alderman. I like the Blue Quadrant: the
House of Gold; the restaurant of the Magdalen.
I like chevets, lobsters, and delicacies out of
season. I like Marengo fowls, eels as female
sailors, ortolans, blown omelettes, pies of fat
liver, truffled turkeys, and kidneys jumped
with wine of Champagne. They are good,
and I like them; so do wiser and better men.
I like a bumper of Burgundy to be filled,
filled for me, and to give to those who prefer it
Champagne. I like Beaune, Mâcon, Chablis,
Sauterne, Lafitte, Médoc, Thorins Chambertin.
Pommard, Clos Vougeot, Romanée, Mercury
(not blue pill by any means), and all the
generous wines of the golden coast which are
so delicious and are growing so woefully dear.
In a word, I like good dinners; but alas!
my name is not Rothschild, nor Royalty, nor
Mathew Marshall. I can dine well once in
a way, and that is all.

Resident in Paris some fortnight ago, I had
dined well—very well, once, perhaps twice in
a way: and began to recognise the necessity
of mediocrity in dining. No more for me
were the golden columniated down-stairs
saloons of the Palais Royal. Gold and
columns and plate glass I could have in the
upper apartments of that palace of gastronomy,
and at a very moderate price; but the
good meats, good sauces, good wines—they
remained below. " Prix fixé " stared me in
the face. Dinners at a fixed tariff of prices
and a fixed tariff of badness. I could have
six courses for one and eightpence, but what
courses! Gloom began to settle upon me. I
saw visions of dirty little restaurants in back
streets; of biftecks like gutta percha; of
wine like pyroligneous acid, with a dash of
hemlock in it to give it body; of sour bread
in loaves of the length of a beefeater's
halbert; of winy stains on the tablecloth; of
a greasy waiter; of a pervading odour of
stale garlic; of having to ask the deaf man
with the asthma and the green shade over
his eyes yonder, for the salt. Better I said, to
buy cold halves of fowls at the roasters'
shops, and devour them in the solitude of my
fifth floor; better to take to a course of
charcuterie or cold pork-butchery; Lyons
sausages, black puddings, pigs' feet, polonies
with garlic, or sparerib with savoury jelly.
Better almost to go back to the Arcadian
diet of red-shelled eggs, penn'orths of fried
potatoes, fromage de Brie, and ha'porths of
ready-cooked spinach — of which, entre nous,
I had had in my time some experience. I was
meditating between this and the feasibility of
cooking a steak over a French wood fire at
home (a feat never yet accomplished, I
believe, by mortal Englishman); I had almost
determined to subscribe for a month to a
boarding-house in the Banlieue, where the
nourishment as described on the public
walls was "simple but fortifying," when the
genius of fortuitous good threw Madame
Busque in my way.

Through the intermediary of a friend, be it
understood. He and I had dined well, the
once, twice, or thrice in a way at which I
have hinted. He mentioned at the conclusion
of our last repast that he must really dine at
Madame's to-morrow.

I don't know what time in the afternoon it
was, but it was getting very near dinner-time.
A certain inward clock of mine that never
goes wrong told me so unmistakably. It was
very cold, but we were sitting outside a café
on the Boulevard; which you can do in Paris
till the thermometer is all sorts of degrees
below zero. We were sitting there of course
merely for the purpose of reading the latest
news from the Crimea; but in deference to
received café opinion we were imbibing two
petits verres of absinthe, which is a delicious
cordial of gall, wormwood, and a few essential
oils, and which mixed with a little aniseed
and diluted with iced water will give a man
a famous appetite for dinner. And thereanent
I ventured to propound the momentous
question: " Where shall we dine?"

' Well," said my friend, " I was thinking
of—of a crib—well, a sort of club in fact,
where I dine almost every day when I am in
Paris."

I suggested that he might have some difficulty
in introducing me, a stranger, to the
club in question.

"Why, no," he answered; " because you
see it isn't exactly a club, because it's a sort
of ' creamery'; and in fact, if you don't mind
meeting a few fellows, I think we'd better
dine there."

I suggested that we had better go home
and dress.

"Oh," exclaimed my friend, " nobody
dresses there. To tell the truth, it's only at
Madame Busque's; and so I think we'd better
be off as fast as we can, for nobody waits for
anybody there."

I confided myself blindly to the guidance
of my friend, consoling myself with the
conviction that whatever the club or " creamery"
might be, the dinner could be but a dinner
after all, and amount to so many francs on
this side a napoleon.

We went up and down a good many streets
whose names I shall not tell you; for, unless
I know what sort of a man you be, and what
are your likings and dislikings, I would not
have you go promiscuously to Madame
Busque's, and perchance abuse her cookery
afterwards. At length, after pursuing the
sinuosities of a very narrow street, one of the
old, genuine, badly-paved, worse lighted
streets of Paris, we slackened our footsteps
before a lordly mansion, — a vast hotel, with
a porte-cochère and many-barred green shutters.
My heart sank within me. This must
be some dreadfully aristocratic club, I thought,
and still mentally I counted my store of
five-franc pieces, and wondered tremblingly
whether they played lansquenet after
dinner.

"Is it here?" I faltered.