe, which
was the most renowned of any.

The learned men of Paris, and those better
known as the pedants of the university, dined
and caroused at the Cabaret de la Corne (The
Horn), in the Place Maubert, and at the
Hôtel Saint-Quentin, in the Rue des Cordiers.
It was at the Ecu d' Argent (The Silver
Crown) that, on festival days, all the
bacchanalians of the Sorbonne were wont
to assemble to toss off the vin de Beaune
for which the house was celebrated. It
was only then that you could be sure of
getting the fashionable soups genuine, of
which Boileau has given the somewhat ironical
receipt in his third satire. Montmaur,
the learned epicure, famous also for his good
sayings, was the perpetual president of the
Silver Crown, in which capacity Ménage has
embalmed his memory in a satirical Latin
poem, where he represents him seated on an
enormous reversed saucepan, instructing the
young cooks in the science of gastronomy.
Montmaur was professor of Greek at the
college of Boncourt; and, when he died,
search was made amongst his papers for the
learned works which he was supposed to
have written. None, however, were found;
but in their place the seekers discovered a
treatise on The Four Meals a Day, with their
Etymology; and a Petition to the
Lieutenant of Police, requesting him to prohibit
the tavern-keepers from making use of dishes
with convex bottoms, which is a manifest
deception, &c.

Before I close the list of the most noted
taverns of Paris during the seventeenth
century, mention must be made of two in the
quarter of the Marais, the most fashionable
locality in the time of Louis the Fourteenth.
The first of these, situated in the street, then
new, of the Pas de la Mule, near the Place
Royale, was kept by a very handsome woman
named Coiffier, and bore the appellation, if