Café de Paris

“ THE PARIS CAFÉS.
Alimentary, and not literary, is the modern café. Times are so changed since Voltaire, Diderot and the rest sang and shouted in the Café Procope—jested, reasoned and made themselves immortal there—there are so many people who have the means to frequent cafés, and there is such an immense floating population, eager, curious and bent on sightseeing, that no clique can live. ”

“ As a Frenchman rarely asks an acquaintance, or even a friend, to his apartment, the café has become the common ground where all meet, for business or pleasure. Not in Paris only, but all over France, in every garrison town, provincial city, or tiny village, the café is the chief attraction, the centre of thought, the focus toward which all the rays of masculine existence converge. ”

“ At the Café Américain, the profession of the ladies who frequent it at supper-time is a little too obvious. You should take your wife to Durand's. She will insist on going to the Café de Paris. You should not take her to Maxim's, and you cannot take her to the Américain. Of course, the supping-places I have enumerated are but a few of the many, for there is no Early Closing Act in France, every restaurant in Paris keeps open till 2 a.m., and some later, and supper is to be had at all of them. ”

“ These people who suffered in Paris at every turn were now beginning to find a cyclopedia of their own in another invention of comparatively recent date—the cafés, warmed and lighted, where even men who had not sous enough to satisfy their hunger might cheat their stomachs with a thimbleful of sour wine or a morsel of food, and sit for hours listening and pondering the talk of others who came and went. There was much talk, and in one part of Paris or another it touched upon every known subject. Each café had its specialty; politics in one, philosophy in another, science in a third. ”

“ My friend was bewildered because he did not understand the raison d'être of the café in French life. He thought that a café was a place to drink according to the American notion of drinking. The women were bad women in his eyes and the men on the downward path. To one who holds this curious notion the number of cafés in Paris and the crowds in them and at the little tables in front of them are inexplicable and alarming. Cafés, restaurants, brasseries and zincs line the boulevards, and there are at least two or three to a block in every street. ”

“ Do not go to-day to see this old incubator, in which so many political and literary celebrities have been hatched; for you will only find a cafe, just like any other, with its groups of ugly little Jews who discuss the coming races, and here and there a poor creature, painted like a Jezebel, dying of chagrin over her pot of beer.
At the decline of the Second Empire—it was May 1, 1866, that Amedee Violette entered there for the first time—the Cafe de, Seville passed for, and with reason too, one of the most remarkable places in Paris. ”

“ The café of the Black Cat is much finer and much more pretentious than Bruant's shop, and is of wider fame. It is, indeed, of an entirely different class, but it comes in here under the head of the show-places of Paris at night. It was originally a sort of club where journalists and artists and poets met round the tables of a restaurant-keeper who happened to be a patron of art as well, and fitted out his café with the canvases of his customers, and adopted their suggestions in the arrangement of its decoration. ”

“ For a few sous these small steamers will take you to St. Cloud or beyond, past feathery green islands, past small rural cafés perched upon grassy banks where all day long old gentlemen wearing white socks and Panama hats wait patiently for a stray nibble.
This bright morning in Paris the boulevards are crowded with a passing throng which is gazed at for hours by those who fill the terraces of the cafés to linger over a morning apéritif. At one café a party of commerçants are transacting business. ”

“ At the Café Foy congregated the Liberals of the new régime; at the Café Valois came together the Royalists, who believed in nothing but the throne and the altar as maintained under the ancient monarchy.
The café, in spite of the number of new clubs established in Paris, continues to be one of the most popular and most flourishing institutions of the French capital. Numbers of Parisians are not rich enough to belong to clubs, but can well afford from day to day the expenditure of fivepence or sixpence on a cup of coffee and a petit verre. ”

“ There is a delicious sparkle and spirit to the place which can spring only from a high sense of individuality. Paris is supposed to provide nothing better than the Café de Paris in so far as food is concerned. ”

“ The cultured modern world enjoys reading the book of nature,—especially so, provided some one has cut the leaves.
IX.
In the evening, we repeat the stroll down the Allée d'Étigny. The lights twinkle brightly down upon the street; the shops are open, the hotels lit up, the cafés most animated of all. Here on the sidewalks, around the little iron tables, sits Luchon, sipping its liqueurs and tasting its ices. It is the café-life of Paris in miniature,—as characteristically French as in the capital. To "Paris, c'est la France," one might almost add, "le café, c'est Paris." ”

“ Why cut yourself off from an indispensable feature of Paris life?
The Panthéon from the Rue Soufflot
The hour of the apéritif finds the terrasses of the cafés crowded. You may have difficulty in getting a place outside. Having worked all day and perhaps having walked home, the Parisian saves a half hour before dinner for his appetizer. He sits at the little table in front of his favorite café and watches the passing crowd. It is no hastily swallowed cocktail, leaning against a bar and shut off from eyes like mine by a swinging screen door. It is no prerogative of man. ”

“ Paris is brilliant with cafes: all the world frequents them to sip coffee (and too often absinthe) , read the papers, and gossip over the news; take them away, as all travelers know, and Paris would not know itself. There is not a cafe in London: instead of cafes, there are gin-mills; instead of light wine, there is heavy beer. The restaurants and restaurant life are as different as can be. You can get anything you wish in Paris: you can live very cheaply or very dearly, as you like. ”

“ Their names, which do not concern us here, may be found in the list of those who started the petit cercle of the Café de Paris. This was an exclusive dining club founded by a set of gay livers who dreaded the political discussions of the one or two regular clubs then existing, but wished to have a place where they could dine together without disturbance by casual strangers. They hired, therefore, some rooms from Alexandre, the proprietor of the restaurant, and continued there till the club broke up in 1848. ”

