For a

which these delicious combinations are intended to create. framboise you pay one franc, likewise leaving two sous on the table for the garçon. Nothing can surpass the brilliancy, and beauty, and vivacity of the scene around Tortoni's on a pleasant summer's evening.

Of the magnificent cafés there are eight or ten, between which I know not how to choose. At the Café de Foy one never hears the clatter of dominos; the game is there forbidden. At the Café du Caveau and the Café d'Orleans the finest moka in the metropolis may be enjoyed. At the Café of the Opera Comique, you drink it from cups of greatest magnitude and weight. At the Café Vivienne it is placed before you on tables of the most beautiful white marble. At the Café des Variétés it is served up in the midst of Oriental splen. dour, and also at Veron's. Suppose we walk into Veron's; you pronounce it instantly more richly ornamented than any other mere café in Paris. The gilding of various parts is in a gorgeous profusion, that recalls whatever you may have read of the golden house of Nero. The ceiling and walls are wrought here and there into the most lovely frescoes of birds and flowers; fauns, nymphs, graces, and images in every fantastic form; four immense and gilded chandeliers hang from the ceiling: a tall candelabra rises in the centre of the room, and two beautiful lamps stand on the comptoir. These lights illuminating these colours and this gilding, make the scene brilliant beyond all description. Then the mirrors, so disposed as to double and redouble, nay, twenty times to reflect what has been described. Here is not merely one Café Veron to dazzle and enchant, but a score of them. There is not a café, nor hardly anything else in Paris, which is not abundantly supplied with looking-glasses. The French of Louis Philippe can no more live without them than could the French of Louis XIV. They are not indeed now, as formerly, carried about by ladies as they promenade the streets; but walking through any street or any passage, you may, if you please, pause at every moment to adjust your locks in a mirror. There are mirrors in every street, mirrors walling the rooms of every dwelling-house, mirrors multiplying every boutique ; there are mirrors in the diligences, and mirrors in the omnibuses; there is no place too high nor none too low for them; they line the Hall of Diana in the Tuilleries, and reflect the boot-black half a dozen times, as he polishes your nether-self beneath the sign of "On cire les bottes." Paris itself is one of the largest cities of Europe: but Paris in all its mirrors is twenty times larger than the largest city in the world. "It cometh often to pass," says Bacon," that mean and small things discover great, better than great can discover small." If I were now on those themes, I might detect in their mirrors, not merely ungenerous evidences of their vanity, but one vast school wherein the polished manners of the French have been educated. But here comes the café noir.

Coffee is to the Frenchman what tea is to the Englishman, beer to the German, eau-de-vie to the Russian, opium to the Turk, or chocolate to the Spaniard. Men, women, and children, of all grades and professions, drink coffee in Paris. In the morning, it is served up under the aromatic name of cafe au lait; in the evening, it is universally taken as café noir. After one of Vefour's magnificent repasts, it enters your stomach in the character of a settler. It leaves

you volatile, nimble, and quick; and over it might be justly poured those pleasant compliments which Falstaff bestowed on sherris sack. The garçon, at your call for a demi-tasse, has placed before you a snowy cup and saucer, three lumps of sugar, and a petit verre. He ventured the petit verre, inferring from your ruddy English face that you liked liqueur. Another garçon now appears; in his right hand is a huge silver pot covered, and in his left another of the same material, uncovered: the former contains coffee, the latter cream. You reject cream, and thereupon the garçon pours out of the former in strange abundance, until your cup, ay, and almost the saucer, actually overflow. There is hardly space for the three lumps; and yet you must contrive somehow to insert them, or that café noir-black it may indeed be called-will in its concentrated strength be quite unmanageable; but, when thus sweetly tempered, it becomes the finest beverage in the whole world. It agreeably affects several senses. Its liquid pleases all the gustatory nerves, its savour ascends to rejoice the olfactory, and even your eye is delighted with those dark, transparent, and sparkling hues, through which your silver spoon perpetually shines. You pronounce French coffee the only coffee. In a few moments its miracles begin to be wrought; you feel spirituel, amiable, and conversational. Delille's fine lines rush into your memory :

"Et je crois du genie eprouvant le reveil,

Boire dans chaque goutte, un rayon du soleil."

