and they crowded Tortoni's smokingroom, for society had abandoned the snuff of the old régime. But the men who had conquered half Europe under Napoleon would not give up their favorite resort so easily; and over the billiards and the pipes many a quarrel broke forth, to end in a bloody duel. It was easy to ride out to the secluded Mare d'Auteuil (whose peaceful waters are now a part of a far different resort of fashion, the steeplechase course in the Bois de Boulogne). There they could kill each other picturesquely, and according to the full requirements of the code of honor.

This supreme point of finished elegance, this fine, exquisite flower of the flânerie of the Boulevard gods, has marked Tortoni's to the end. If it is all over and past, it must be because the gods are dead, or else have fled before a democracy that brings all down to a dull, earthy level. But for three quarters of a century the place remained the rendezvous of the serene upper ten, - first, of the gratin of elegance, adding afterwards the fortunate in literature and art. It was but gradually that the military spirit ceased to lead, subsiding before the ideals of a generation that had not drunk gunpowder with its milk in the days of the Terror.

Meanwhile the city grew out to the Boulevard, and pushed beyond. Little by little the Boulevard itself was lined, behind its rows of trees, by tall houses, having shops with shining windows below.

Then the street of the old fosse was leveled up with the Boulevard of the ramparts, and with it the terrace of Tortoni disappeared, — all but in name. For the space reserved for the little tables on the level pavement in front of all cafés has kept the title. "Voyez, terrasse!" will long startle the heedless waiter to attend to the customers on the sidewalk. It was this first age of Tortoni's which gave the word to the Parisian language, whence it has spread to the provinces. To the end, the house VOL. LXXIII. - NO. 440. 48

itself remained a last relic of the old Boulevard de Gand, which, with it, has now vanished utterly.

To the ices and billiard pools and tobacco of the new order of things, with its leveling of society and of streets, another element was added. This was the newspaper, shaping politics and diplomacy; and it found due place on the little tables at Tortoni's. Its triumph was coming when Tortoni died, about the time when Charles X., the last king of France, with the haughty grace of the old school, was retiring before his pear-headed cousin of Orleans, Louis Philippe, whose commercial spirit fitted him to be "the king of the French," then the newest formula of government.

But the clicking of swords was still heard in the distance. Chocquart - the Chocquart of Dumas was one of the faithful to the little table and the daily Constitutionnel. Tall, hatchet - faced, with long mustaches waxed straight out at right angles to his nose, he was the link between the old courtliness and the new revival of intellect. One day he sat down, as usual, and demanded his paper of the garçon.

Monsieur, it is in hands."

A quiet gentleman in the corner sat reading the only copy impassively.

Five minutes passed silently by. Then Chocquart spoke again: “Garçon, I have asked for the Constitutionnel." "Monsieur, it is still in hands."

With his most terrible air Chocquart arose, marched straight on the quiet gentleman, and snatched the paper from him. The next day there was a duel, which sent a sword full into the breast of Chocquart, and kept him in bed for a month. sooner was he up than he came back to Tortoni's. The quiet gentleman was there again, reading the newspaper as before.

No

"Garçon," cried Chocquart, "the Constitutionnel!"

"Monsieur, it is in hands."

Again five minutes of silence, and

Chocquart planted his full height before the gentleman.

"Ah, then, do you wish for another lesson ?"

II.

With the change in the spirit of the times, the Anglomania which had preceded the Revolution appeared once more. Then it had been said that the head of the house of Orleans, lately back from England, and rising high in his stirrups as he rode English fashion, boded no good to the French state. Under the Orleans king, the English themselves appeared notably men like Thackeray's Lord Steyne- on the terrace at Tortoni's. But chiefly it was the English spirit which was being copied, Chesterfield by the French "dandies,' and Byron by the fashionable poets.

