istmas to New
Year's and New Year's to Christmas. Neither would you find MacMahon,
Thiers or Victor Hugo at the cafe. The recognized great, the nobility and
high officials, contrary to what perhaps is commonly supposed, are rarely
to be seen there. They meet in some more private way.

But the cafe is nevertheless a very charming place. It is a place where it
is permitted to you to surrender yourself to the most delicious
reflections. You are in the presence of humming-birds, not ostriches or
owls. The people are smoking cigarettes, or cigars at worst, not
meerschaums. The establishment itself is a dazzle of decoration, a little
corner of the Louvre. There is no shouting or swearing, but a pleasing
hum. The calls of messieurs and the replies of garcons resolve themselves
into a confused lulling sound. If you are well, and your conscience does
not trouble you--and even if it does--you can select a quiet corner and
dream away the livelong day. The air is nerve-slackening. You feel
perfectly at your ease. You can think of nothing to apprehend--no
incursion of your lady friends designing to reason with the proprietor and
perhaps hold a prayer-meeting on the sidewalk; no incursion of the police,
no row. Everybody is placable and quiet--preserves indeed a sort of
deferential attitude toward his neighbor--and not only when he comes in,
but again when he goes out, salutes the dame de comptoir--the lady
superintendent, that is (not unfrequently the wife of the proprietor)--who
sits enthroned in a little boxlike place superintending the delivery of
drinks and making change. This matter of saluting, as the reader knows, is
a deference which every Frenchman considers due to the great man or woman
who, at the particular time of his entrance or exit, may chance to be in a
particular apartment; and in the case of cafes, if the dame de comptoir
were not in her place, he would salute the guests; and if there were but
one guest, that one would be expected to return the salute, it being meant
for him alone.

Sanctified in this way by the presence of a lady, the cafe does not seem
such a very bad place; and it isn't. Even the _estaminets_ and
_brasseries_, which are but second-rate cafes, and the ordinary
wine-shops, still lower in the scale, in which the coachman and
commissionnaire regale themselves, taking a _canon_ across the counter in
the morning and playing a game of cards in the back shop at night, are by
no means the hideous gulpi