Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/303

Rh interposed, and, under the pretext of demanding explanations more tranquilly, he ushered the Russians and Prussians into his laboratory and so got them away.

Although the Café Lemblin was the rendezvous of the officers of the Empire, members of the king's body-guard were often seen there, and musketeers came, with their moustaches turned up and their lips contemptuously curled to seek for adventures.

One evening the gardes du corps arrived in a mass, and announced that they should come the next morning to inaugurate the bust of Louis XVIII. over the comptoir. The next morning nearly three hundred officers of the Empire were there to defend the threatened position; but the authorities had been duly put on their guard, and the assailants did not make their appearance.

At the time of the Restoration, the Café Valois flourished in the Palais Royal as a political café, antagonistic to the Café Lemblin. It was the club of the old royalist emigrants, who were called the light infantry (voltigeurs) of Louis XIV. This café no longer exists.

The Café de la Rotonde and the Café du Caveau were opened in 1805 or 1806 by M. Angilbert, who in 1822 founded the Café de Paris. The Café de la Rotonde realised 467,000 francs by the entrance of the allies: the Café de Paris was founded upon this sudden overflow of profits—it should have been called the Café dcs Alliés.

Of all the cafés situated in the first floor of the Palais Royal, the Café de Milles Colonnes was, alike under the Empire and the Restoration, the most frequented. It was entirely indebted for its success to the beauty of the mistress of the house, Madame Romain, whose husband, by way of compensation, was little, thin, and maimed.

The late lamented James Simpson, in his account of Paris after Waterloo, gives the following interesting description of the Café de Milles Colonnes at that eventful period:

We had heard much of the taste and grandeur of the Café de Milles Colonnes, and its beautiful matron—who, it is said, was a favourite of Buonaparte's—a specimen of a very artful part of his materiel, which he occasionally played off upon ambassadors, whose state secrets it was desired to worm out; and even upon their masters. We entered the coffee-house, which is on the first floor up-stairs. Very few ball-rooms present the showy coup-d'œil of this singular place. It is very splendidly mirrored all round, the plates being divided by fluted Corinthian pillars, which, as well as the company, seem innumerably multiplied. Waiters, in great numbers and activity, are serving coffee, ices, fruit, &c., to the different tables, which are all of marble, having a very cool and clean appearance, and encircled, one by English officers, another by plumed Highland bonnets, a third by Prussian hussars, a fourth by Brunswickers in their mourning; many, by parties of French ladies with their beaux; and enthroned in the middle of the hall, close to the wall, with a marble table before and a mirror behind her, dressed in crimson velvet, and covered with jewels, sits la belle Limonadière, serenely looking down on the hundreds who are looking up to her, and only recalling to mind the fact that she is not an empress, by occasionally giving change when wanted by the waiters, and, as is the case in all French coffee-houses, having spread out before her some dozens of small allotments of broke sugar, of five or six pieces each, on a little silver saucer like a wine-funnel stand; a remnant of the respect for sugar with which Napoleon impressed his subjects when he closed Europe against English commerce, and which has banished that profuse thing called a sugar-basin from the economy and vocabulary of Paris. La belle Limonadière is rather large, and un peu passé; but she is no doubt, a most brilliant