Part 46 (2/2)

At the upper end of the bath was a semicircular platform somewhat loftier than the rest, called the Amphitheatre. This, I learned, was the place of honor. Here cl.u.s.tered the _elite_ of the swimmers; here they discussed the great principles of their art, and pa.s.sed judgment on the performances of those less skilful than themselves. To the right of the Amphitheatre rose a slender spiral staircase, like an openwork pillar of iron, with a tiny circular platform on the top, half surrounded by a light iron rail. This conspicuous perch, like the pillar of St. Simeon Stylites, was every now and then surmounted by the gaunt figure of some ambitious plunger who, after att.i.tudinizing awhile in the pose of Napoleon on the column Vendome, would join his hands above his head and take a tremendous ”header” into the gulf below. When this feat was successfully performed, the _elite_ in the Amphitheatre applauded graciously.

And now, what with swimming, and lounging, and looking on, some two hours had slipped by, and we were both hungry and tired, Muller proposed that we should breakfast at the Cafe Procope.

”But why not here?” I asked, as a delicious breeze from the buffet came wafting by ”like a steam of rich distilled perfumes.”

”Because a breakfast _chez_ Molino costs at least twenty-five francs per head--BECAUSE I have credit at Procope--BECAUSE I have not a _sou_ in my pocket--and BECAUSE, milord Smithfield, I aspire to the honor of entertaining your lords.h.i.+p on the present occasion!” replied Muller, punctuating each clause of his sentence with a bow.

If Muller had not a _sou_, I, at all events, had now only one Napoleon; so the Cafe Procope carried the day.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE RUE DE L'ANCIENNE COMeDIE AND THE CAFe PROCOPE.

The Rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie are one and the same. As the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres, it dates back to somewhere about the reign of Philippe Auguste; and as the Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie it takes its name and fame from the year 1689, when the old Theatre Francais was opened on the 18th of April by the company known as Moliere's troupe--Moliere being then dead, and Lully having succeeded him at the Theatre du Palais Royal.

In the same year, 1689, one Francois Procope, a Sicilian, conceived the happy idea of hiring a house just opposite the new theatre, and there opening a public refreshment-room, which at once became famous, not only for the excellence of its coffee (then newly introduced into France), but also for being the favorite resort of all the wits, dramatists, and beaux of that brilliant time. Here the latest epigrams were circulated, the newest scandals discussed, the bitterest literary cabals set on foot. Here Jean Jacques brooded over his chocolate; and Voltaire drank his mixed with coffee; and Dorat wrote his love-letters to Mademoiselle Saunier; and Marmontel wrote praises of Mademoiselle Clairon; and the Marquis de Bievre made puns innumerable; and Duclos and Mercier wrote satires, now almost forgotten; and Piron recited those verses which are at once his shame and his fame; and the Chevalier de St. Georges gave fencing lessons to his literary friends; and Lamothe, Freron, D'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, and all that wonderful company of wits, philosophers, encyclopaedists, and poets, that lit up as with a dying glory the last decades of the old _regime_, met daily, nightly, to write, to recite, to squabble, to lampoon, and some times to fight.

The year 1770 beheld, in the closing of the Theatre Francais, the extinction of a great power in the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres--for it was not, in fact, till the theatre was no more a theatre that the street changed its name, and became the Rue de L'Ancienne Comedie. A new house (to be on first opening invested with the time-honored t.i.tle of Theatre Francais, but afterwards to be known as the Odeon) was now in progress of erection in the close neighborhood of the Luxembourg. The actors, meanwhile, repaired to the little theatre of the Tuilleries. At length, in 1782,[2] the Rue de L'Ancienne Comedie was one evening awakened from its two years' lethargy by the echo of many footfalls, the glare of many flambeaux, and the rattle of many wheels; for all Paris, all the wits and critics of the Cafe Procope, all the fair shepherdesses and all the beaux seigneurs of the court of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI., were hastening on foot, in chairs, and in chariots, to the opening of the new house and the performance of a new play! And what a play! Surely, not to consider it too curiously, a play which struck, however sportively, the key-note of the coming Revolution;--a play which, for the first time, displayed society literally in a state of _boulevers.e.m.e.nt_;--a play in which the greed of the courtier, the venality of the judge, the empty glitter of the crown, were openly held up to scorn;--a play in which all the wit, audacity, and success are on the side of the _canaille_;--a play in which a lady's-maid is the heroine, and a valet canes his master, and a great n.o.bleman is tricked, outwitted, and covered with ridicule!

