THE FINE ART OF DINING
Paris is full of restaurants, but the list of those at which one may enjoy both a supremely chic fashion exhibit and a dinner worthy to be associated with the clothes are comparatively few. Indeed, where the frocks are up to an epicurean standard the food is sometimes far below, and there are cafés in Paris where a gourmet will find possibilities of ecstatic moments, but where no swish of petticoats will break in upon his rapt silences.
Not that the average viveur of Paris objects to association of pâté and petticoat. Far from it. He will follow the petticoat even to the Ritz where the pâté is fairly sure to be poor,—but he will occupy his leisure intervals by enjoying a meal at the Café Voisin, or testing the famous cellars at the Café Anglais.
As for Madame,—she is a bit of a gourmande, of course. One does not live in Paris for years without learning the proper attitude toward a dinner, and the Parisienne thinks more about her food than is consistent with traditions of the fragile and ethereal feminine. When a poetic vision in vaporous mousseline and lace knits her beautiful brows and pouts her curving lips and waxes vastly indignant because an entrée has not the right flavour or because a wine is not of the vintage indicated by the label on the bottle, there is an uneasy stirring in the mental pigeonhole where the observer keeps his illusions; but, after all, the Parisienne, though knowing in matters gastronomic, does not allow that knowledge to destroy her sense of proportion. She may like a good sauce and a good wine, but she insists first of all that a dinner shall be well seasoned with gaiety. She wants to dine where she may wear her smartest frock and see the smartest frock of her dearest foe, where she may see and be seen. She is coquette before she is gourmande, and the restaurants where she can combine both rôles are those to which she accords most enthusiastic favour.
Go out to the Bois on a fine night in June, if pâtés and petticoats divide your allegiance, and eat your dinner in the courtyard of the Château de Madrid or on the terrace at Armenonville. If you are a stranger in Paris the latter will probably be your choice. The fame of Armenonville has travelled far, and it stands for all that Paris means to the visitor who has gained his knowledge of the sorceress city from reading and hearsay. It is in the Bois, this famous restaurant where all the mad, merry world of Europe has dined at one time or another, and, though rivals have come and gone, though restaurants more elaborate and cuisines more perfect have wooed the luxury-loving crowd, Armenonville has held its own, has kept its place as the most brilliantly popular café of Paris—and the most cosmopolitan.
The latest Plaything of the Duchesse d'Uzes
Frankly speaking, the café retains its vogue by favour of the demi-mondaine of Paris. Long ago she chose Armenonville for her own, and she has remained loyal to her choice. This is not saying that for the beau-monde the restaurant is taboo. Everybody goes to Armenonville, but there, as to no other café, flock the high-class demi-mondaines with their elaborate toilettes, their superb jewels, their consummately sensuous allure; and, as always, in their wake comes a reckless, prodigal crowd. Terrace, verandahs, and inner rooms are thronged night after night, and the throng is the incarnation of the spirit that has made Paris the hub of the frivolous world, has drawn from all countries folk devoted to the worship of the vanities, has stamped the money-spending set of Paris as the most consistently volatile, the most systematically extravagant class of Vanity Fair.
The leisure class of France is unreservedly a leisure class. The Frenchman of wealth, rank, and leisure is likely to give himself up to what someone has called "the science of not making a living." He does not have the vast business interests that usually claim the wealthy American, he does not go in for public life as does the average Englishman of a corresponding class; and, though exceptions to this rule are many, the chances are that he concentrates his energies upon amusing himself and assiduously cultivates every taste that will open an avenue to pleasurable sensation.
He is, for instance, connoisseur of food and wine, but he is epicure not glutton. Your true gourmet has with much effort and at considerable cost trained his palate to an appreciation of subtle distinctions, of vague, elusive flavours. Eating and drinking are serious matters with him. He eats not to kill his appetite but to tickle his senses, and he values his capacity for epicurean joys too highly to endanger it by riotous indulgence. The Parisian viveur devotes to his meals an extravagant amount of consideration. They are to him sacred rites, mystic, unfathomable to the uninitiated. The dishes are planned and arranged with reference to their relation to one another, are harmonized, blended, resolved into wonderful, sense-satisfying gastronomic chords. A succession of flavours leads subtly and cumulatively to a gastronomic climax, drinks are not absorbed with blithe impartiality, but run a faultless scale of stimulation and form a fitting accompaniment to the progressive harmony of the food.
It is with other pleasures as with eating and drinking. The Parisian takes his gaiety with profound seriousness, and the foreigner, as well as the Parisian, if he stays long in Paris, adapts himself to the epicurean point of view.
