presents from crowned
heads; to sketches by d'Orsay, and to framed tickets for Almack's.
"Whenever the dear lady next door," he said, with a glance at the
seminudities of the French fashion-plates, and alluding to Miss
Burdett-Coutts, "comes to have a dish of tea with me, I have to lock
those things up. I fear," he said, presently, "I'm in a shocking bad
odor with her now." Only last night, he explained, he had received from
one of the French Rothschilds a magnificent _pate de foie gras_; and,
having himself no parties in prospect, he sent this gastronomical
treasure to Miss Coutts, who was about to entertain, as he knew, a large
company at luncheon. There was one thing, however, which he did not
know--the luncheon was to be given to the members of a certain society
which had for its object the protection of edible animals from any form
of treatment by which they might be needlessly incommoded. What, then,
were the feelings of the hostess when she suddenly discovered that a
dish which, with Mr. Bevan's compliments, had been solemnly placed
before her was the most atrocious of all the abominations which the
company had assembled to denounce! "It was sent back to me," said Mr.
Bevan, "as though it were the plague in person. It's a pity that you and
I can't eat it together. I'd ask you to dinner if only I were sure of my
new cook. My last cook was with me for twenty years. Shall I tell you
what he wrote in a letter when he had left me to join the army during
the Franco-German War? 'Alas! monsieur,' he said, 'I must now make
sorties instead of _entrees_.'" The banquet, however, which Mr. Bevan
had suggested--and it was followed by others--took place before many
days were over. The guests numbered eight or nine. I cannot recollect
who they were; but the cooking, the wines, and the decorations of the
table would have satisfied Ouida herself. The china, covered with royal
crowns, was a gift from Louis Philippe. The wines, of which the names
and dates were murmured by the servants who dispensed them, seemed all
to have come from the cellars of a Rothschild or an Austrian emperor,
while every dish was a delicacy unique in its composition and flavor,
the last of them being a sort of "trifle," which the artistry of a
_chef_ had converted into the form of a pope's tiara. Mr. Bevan, in
short, was a model of the ultrafastidious man of the world as he figures
in the novels of Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli. I mentioned this impression
of