The word "dandy," transplanted spelling and all, has from the beginning had a meaning in French quite different from its English sense. It came just in time to label a thing new-born of the ages, the Frenchman who replaces in modern society the courtier of the old régime. Like the dwellers on Olympus, sung by Lucretius, he has all the indifference of the gods for his neighbors of level earth. So great is his indifference that he does not even scorn the ordinary mortal; and his self-satisfaction amounts to satiety. These dandies form a select inner circle, until this day, amid the widening eddies of what were then called les fashionables, and are now the Parisian élégants.

In those years, the Comte de Montrond was the recognized king of the dandies, and he held his court at Tortoni's. His successor, the Comte d'Orsay, who was even more absolute in his sway over the male world of fashion, followed his example. Each morning he drove in his tilbury to the terrace, and alighted amid the chosen few who dared to admire and aspired to imitate. It was for the public ceremony of his midday lunch; for lunches, delicious déjeuners, had now

been added to the ices and liqueurs, to the billiards and smoking, and to the attractions of the daily newspaper.

The young Thiers, whose large ambitions, political and social, were already piercing through his small body, had long been content to gallop up on horseback for an ice. He was attired irreproachably, with soft leather boots and culotte mastic, the putty-colored material then used for a professional rider's breeches. His adoption of what was latest in dress did not prevent his saying with decision, when he saw the first railways in operation in England, "That may do for you English, but it will succeed in France-never!" However, the dandy of the Restoration came to have a more accurate conception of the real world in which he lived. It was he who chiefly helped to shape the Third Republic, in whose practical atmosphere the ideal life of Tortoni's has expired finally.

At the start, when these dandies were still too Olympian to be human, their patronage—like Anglomania to France -boded no good to Tortoni's. Perhaps the Neapolitan's successor, Provost, was not a good business manager. In any case, during the six years of his rule the café-glacier went so near the top of the social pyramid that it threatened going off the apex. Still, the poets of the day wrote in their songs, which were sung by the favorite tenor, that of the glacier of Tortoni and the glaciers of the Alps, Tortoni's was more admirable by far.

Of the spirit of these days the memoirs which illustrious Frenchmen delight in writing are full, and for some years the time for publishing them has been upon us. The Englishman in Paris has rescued many of their anecdotes, big with verisimilitude; but it is Alfred de Musset's prose- his Confessions of a Child of the Century-that gives, by incidental lapses from its general vain sensualism, the most veracious impression of the Parisian intellect which now began thrusting itself into the company of birth and rank.

--

Of these men of letters, Byron was, for some years, the model and the muse. They were at the same time men of would-be fashion; there was as yet no room on the aristocratic terrace for Bohemians like Henri Mürger or for the new lights of Romanticism. At most, Balzac, and a few like him, aristocrats by birth and at heart, and Bohemians only through their general impecuniosity, appeared there on the occasion of some unusual windfall of author's or artist's luck. Alfred de Musset was the finished type of this middleman between fashion and letters. As a boy he had been nicknamed "mademoiselle" by his schoolmates, and he became a dainty and intensely morbid sensualist when a grown man. He alternately made love to and quarreled with that other lawless genius, George Sand, and cried melodiously between whiles over the hopelessness of his present earthly life and his despair of any heavenly life to come. A divinely gifted trifler and sot, he disdained the common herd, and vainly tried to look with Voltaire's cynical glance through the weak and watery eyes of Rousseau. His brother Paul, who was of more wholesome make, remained faithful to the old rendezvous at Tortoni's until his death, toward the close of the Second Empire.

This lack of seriousness in life, this engulfment of existence in elegant pleasures, must always be a mark of the highest fashion, which is by nature both selfish and sensual. But not all who passed by Tortoni's aimed at a permanent residence on these Olympian heights. Moreover, at this very time a reaction in the sense of Christian faith was springing up against Rousseauism. It was led by Lacordaire and Ravignan from the pulpit; by Berryer, Ozanam, Montalembert, and others high placed in the world of social rank and letters. It was a movement of thoroughly distinguished men. It was also far too much in earnest to give sign of life among the triflers of the Boulevard.

