ut the old historic cafe, the cafe
of tradition, where you were sure to find some celebrity on exhibition--a
first-class poet or a philosopher--may be said to be defunct. The Grand
Cafe and the Cafe de la Paix under the Grand Hotel, being very central,
near the new Opera, and gorgeously fitted up, are the chief rendezvous of
the fashionable floating population, aristocratic loafers of all nations,
where representatives from the remotest parts of the earth meet to stare
at each other under the same roof--Persians, Greeks and Hindoos, Sandwich
Islanders and Yankees. Tortoni's is a restaurant and cafe of the highest
class, the most select in the city. Cafe Riche and Cafe Gretry, both fine
cafes, are much frequented by stockbrokers, who in the evening are wont to
assemble on the sidewalk near by, making the night air ring with their
wild shouts of "give" and "take:" if dispersed by the police, as they
often are, they generally gather into knots a little farther on. Cafe du
Helder is appropriated almost exclusively to the military, officers in
_bourgeois_ dress, students from the Polytechnic and St. Cyr, and
horse-jockeys. The Cafe des Varietes belongs to the actors--a noisy,
brilliant place--whilst the Cafe Madrid is the literary cafe of the
nineteenth century, if there is any. Under Napoleon III. it was the centre
of the radical opposition, being frequented by all the shades of Red, from
the delicate hue of the _Debats_ to the deep crimson of Flourens and
Rochefort. Under the Commune it continued to be notorious, and to-day it
is the resort of lawyers, journalists and Bohemians--lesser lights who
seem to like the location, on the confines of the bad Boulevard
Montmartre, and have no objection to the _cocottes_ who come there in the
evening. Like La Fontaine's mule,

Qui ne parlait incessament
Que de sa mere la jument,

they talk only of literature, their nurse, and speak disparagingly--it is
a peculiarity of the place--of all the fellow-beings she has suckled. It
is the typical French cafe, in the central _salon_ of which, in majestic
repose, sits the _dame de comptoir_, who has a little gray moustache--the
French like a little hair upon the upper lip of ladies--whilst overhead,
forming a part of the extraordinary decoration, is a Madonna, goddess,
angel--I can't say what--copied from one of the old masters in the palace
of the Luxembourg. Gold-dust blown across a blue oval, with white-and-rose
angels in the midst