[2] 1782 is the date given by M. Hippolyte Lucas. Sainte-Beuve places it two years later.

This play, produced for the first time under the t.i.tle of _La Folle Journee_, was written by one Caron de Beaumarchais--a man of wit, a man of letters, a man of the people, a man of nothing--and was destined to achieve immortality under its later t.i.tle of _Le Mariage de Figaro_.

A few years later, and the Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie echoed daily and nightly to the dull rumble of Revolutionary tumbrils, and the heavy tramp of Revolutionary mobs. Danton and Camille Desmoulins must have pa.s.sed through it habitually on their way to the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Charlotte Corday (and this is a matter of history) did pa.s.s through it that bright July evening, 1793, on her way to a certain gloomy house still to be seen in the adjoining Rue de l'ecole de Medecine, where she stabbed Marat in his bath.

But throughout every vicissitude of time and politics, though fas.h.i.+on deserted the Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie, and actors migrated, and fresh generations of wits and philosophers succeeded each other, the Cafe Procope still held its ground and maintained its ancient reputation. The theatre (closed in less than a century) became the studio first of Gros and then of Gerard, and was finally occupied by a succession of restaurateurs but the Cafe Procope remained the Cafe Procope, and is the Cafe Procope to this day.

The old street and all belonging to it--especially and peculiarly the Cafe Procope---was of the choicest Quartier Latin flavor in the time of which I write; in the pleasant, careless, impecunious days of my youth.

A cheap and highly popular restaurateur named Pinson rented the old theatre. A _costumier_ hung out wigs, and masks, and debardeur garments next door to the restaurateur. Where the fatal tumbril used to labor past, the frequent omnibus now rattled gayly by; and the pavements trodden of old by Voltaire, and Beaumarchais, and Charlotte Corday, were thronged by a merry tide of students and grisettes. Meanwhile the Cafe Procope, though no longer the resort of great wits and famous philosophers, received within its hospitable doors, and nourished with its indifferent refreshments, many a now celebrated author, painter, barrister, and statesman. It was the general rendezvous for students of all kinds--poets of the ecole de Droit, philosophers of the ecole de Medecine, critics of the ecole des Beaux Arts. It must however be admitted that the poetry and criticism of these future great men was somewhat too liberally perfumed with tobacco, and that into their systems of philosophy there entered a considerable element of grisette.

Such, at the time of my first introduction to it, was the famous Cafe Procope.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BREAKFAST.

”Now this, _mon cher_,” said Muller, taking off his hat with a flourish to the young lady at the _comptoir_, ”is the immortal Cafe Procope.”

I looked round, and found myself in a dingy, ordinary sort of Cafe, in no wise differing from any other dingy, ordinary sort of Cafe in that part of Paris. The decorations were ugly enough to be modern. The ceiling was as black with gas-fumes and tobacco smoke as any other ceiling in any other estaminet in the Quartier Latin. The waiters looked as waiters always look before midday--sleepy, discontented, and unwashed. A few young men of the regular student type were scattered about here and there at various tables, reading, smoking, chatting, breakfasting, and reading the morning papers. In an alcove at the upper end of the second room (for there were two, one opening from the other) stood a blackened, broken-nosed, plaster bust of Voltaire, upon the summit of whose august wig some irreverent customer had perched a particularly rakish-looking hat. Just in front of this alcove and below the bust stood a marble-topped table, at one end of which two young men were playing dominoes to the accompaniment of the matutinal absinthe.

”And this,” said Muller, with another flourish, ”is the still more immortal table of the still more supremely immortal Voltaire. Here he was wont to rest his sublime elbows and sip his _demi-ta.s.se_. Here, upon this very table, he wrote that famous letter to Marie Antoinette that Freron stole, and in revenge for which he wrote the comedy called _l'Ecossaise_; but of this admirable satire you English, who only know Voltaire in his Henriade and his history of Charles the Twelfth, have probably never heard till this moment! _Eh bien_! I'm not much wiser than you--so never mind. I'll be hanged if I've ever read a line of it.

Anyhow, here is the table, and at this other end of it we'll have our breakfast.”

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