You almost express aloud your gratitude to the garçon. In his sphere he seems to you a beau-ideal. His hair is polished into ebon. His face has a balmy expression, that enchants you. His cravat is of intensest white. His shirt-bosom is equally elegant. His roundabout is neat and significent. Upon his left arm hangs a clean napkin, and his lower extremities are quite wrapped about in a snowy apron. His stockings are white, and he glides about in noiseless pumps. At your slightest intimation he is at your elbow. He is a physiognomist of the quickest perception. He now marks the entrance of yonder aged gentleman with a cane. Calmly he moves for a demi-tasse. That aged gentleman is an habitue. He glances his eye at the titles of halfa-dozen Gazettes, and having found that which he desired, lays it aside, carefully, upon his table. Having divested himself of gloves and hat, he sits down to café noir, and the gazette. That man patronizes only Veron's. He is not its habitue of ten or twenty years, but of forty. It has changed proprietors five times; but, even as Mademoiselle Mars has performed under the Directory, the Consulate, the Empire, the Restoration, and the Revolution, and is still fresh, and true to her vo cation, so has this habitue survived those five proprietary regimes; still continuing true to Veron's. With several others he is now considered, as it were, a part of the establishment, and when it exchanges hands its inventory is made out somewhat thus :

12 marble tables

24 stools, nearly new

7 habitues, nearly used up, but capable of enduring, say

five years

That individual has no physical or moral type out of Paris.

Tapping your cup with a five-franc piece, the garçon approaches, and, taking the coin, advances with it towards the dame-du-comptoir, saying at the same time, "huit-cent." The dame-du-comptoir

And where out of France will you find a dame-du-comptoir ? Some of our cockney travellers sometimes call her by the blowsy name of barmaid. But there is a wide ocean rolling between that graceful, elegantly dressed, and universally-recognising divinity, and her to whom that abominable name may be applied,- -a name reek. ing with exhalations from mugs, and beer-bottles, and stable-boys. This lady sits stately behind her comptoir. Two large silver vases stand in front of her, filled with spoons. At her right hand are several elegant decanters, and at her left a score of silver cups piled up with sugar. There is moreover a little bell within reach to summon the garçon, and wide open before her are the treasury-boxes of the cafe. Her business is to superintend the garçons, and receive the money. Her influence is, by her graceful presence, to refine the whole scene.

You may remark that such public vocation is out of woman's sphere. I can hardly coincide with you. I must say, however, that after some European travel, my ideas with regard to what is woman's legitimate sphere, have become somewhat confounded.

In every country, from Turkey upwards, woman has her certain place. In Italy, in Switzerland, in Germany, in England, in Scotland, and more than all in civilized and woman-adoring France, I have seen her, in instances without number, performing offices of hardship and notoriety, with which her heaven-given, womanly nature seemed to me totally incompatible.

That the age of chivalry has passed from Europe needs not the meagre evidence that no thousand swords leaped from their scab. bards to save the beautiful Marie Antoinette. Travel over Europe, the proofs shall stare you in the face wherever you go. In Munich a woman does the work of printer's devil. In Vienna I have seen her making mortar, carrying hods, digging cellars, and wheeling forth the clay; and there have I also seen females harnessed with a man, nay, with a dog, and once with even a jackass, to a cart, dragging the same through the most public streets of the metropolis. In Dresden she saws and splits wood, drags coal about the city in a little waggon, and wheels eatables for miles through the highways to the mar、 kets, in a huge barrow. In all these places, in France and Italy, may you note her with basket and scraper, hastening to monopolize the filth just fallen upon the public routes.

In France females do vastly more degrading and out-of-door work than in England, and in Paris they are in as great request as the mirrors themselves. A woman harnesses diligence horses. A woman cleans your boots as you rest them on her little stand at the Pont Neuf. At the theatres it is a woman who sells you your ticket, and other women who take charge of the boxes. At many mere business-offices it is a woman who does the business. Would you bargain at a Chantier for a load of wood, you bargain with a woman.— Would you be conveyed publicly to the south of France, you receive your right to a place in the Coupée from a woman. There is no shop, of whatever description, in which a woman is not concerned. There is indeed hardly a department in which she does not seem to be chief

manager. The greatest hotel in Paris is kept by a woman. You see women superintending everywhere;-in the reading-rooms, in the restaurants, in the estaminets, in the Cafés ;-selling tobacco in the thronged Tabacs :-tending cabinets inodories on the Boulevard Montmartre; lending newspapers in the Palais Royal, and writing out accounts in the Rue de la Paix ;—and when, alas! her vocation must needs render her form invisible, you shall still on canvass see her image, large as life, in fifty streets of Paris, under these pregnant words;"A la Maternité. Madame Messenger, sage-femme, 9 jours, l'accouchment compris. 50 francs et au dessus."