Out at Armenonville, one comes into an understanding of that modern paganism which lies at the heart of Vanity Fair, though the scene does not represent the most subtly æsthetic expression of the cult, for the place is overcrowded, and there is a hurrying and bustling of waiters, the laughter is a trifle too loud, the perfumes are a trifle too heavy, the jewels a trifle too resplendent. There is a burning fever in the pulse of Armenonville, a strain of coarseness in the gaiety. The Vanity worshippers go about their devotions with finer art over among the great trees of the courtyard of Madrid.
But Armenonville is—Armenonville. One must take it as one finds it, and one is likely to find it amusing.
The flowers and napery and service of the little tables on the terrace—more popular on a summer night than the tables within doors—glow with a roseate bloom under the shaded lights. Vivid ruby and topaz gleam in the wine-glasses, the air is throbbing with the wild, passionate music of the Tziganes. Men of all types and from all quarters of the globe lean to look into the eyes of women marvellously gowned, magnificently jewelled, flushed under the influence of music and wine and admiration and conscious power. Laughter, wit, the tinkle of glasses, the hum of voices talking gossip in all the languages of Europe, delicately cooked dishes, rare wines, colour, perfume, melody,—everywhere an appeal to the senses, an effort to meet the demands of a class with tastes trained to appreciate the fine flower of all things material, and with money to pay for the gratification of its desires! Nothing in old Rome was in spirit more essentially pagan and prodigal than this, but latter-day civilization has brought its refinements. The Roman orgy has been translated into polite French.
If one sits long enough at one of the terrace tables, familiar faces are likely to float within one's range of vision, for all the world pays tribute to Armenonville, and public characters are many in the crowd. Opera singers, theatrical folk, famous writers and painters, professional beauties, diplomats,—all the celebrities whose pictures are most often in the papers are among the diners. Over there at the end table, Tod Sloan is sitting opposite a radiant being in cerise and silver. At the next table the Prime Minister of England is dining with an American Duchess and her English Duke. Beyond her Grace, little Polaire of "Claudine" fame is keeping a tableful of men in a gale of laughter. An American millionaire is host to a group of theatrical folk of whom Maxine Elliott is bright particular star, and close at hand the Newstraten, who owes her notoriety to the favour of another millionaire, is vis-à-vis to a well-known Russian nobleman. Réjane, the ever-youthful, is exchanging good French for bad with an English theatrical manager. Leopold, King of the Belgians, boulevardier, dear friend of Parisian cocottes, is in evidence. A Turkish pasha with several members of his suite is back to back with the greatest brewer of England. London's latest Maharajah is having a royal occidental time in company with several pretty and titled English women. Mrs. Clarence Mackay and several other members of the New York smart set are among the elaborately gowned diners—but Madame Stanley and Margyl and the beautiful Cavalieri are gowned as well and more bejewelled. The crowd is never the same, yet always the same, and all through the year the show goes on, though cold weather drives the diners from the terrace to over-heated and over-lighted rooms.
Over at the Madrid, too, there is picturesque dining—but with a difference. The old château lies on the edge of the Bois, an unimposing building promising little, and, so far as the building itself is concerned, fulfilling its promises. One does not go to the Madrid in winter. The rooms are small and stuffy, and poorly adapted to restaurant purposes, but during the season of al fresco dining, the Madrid is all that there is of the most modish, a gathering place for the most exclusive society folk of Paris. One drives boldly up to the château and into an archway that leads through the building and brings one out upon the edge of a big courtyard picturesquely set with fine old forest trees under which men and women are dining at little tables. Beyond the court are the stables and, though a high, thick hedge intervenes, a muffled stamping of hoofs, the jingle of silver chains, sometimes furnishes a subdued accompaniment to the music of the Tziganes, an element hardly discordant and suggesting vaguely ideas of mettled horses, of luxurious carriages, of all that goes to the self-indulgence of such diners as those beneath the trees.
Things are more tranquil here than at Armenonville—gay, sense-satisfying, artificial, wordly, but of a finer flavour. Here one finds the most aristocratic of Parisian mondaines, the clique of the Polo Club and la Boulié and Puteaux. Many nationalities are represented among the diners, but the French are in the majority and the Parisienne of the best type may be found under the great trees of Madrid. She may be no more perfectly dressed, this mondaine, than her demi-mondaine sister of Armenonville. Their frocks and hats come from the same makers, their jewels were bought at the same shop on the Rue de la Paix, the grande dame of Madrid has perhaps not so liberal a share of good looks as the lionne of Armenonville, and may be made up quite as conscientiously—for artificiality is beloved of the Parisienne, is a part of her creed—but my lady of Madrid has the something which sets her apart, the impress of race, of blood, of class. Even the veriest stranger within Parisian gates who might wander from one café to the other would realize at first impression that the two were separated by more than the green stretches of the Bois. As to which café he would prefer, that depends upon his tastes—and to some extent upon his mood. One who does not "belong" at Madrid may feel himself a lonely outsider. No one is on the outside at Armenonville save the bankrupt.
