Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/305

Rh Et chantons tous a perdre haleine;

Vive le grand Napoleon!

Bon, bon, bon, bon, bon, bon, bon.

At the Restoration, the gardes du corps and musketeers invaded the café, broke the glasses, and threw the furniture out of the windows. The Café Montansier became, in 1831, the theatre of the Palais Royal.

The Café de Chartres, now Café Véfour, enjoys a first-rate reputation, and is, for certain reasons, the resort chiefly of riches financiers and distinguished strangers. The Café de la Régence was the rendezvous of chess-players, and had once a great name.

Among the most renowned cafés of the Boulevarts, were the Café Hardi—now the Maison Dorée—the Café Riche, and the Café Anglais. M. Hardi must, we suspect, have been Hardy gallicised. He had a capacious fireplace, with a handsome chimney-piece of white marble and a silver gridiron, to please the eyes of his customers, the chops or steaks being cooked in English fashion in the presence of the consumer.

One of the most original of the habitués of the Café Hardi is described, as usual, as being an Englishman of the name of Schmitt (Smith?), who rose daily at five, took his customary place at Hardi's at six, and finished his repast by ten. He then began a course of Bordeaux, which, with the help of a salt herring at midnight, always reached a dozen bottles by break of day!

The Café Tortoni originated with a Neapolitan confectioner of ices, by name Velloni. The celebrity of one Spolar as a billiard-player brought it subsequently into notoriety:

Frenchmen have a most extraordinary idea of the riches of extravagant foreigners. Millionary milords are not so abundant as formerly, but they are still believed in, even by those who should be better informed. But a Russian prince, with an imaginary hundred miles of exhaustless mines, particularly pleases the fancy of a Parisian badaud:

In 1816 and 1817 the citizens of Paris used to fall into ecstasies before certain vast and sumptuous appartements situated on the ground-floor of the Boulevart des Italiens, at the corner of the Rue Taitbout. These appartements were occupied by M. Demidoff, a Russian millionaire, who was indebted for his immense riches to mines of coal, copper, iron, and malachite.

He had two sons, Messrs. Paul and Anatole Demidoff. M. Anatole Demidoff is the only one now alive. M. Demidoff lived alternately at Paris and