With the next change in the management of Tortoni's, room was made for a new class of celebrities, who might be neither lions" nor dandies. Whether it was the result of the breaded cutlets of the déjeuners, which had now become a choice feature of the place, or of some hidden process of evolution, it is certain that men little known to fashion, yet always distinguished for something which separated them from the material crowd, now became familiar with Tortoni's.

Véron- the doctor who was at once Director of the Opéra and of the Constitutionnel, the patron of the new music of Rossini and Auber and of constitutional government, which was quite as new in France must have been responsible in part for this change. He was the soul of hospitality, and would have his friends with him from all the different worlds in which he figured so long and bustlingly. He lived in the quarter, and was an habitué of Tortoni's corner as well as of the new Maison Dorée, a door away, at the corner of what was then the Rue d'Artois. This short street, running up to the new Church of Notre Dame de Lorette, from whose easy neighborhood the lorettes came into French literature, -was already taking on itself that individual air which it has never yet lost. The great banker Laffitte had his house in it, and it soon took his name. Then the Rothschilds' house was planted there, where the bank still remains, though the great gardens are now empty of the cour tiers of money who flocked thither when this was a palatial residence.

Here Beugniet, who has died since Tortoni's was closed, began that picturedealing for which the Rue Laffitte is still famous. He has willed to the National Museum his own peculiar collection of fifty years, the palettes of one hundred and sixteen noteworthy French painters who had dealt with him, each with its special mingling of colors as the artist left it. In those early days, Delacroix and Ingres and the luckier brethren, hav

ing "touched" their money after some sale in the Rue Laffitte, let it slip freely from their fingers' ends in a moment's glory over their cups at Tortoni's.

By some chance, Louis Blanc, by this time at work on his social philosophy, and then publishing the five volumes of his Histoire de Dix Ans (1830-40), had his home in the upper regions of the house toward 1842. The first morning cup of coffee was for him. It was his brother Charles who afterwards became a notable historian of art. Already, as has been said, when a book had been successful or a painting sold, and money for a day was flush, the occasion was commonly fêted by a friendly meeting at Tortoni's. Sometimes this was done when there was money without success, in order to strike envy into the breasts of less fortunate rivals. Until the end, all who desired to pose as men of distinction ascended to Tortoni's glacier.

III.

Days golden with the glint of coin had already begun when Girardin, the second French proprietor of the place, fearful that they might not last, sold out to the Percheron brothers, in 1847, for what was considered the enormous sum of three hundred and twenty-five thousand francs. It is the younger of these two brothers who has now put an end to the place, regretfully, because of the débâcle of a society then only blossoming into full life.

"Then I gained one hundred thousand francs a year; now I have only the glory for my work. I am sixty years old, and for forty years I have been at the trade. I am le doyen de la limonade, but I am not willing to end my career by a fall." And he added, with a sigh, that he had not slept for a week through thinking of the change. "It is such an event in my existence."

It is also the closing of a page in the existence of Paris and modern France.

Long before this the Boulevard had become the crowded and cosmopolitan

promenade unique in the world's history. Until the next great change in French society, after the break-up of the Second Empire, Tortoni's welcomed to its tables every celebrity, royal or not, that came to taste, incognito, the intoxication of Parisian life. King Leopold I. of Belgium, and Victor Emmanuel, who was to be king of an Italy not yet born, and many another one, equally royal, left behind them golden memories of princely pourboires for the waiters in the cabi nets particuliers where they had supped sumptuously. Louis Napoleon, before he made himself Emperor, was seen there, and there were at all times such men as the Comte Walewski and English noblemen, drinking and spending like lords, from Lord Seymour, in the early days, down to Lord George Hamilton, who broke his neck while tumbling out of the Maison Dorée.