There are other cafés in the Bois whose fortunes have risen and fallen, but none rank with Armenonville and Madrid, though quite recently the Café de Lac has taken a fresh lease of life and begun to find favour with the smart Parisian crowd.
Report has it, however, that there is to be a new restaurant in the Bois, one that will totally eclipse the two reigning cafés, and will set a new standard for the world. A syndicate with unlimited capital has the project in hand, and it is said that the new pleasure palace will rise on the site of the old Pre Catalan,—Arcadian little farm where a herd of mild-eyed cows furnishes fresh milk for children, and a little café supplies drinks of less Arcadian simplicity to anyone who asks for them. For years the popular duelling ground of Paris was just behind the buildings of the Pre Catalan. There is a little ruined theatre, too, behind the restaurant, and all the smart world of Paris has upon occasion gone out there to see the actors of the Théâtre Français and the Odeon give classical plays upon the sylvan stage. Such piquant incongruities are dear to the French heart.
But it is in the middle of the afternoon that the Pre Catalan is charming. Carriages full of children, with their quaintly costumed bonnes or their fashionably dressed mammas, roll up, one after another, and deposit their loads, until the place is all abloom with babies and musical with pattering feet and babbling tongues. They have come to drink the fresh milk, these pretty, overdressed children. Even the babies lead a life chic, in Paris.
And when the babies are all snugly asleep in their beds, the Pre Catalan often has other visitors. Late diners who have made a night of it in town cafés, and then driven about the Bois singing romantic ballads and growing more maudlin moment by moment, drive up to the Pre Catalan in the grey dawn, and weep upon the shoulder of the waiter who brings them their glasses of fresh milk. It is milk they want. They are in a state of exuberant sentimentality—of dramatic remorse. They have renounced Bacchus and all his crew. They are beginning new lives. The world is a weariness and a delusion, full of headaches and profound melancholy—Fifi goes back to nature at the Pre Catalan in such a mood,—but midnight finds her at the Café de Paris once more.
It is in this place of duels and babies and tipsy penitents that the new restaurant is to shine resplendent, if plans do not miscarry. Whether with all its grandeurs it will attract the crowd remains to be seen. A restaurant's success is not always in proportion to the money spent in equipping it. There, for example, was the Café des Fleurs. It was the prettiest café in Paris. The men behind it were so wealthy that they did not care whether the place paid or not. They lavished money upon the decorations, the cuisine, the cellars. They hired the best Tzigane orchestra in Paris—and the fashionable crowd stayed away. Why? No one knows why. "The women would not come," says the promoter, with a shrug. "There is no accounting for the whims of the women. There was everything to attract them and they would not come,—c'était finis."
Cafés by the score have had this same history, or have had a brief brilliant success and a failure sudden and complete. There was Cubats on the Champs Elysées, superbly installed in a house where had lived the mistress of Louis Napoleon. For a little while everyone went to Cubats. The place had enormous success, and then, all of a sudden, the crowd stopped going. Cubats did not exist. Perhaps the diners grew tired of being robbed. Parisians of the high-living class do not object to spending money. It is their metier, but the prices at Cubats were monumental and the proprietor in other and less humdrum times would have been a bold buccaneer or a bandit chief. One night a diner ordered a melon with his dinner. The waiter reported that melons were out of season. The patron growled, the waiter murmured that he would call Monsieur. Monsieur came, bland, imperturbable, and listened to the growling.
M'sieu wished absolutely to have a melon? But certainly. One could get it. It would be for after the dinner instead of before the dinner, however. That would be satisfactory?
The diner, mollified, signified his willingness to eat his melon after his sweet, and when the appointed time arrived, the melon arrived with it. Later, the bill arrived in its turn. One item read: "Melon—250 francs." There was a storm and the matter went to the courts, but the restaurateur remained imperturbable. The melon was expensive—he admitted as much to the judge sorrowfully—but M'sieu would have it. When one orders horses and carriage and sends a special messenger post-haste through the night for many miles in order to gratify a patron's whim, one must be paid for one's trouble. The judge appreciated the point and the bill was paid,—but in time Cubats closed its doors.
