teaux is engraved on many memories. Few indeed were the
students who lived in the Latin Quarter during the last twelve years of
the Restoration and did not frequent that temple sacred to hunger and
impecuniosity. There a dinner of three courses, with a quarter bottle
of wine or a bottle of beer, could be had for eighteen sous; or for
twenty-two sous the quarter bottle becomes a bottle. Flicoteaux, that
friend of youth, would beyond a doubt have amassed a colossal fortune
but for a line on his bill of fare, a line which rival establishments
are wont to print in capital letters, thus--BREAD AT DISCRETION, which,
being interpreted, should read "indiscretion."

Flicoteaux has been nursing-father to many an illustrious name. Verily,
the heart of more than one great man ought to wax warm with innumerable
recollections of inexpressible enjoyment at the sight of the small,
square window panes that look upon the Place de la Sorbonne, and the Rue
Neuve-de-Richelieu. Flicoteaux II. and Flicoteaux III. respected the old
exterior, maintaining the dingy hue and general air of a respectable,
old-established house, showing thereby the depth of their contempt for
the charlatanism of the shop-front, the kind of advertisement which
feasts the eyes at the expense of the stomach, to which your modern
restaurant almost always has recourse. Here you beheld no piles of
straw-stuffed game never destined to make the acquaintance of the spit,
no fantastical fish to justify the mountebank's remark, "I saw a fine
carp to-day; I expect to buy it this day week." Instead of the prime
vegetables more fittingly described by the word primeval, artfully
displayed in the window for the delectation of the military man and his
fellow country-woman the nursemaid, honest Flicoteaux exhibited full
salad-bowls adorned with many a rivet, or pyramids of stewed prunes
to rejoice the sight of the customer, and assure him that the word
"dessert," with which other handbills made too free, was in this case
no charter to hoodwink the public. Loaves of six pounds' weight, cut in
four quarters, made good the promise of "bread at discretion." Such was
the plenty of the establishment, that Moliere would have celebrated it
if it had been in existence in his day, so comically appropriate is the
name.

Flicoteaux still subsists; so long as students are minded to live,
Flicoteaux will make a living. You feed there, neither more nor less;
and you feed as you work, with morose o