La

Under the new régime - Percheron at Tortoni's, Napoleon III. at the Tuileries - things grew with successive splendors. The morning was now almost given over to boursiers, money-kings lunching lavishly, and, with their bottomless purses, leaving only the eventide of absinthe and ices to the more limited means of dandies and men of letters. Late in the night carriages came rolling up to the side entrance on the Rue Taitbout. dies of the grand monde descended, and mounted the stairs, with their escorts, for a consommé and sandwich, a cup of chocolate and a picking of cold meat, and for the inevitable ices and liqueurs which nowhere could be found as at Tortoni's. They were just from the Opéra, two streets below, or perhaps from a garden party in the Rue Laffitte, patronized by the Empress Eugénie. Their costumes, which were the envy of a whole civilization infatuated with the philosophy of clothes, expanded into wonderful crinolines, and became daily uglier, and more essentially vulgar and ridiculous, and more costly.

It was not, however, the mere costli

ness of Tortoni's wares that made the place a favorite rendezvous for those to whom the ostentation of lavish expenditure had well-nigh become a substitute for all distinction. Tortoni's was the only night resort where the fine ladies of a world still wishing to be "correct might enter without danger of meeting the finer ladies of a demi-monde caring only to live pleasantly.

It was impossible that a simple corner like Tortoni's, with the dozen tables of its terrace and café below, and its few private salons above, should suffice to the refreshment of the most exclusive, even, from these two worlds of fashion and of letters. A torrent of luxury and ostentation, such as the world had not seen since the brilliant decline of the Roman Empire, rolled in waves down the Boulevard, in these flush times of another empire, whose highest brilliancy was also mingled with decay. Besides, in those days Paris had not become the vast agglomeration which it now is, where life eddies and pours in a hundred distinct whirls and channels. The court alone, by centralizing the ambitions and the expenditure of wealth, turned the tide in well-defined courses. Sooner or later, it flowed noisily and without stagnation between the banks of the Boulevard.

Across the Boulevard from Tortoni's and the Maison Dorée, the Café Anglais now sprang into notoriety. It was just round the corner from the Rue de Grammont, where the Jockey Club then had its seat. It soon became one of the most undoubted glories of imperial Paris. Turgénieff knew the Paris of the end of the Empire at least as well as anything else, except the Russian life from which he drew his wonderful tales. Until his death, the Café Anglais represented to him the acme of Western civilization, with its brilliancy and its essential defects. The proprietor of the new resort laid down a principle from the beginning: "A man must be very rich to say that he is a daily customer of my house."

It was essentially an eating-place in the style of Heliogabalus. There was no long bill of fare, there were no plats du jour. It was for the guest to know what he wanted; it was the proprietor's business to supply him with it. What should be paid afterwards was of slight consequence.

The life which developed here was not as correct as that across the way, but it was far more dazzling in the splendor of its sensations. The café was for men mainly, as may be supposed; and in spite of the expense and the twenty cabinets at its disposition, it was often necessary to engage places days in advance for a seven-o'clock dinner that was the hour in those days-or an after-midnight supper. Prince Demidoff, who had married the Princess Mathilde, the daughter of Jerome Bonaparte and Miss Paterson's successor, remained a devotee of Tortoni's. But his Tartar magnificence could not neglect the new life, and more than once he telegraphed from St. Petersburg the date of his arrival at the Café Anglais. Cabinet No. 16, in the bevel-angle overlooking the Boulevard, was the most famous of the supper- rooms. It was here that another Russian welcomed his friends at five. hundred francs a head. The tradition of heavy drinking of champagne began here, through love of lavishness rather than of the wine. It has died out of French ideas of good living, to which it was always essentially foreign. It remains, perhaps, only in American fashions ill copied from the high living of Paris under the Empire.

The great ladies of the day were emancipated enough to be curious of this new side of life, and the cabinet of the femmes du monde is still shown. Perhaps they were satisfied when they heard from No. 16, with its forty guests, the voice of La Belle Alsacienne calling imperatively through the corridor, "Taniel!" It was only M. Daniel Wilson who was wanted, the son-in-law of the austere