Outside of Paris there are many restaurants to which Parisians drive or motor for dinner when they are tired of the Bois, yet want to escape from city walls. The Reservoir at Versailles, and the Henri Quatre at St. Germain, are the oldest, the most famous of the list, and though for a time their prestige declined in so far as the truly fashionable diners were concerned, both have taken on new popularity since the automobile brought about a mania for dining out of town. At the Reservoir one is in the midst of historic associations. The place, with its decorations and furnishings in pure Louis XVI style, was already famous when Marie Antoinette played at farming in the Petit Trianon, near by. The place has seen many notable dinners, harboured many illustrious personages, and its ancient grandeur clings about it like a garment, though it caters now to the most mixed and modern of fashionable crowds.
Historic memories swarm thickly about the Henri Quatre too. Louis the XIV was born in the building which is now a restaurant, and a cradle marks the café silver. From the terrace and the windows one looks over miles of fertile valley, and at the tables one finds, save upon Sunday, a particularly chic crowd. On Sunday the bourgeoisie invade the place, but during the week it is very much the thing to run out to the Henri Quatre for luncheon or dinner.
It is a pity le Roi galant cannot come back to his own for at least one summer night. He had ever an eye for a pretty woman, and it would warm even his ghost to watch the women who flutter from automobile or carriage to the pavilion that bears his name. He would smile approval too at the woman of the golf or tennis costume, for this hot-headed Henry was catholic in his tastes. Perhaps it is the tolerance of his spirit that has made possible at the Henri Quatre what would be shocking at the Bellevue, where the Pompadour is presiding genius. La Grande Marquise was not a marvel of morality, but upon etiquette she stood firm. One must be in grande toilette for Bellevue, but for the Henri Quatre—that is as one chooses.
Pretty women in ravishing toilettes flock to the tables of the glass-enclosed verandahs; but, side by side with the woman of the trailing chiffon and lace, of the wonderful driving cloak, of the picture hat, is the woman who has been playing golf or tennis at some one of the clubs round about St. Germain. The chances are that, being French, she has not played violently enough to disarrange her costume. It is as immaculate, as perfect in its way as the dinner toilette of the woman who has driven out from town, but she adores le sport, and she chatters about it enthusiastically over her truffles and champagne, looking, the while, like a Dresden china image of a golf girl.
High above the bank of the Seine at Meudon stands the Bellevue, a restaurant de luxe, which was built only a few years ago, and has had a considerable vogue, but has suffered since the day of the automobile arrived, because it is hardly far enough from Paris to afford a good motor spin, though too far to be as convenient as the restaurants of the Bois.
The Pompadour once had a villa where the picturesque white building now stands far above the river and overlooking all the country round, and in point of elegance the modern belles who dine on the terrace or in the white arched dining-rooms live up to the traditions of the place where the Grande Marquise held butterfly court; for one dons one's smartest frock for Bellevue. From the river a funicular leads up to the broad terraces in front of the Pavilion. Behind the restaurant the wooded hill climbs on up toward the sky, and on its top Flammarion's observatory is perched. There is a little hotel in the woods, an unimportant place, where Bellevue parties may stay over night if they do not care to go back to the city after a late dinner or supper,—and it is not always easy to get back to town if one has come out to Bellevue in plebeian fashion by train or boat, and lingered late in defiance of boat and railway time-tables. A party of Americans were stranded that way one night last summer. No train, no boat,—and no knowledge of the little hotel in the woods. No carriage to be had, unless les messieurs could wait indefinitely. Les messieurs, being New Yorkers, were not fond of waiting. They tucked the mesdames under their arms, and went out to reconnoitre. In the court stood a magnificent big touring-car, in charge of a liveried and stately chauffeur. One of the Americans boldly approached the imposing personage.
"My man," he said in French that was intelligible if scarcely academic, "I want you to take us into town."
The Frenchman stared in amazement.
"But, Monsieur, this is a private automobile. M. le baron is having supper in there with—eh bien, with a lady."
"Exactly," said the man from New York. "But you are going to take us to town. The baron will never know you're gone. I saw the lady."
The chauffeur lapsed into what Mark Twain would call "a profound French calm." He wrung his hands and rolled his eyes and shrugged his shoulders and called the gods to witness that the baron would eat him alive if he dared to consider such a proposition.
The man from New York listened with interest; and, when the conversationalist paused for breath, ran his hand into his pocket and brought forth something that clinked musically.
"It's worth one hundred francs to me to go to town in the baron's car," he said.
The chauffeur looked at the open hand, at the car, at the restaurant door. His conscience struggled within him and was silenced.
"Voyons, M'sieu, we will consider." He tiptoed to a window, looked into the dining-room, and returned with the air of a comic opera conspirator.