One might infer from most of these instances that woman had changed occupation with the other sex. So far as cooking is concerned this is the fact. But I know not if the remark can be ex tended farther. While the women are thus active, the men are too generally lounging. Ten thousand brilliant shops in Paris are each day and evening presided over by ten thousand brilliant women. Here is certainly no unattractive spectacle. Therein is revealed the ingenuity of the French; since many a green one, and many a knowing one, is thus beguiled into jewellery and kid-gloves, to say no worse, merely because it is pleasant to higgle about their price with such gentle cheaters. As to the beauty of these divinities, you shall hear many a sigh from ancient veterans of the Consulate and the Empire. They will tell you that the young loveliness of those times has vanished. The present is an old and ugly generation. So far as specimens in Cafés are concerned, the remark may be true. I have been surprised to find with so much grace, and so much courtliness, and so much gentleness, so little personal beauty combined. I hardly know an example that may be safely recommended, and yet he who should often walk through the Palais Royal, without ever looking into the Café Corazza, might be justly charged, in traveller's phrase, with" having seen nothing."

Returning from this episode, I go on to say that as soon as the garçon cries" huit-cent," and deposits the coin before her, the dame du-comptoir abstracts eight sous from the hundred. The garçon, re. turning your change, invariably looks forward to a small pour-boire for himself. If y you leave one sous, he merely inclines his head. If you leave two, he adds to the inclination a "mercie." Finally, if you generously abandon three, he not only bows profoundly, whispering mercie, but respectfully opens the door to you on departing. As you leave will always look at the lady, and raise your hat. you The quiet self possession with which she responds to your civility informs you that she has bowed to half the coffee-drinkers of Europe.

Having taken our demi tasse, suppose to vary the scene we visit an estaminet. Guided by the words: "Estaminet, 4 billiards, on joue le "-for "poule" you see the figure of a chicken,-let us ascend these stairs behind the Italian Opera. At the top of these a door is opened; what is the prospect? Dimly through dense tobacco-clouds are seen groups of smokers and drinkers, chatting at their stands,-billiard-tables, and men in shirt-sleeves flourishing queues, garçons gilding here and there, some with bundles of pipes, some with bottles of Strasburgh beer, and some with eau-de-vie. In the corner you discover a white-capped dame-du-comptoir, looming up through the fog, her left flanked by pipes of every length, and her right by jugs and bottles without number. A garçon,-alas!

not the clean and polished beau-ideal of the Café Veron,-advances and looks into your face with so empathic an expression, that you are constrained to call for a cigar and a petit-verre. On observing more closely, you now perceive in one wall of the room a large case half filled with ordinary pipes, and in another still another case with pipes of rarest make from the rarest material, the veritable ecumede-mer. Among the thirty or forty persons here assembled there is a great deal of motion, and a great deal of talk; and, before half an hour has passed, you recognise four or five different languages. In the midst of the variety there is one thing common,-smoke is rolling from every mouth. Here are five gentlemen, of whom two are in uniform of the National Guard. They have called for cards. A little green square, with cards, is placed upon the marble table before them. They sip coffee, smoke ordinary pipes, and play at vingt-et vr They are Frenchmen. Yonder dark individual, in

those warlike moustaches, which extend and twine about his ears, and who smokes that delicate lady's finger, as with folded arms he seriously observes the players, is a Spaniard. You observe the old gentleman sitting near him. Upon his table is a large bottle of Strasburg. His right hand half embraces a goblet of the beverage, his left is around the huge bowl of his pipe, and as with half-closed eyes he puffs those careless volumes from his mouth, you cannot mistake the German. The players at one of the billiard-tables you discover from their language to be Italians. Those at the other are Frenchmen, and he with the short pipe is Eugene, the finest player in Paris.

That Eugene does nothing but play billiards. He is autocrat of the queue. Professor of his art, he will tell you that he has just come from giving lessons to the Marquis of A. or the Baron B. For such as take any interest in this elegant game, the play of Eugene is a source of much delight. Indeed parties and engagements are frequently made for the express purpose of witnessing his style. He plays the French game of three balls, counting carams and doubled. pocketings. Mark his elegant and easy position. With what graceful freedom does he manage his queue; and as its elastic point salutes the ball, the sound is half musical! How complicated are his combinations, and with what swiftness are they conceived! He has unquestionably a genius for the game; some natural capacities that way, to himself mysterious, and for which he claims no praise. You deem those balls in an unaccountable position. Eugene hardly surveys the table. Swiftly his thought passes out through his queue into the white; the white takes the red, and cushioning, spins for an instant, and then starts off in a miraculous curve towards the left, tapping gently the blue. The red has been doubled into the middle pocket. There is from every observer an exclamation of delight. Eugene notices it not. What to them was mystery is to him the simplest intellectual combination. He has moreover left the balls in the best possible position. He almost always leaves them so. Hence, when he gets the run he is a very dangerous competitor. With him the question is not so much how he shall count, as how, after counting, he shall leave the balls. Nothing I know of in its way is more charming than to watch the various developments of Eugene's design. There is not a single direction of the balls whereof, previously to his stroke, Eugene is not aware. Of course Eugene never