Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/301

Rh who frequented them, and of the partisanship—for in Paris everything is political, or literary, or artistic partisanship—by which they were distinguished.

The cafés and restaurants are, indeed, as the Bourgeois Proteus avers of them, essentially a spécialité Parisienne. None of the other capitals of Europe are provided with such sumptuous establishments, or in which so many luxuries are to be obtained. Authors, princes, artists, magistrates, ministers, statesmen, soldiers, strangers from all parts of the globe, crowd to these symposiums. There is not even a bourgeois of Paris who does not on certain festive occasions dine at the Café de Paris, the Frères Provençaux, the Café Anglais; at Riche's, Véry's, or Véfour's.

In 1786 three young men from Provence, Messrs. Barthelemy, Manneilles, and Simon, started a modest eating-house in the Palais Royal. They were so intimately united in the bonds of friendship and of a common interest, that they were called the three brothers. The salt-cellars were of wood, and the tables were covered with wax-cloth, but the dishes had the true Provençal flavour, and the wine was unexceptionable. Such was the origin of the Trois Frères Provençaux. General Bonaparte and Barras used to dine at the Provençaux before going to the theatre of Mademoiselle Montansier, close by. The house attained a zenith of fame in the time of the Peninsular war, when the receipts amounted to from twelve to fifteen thousand francs a day. After conducting the establishment for fifty years the brothers sold their interest to the Bellengers, who again ceded the same to M. Collot, who has for now fifteen years upheld the reputation of the house.

Véry began in the garden of the Tuileries, where he superintended the great dinners given by the military school in the first year of the Empire. Marshal Duroc got a licence for the rising artist to open what was called the Tente des Tuileries. The kitchen was exquisite, the wines excellent, and the fine eyes, the grace, and the engaging manners of the dame du comptoir—Madame Véry—were much extolled.

In 1808 Véry founded the establishment in the Palais Royal, which still exists. This successful artist came to Paris in wooden shoes; he withdrew from business in 1817, possessor of a large fortune. M. Neuhaus is die actual head of the establishment, which is considered to be one of the first restaurants of Paris.

To a stranger in the French capital, one of the first things that strikes him amid the number of cafés and restaurants, many of them of European renown, others too repulsive to enter, are the numerous elegant, well-lit cafés, often occupying the whole length of a first or second story—and we do not allude here solely to the cafés so circumstanced in the Palais Royal, where open windows, brilliant lights, music, gambling, and a variety of devices, are brought into play to entice the stranger—we allude to most luxurious, gentlemanly, quiet-looking cafés, which the stranger naturally asks himself by whom are they frequented, and why go out of your way when here, in the midst of the Place de la Bourse, you have a cool and clear marble slab, a cup of coffee, and a petit ver at your service in the cool fresh air, or at the corner of the street you have an apartment all windows and lights, with journals and feuilletons scattered about like their leafy namesakes? There is a history in this