“ If you wish to buy your tickets in advance for the evening performance at the Alcazar d’Été, the open-air café concert of the Champs-Élysées, you go there some afternoon, and are ushered by a waiter through a narrow corridor of the adjoining restaurant, past little rooms, shining in copper pots and pans, and pungent with steaming sauces, through a pair of swinging doors well worn by hurrying waiters, and into a square room piled high with snow-white linen, pyramids of lump sugar, and rows of glittering silver. ”

“ The first cafe in Paris was established in 1697 by an Armenian, and like the establishment of the Hippodrome in New York by Barnum, was a success from the beginning. These institutions increased rapidly in number under Louis XV., and became the favorite resort of distinguished individuals. At present, they abound in every quarter, and justly rank among the most remarkable features of the city, being very generally decorated with unrivaled costliness and splendor. Besides coffee, wine, beer and other refreshments, they frequently provide breakfast, and many of them also dinners and suppers. ”

“ Most provincial Frenchmen and foreigners who have visited Paris in the character of sight-seers have been conducted to the dreary Café des Aveugles, and probably to the absurd Café des Singes; but it is only those who have wandered idly about the boulevards, careless how they might be devoured, that can have found their way to the Literary, the Electric, or the Oriental Café. ”

“ But there is nothing just like the boulevards. If you should wish to sit at the exact centre of the world and to watch it revolve around you, you have only to take your place at that corner table of the Café de la Paix which juts the farthest out into the Avenue de l'Opéra and the Boulevard Capucines. This table is the apex of all the other tables. It turns the tides of pedestrians on the broad sidewalks of both the great thoroughfares, and it is geographically situated exactly under the "de la" of the "Café de la Paix," painted in red letters on the awning over your head. ”

“ The Parisian may be a saving man, but Paris is no city to save in. It is surprising how dull an empty purse can make it. It had come to this after two days, either that I must shift my quarters from the Ritz into cheaper lodgings, or abandon my engagement altogether and go back alone.
One afternoon, aimless and thirsty, I turned into the Café l’Univers in the Place du Palais Royal, and sat down at one of the little tables under the awning where was a vacant chair. This is a busy spot, upon which many streets converge, and one may rest there idly and study an infinite variety of human types. ”

“ Heaven take pity on his soul! Many café waiters die without having fulfilled their dream of having an establishment of their own. The life of fatigue which they lead kills them, as a rule, towards their thirtieth year. It is thus that we have seen the greatest of them all vanish from our midst—that waiter of the Café de la Rotonde, whose ‘baoum!’ uttered in a far-resounding voice, has found so many imitators. We see him still, coffee-pot in hand, saying in a voice profound, ‘Pas de Crême?’ Alas, alas, he is dead. ”

“ It is in this place of duels and babies and tipsy penitents that the new restaurant is to shine resplendent, if plans do not miscarry. Whether with all its grandeurs it will attract the crowd remains to be seen. A restaurant's success is not always in proportion to the money spent in equipping it. There, for example, was the Café des Fleurs. It was the prettiest café in Paris. The men behind it were so wealthy that they did not care whether the place paid or not. They lavished money upon the decorations, the cuisine, the cellars. ”

“ The cuisine is not remarkable—not so good, for instance, [Pg 134] as that of the Paris Café de Paris, which is under the same management; but much beside food goes to make up one's money's worth when the coveted table has at last been obtained, and there are few things more amusing to a student of men, women, and things than to sit in some corner of the café and watch the world go by. ”

“ Down in the city, the Café de Paris has the crowd corresponding to that at Armenonville, in the Bois. Durand's, Paillard's, Voisins, the Ritz, the Elysées—all have their quota of the patronage, and a host of restaurants less famed in social annals accommodate the lesser folk of the Grand Prix multitude. Everywhere there is eating, drinking, and making merry, and one [Pg 75] gives no thought to dying on the morrow. ”

“ Peasley had been saying, "Wait until we get to Paris and then we will go and sit in front of a café."
We saw many natives, all bundled up, sitting in the open street and slowly freezing to death, and so we joined one of the frigid little clusters and found some nice iron chairs waiting for us. It was a most heroic performance, but we took our coffee in the open air. A true Parisian can sit under a striped awning for hours at a time with nothing to entertain him except a few cigarettes, made of autumn leaves, and a large goblet filled with sweetened water. ”

“ Susanne, she of the madonna-like eyes, and the painter—their small stove, with its pipe traversing the ceiling, having failed dismally to warm even the cat beneath it—have come from their apartment across the Seine to the café, and are snug in a corner over a game of dominoes. The café is a refuge in raw, dreary weather. Only the wretchedly poor must needs pass by its welcome door. ”

“ The best coffee in the world, taken altogether, is certainly made in Paris, though I have occasionally tasted at private houses in England, where the master was a gourmet, and the servants disciplined, finer coffee than was ever brewed either at the Café Foy or the Café Corrazza. ”

“ Whatever his antecedents may be, the Paris waiter invariably becomes fashioned after a certain recognised type. This type is well described by a French writer in the following words: “Vigour of constitution and honesty of soul are two qualities without which the café garçon would not exist. The master’s eye cannot always be hovering over the bottles, the decanters, the cups, and the coffee-pots of the laboratory. Nothing is easier than to divert, in the midst of the gigantic consumption which distinguishes certain establishments, an occasional drop from the ocean of refreshments and liqueurs ”

“ In the mid-nineteenth century a revolution came over the cafés of Paris. Tobacco had invaded their precincts; previously one smoked only in the estaminets. Three cafés of the Palais Royal resisted the innovation, the Café de la Galerie d'Orleans, the Café de Foy and the Café de la Rotonde. To-day, well, to-day things are different. ”