"C'est bien, M'sieu. They arrive at the salad. There is always the dessert, the coffee, the cigar, the liqueur. One can do it, but it is to be hoped that M'sieu and his friends do not object to speed."
That was a wild ride to Paris,—up hill and down, at top speed, with never a slackening for corners or for foot passengers. The Americans were dropped where they could take cabs and the hundred francs changed hands.
"Much obliged. Good luck to you," said the man from New York.
The chauffeur consulted his watch. "Provided always that they have not quarrelled," he murmured anxiously—and the machine shot away into the night.
Down in the heart of Paris, the Café de Paris, the Café Paillard, and the Ritz are the restaurants in which one may best study purple and fine linen. There are other cafés famed for cuisine and cellars, but my Lady of the Chiffons finds them dull, and in the creed of a Parisienne dulness heads the list of mortal sins.
Americans and English are the mainstay of the Ritz, save during the tea hour, when the crowd becomes cosmopolitan. At the Café Paillard one finds the diners of the Madrid a clique aristocratic, mondain, and chiefly French. The Café de Paris repeats the story of Armenonville, though without the picturesque woodland setting and the attractive al fresco features. The two cafés have the same clientèle, the same atmosphere,—even the same proprietor. He is a subject for congratulation, this proprietor. The famous old Café Foyot, under the shadow of the Luxembourg, is his too, and the Café de Paris of Trouville, and the Helder at Nice,—all, save the Foyot, tremendously popular with the crowd vowed to extravagance and folly, and, as a result of that popularity, all phenomenally successful from a financial point of view. The Foyot also has a success, but of a different kind.
Naturally, the man who manages these restaurants is rich. His private establishments are handsome, he spends money lavishly, but—and here is the secret of his success—he is first of all a restaurateur, eternally vigilant, neglecting no detail, proud of his metier, glorying in his triumphs. He could buy, twice over, many of his patrons, yet one will see him moving about among his hurrying waiters, suggesting, prompting, reprimanding, seeing all things, adjusting all difficulties, pouring oil on all troubled waters.
He stops for a moment beside an old patron.
"Ah, Comte X——, bon soir."
His eyes rest upon the fish that has been placed before the count, and his face clouds. A motion of his hand brings an alarmed waiter.
"You serve the sole so, to Monsieur le Comte? You think perhaps that the sole au vin blanc should have that air? Take it away."
"Pardon, M'sieu. You understand,—a moment more or less and a sauce is spoiled. I am grieved that you should wait, but one dines well or one has not dined at all. In a moment you shall have a fish that will be as it should be. You have always the same burgundy, yes? I, too, am of your opinion. It is the best in our cellars."
He hurries away, soft-stepping, alert, diplomatic, napkin over arm, bowing deferentially here and there. A millionaire they say—but certainly a restaurant-keeper who knows his business, such a one as France can produce and Paris can appreciate.
There is another restaurateur in Paris whose name should not be left out of any discussion of Parisian dining. A few years ago he would have had no right to a place in this frivolous chapter, for though his restaurant was famous it was not smart. The gourmet might dine there—or rather lunch there—but the woman of fashion never found her way down to the little old building whose battered sign of a silver tower proclaimed that here was the Tour d'Argent, the café over which presided the inimitable Frederic, Roi des Canards, last of the old school of French cooks and hosts.
Even now the modish Parisienne does not go to the Tour d'Argent, but Americans have taken up the old café, and pretty women and elegant frocks are now no strangers in the Tour d'Argent, though one could not call the place fashionable.
The wine merchants of the Halles des Vins could swear that, fine frocks or no fine frocks, Frederic deserves a place in any chapter devoted to the fine art of dining; for Frederic belongs to a school of cooking which made the cuisine a fine art, and if the rooms of the little tavern down behind the morgue offer no appeal to the senses in the form of music and flowers and jewels and chiffons, they offer eating and drinking good enough to offset many omissions.
The Tour d'Argent has been a restaurant for three hundred years, and looking out from its windows over the cité patrons have been able to see most of the great events of Paris taking place, but M. Frederic is considerably less old than his café.
The Halles des Vins stand only a little way below the restaurant, and the wine merchants learned to go to Frederic's for luncheon. They were a high-living, exacting group of gourmets, patrons to appreciate good cooking and put a cook upon his mettle. Incidentally they knew a thing or two about wines, and through their friendly advice and favour the cellars of Frederic became, in the opinion of many connoisseurs, the best in Paris.
Others beside the wine-merchants found their way to the sign of the silver tower. The fame of Frederic spread through Paris and beyond. Last year in Nice, a New York man asked the chef of a noted hotel to prepare for him a "canneton à la presse." "Cook it for me just as Frederic does it," said the American. The chef shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and shook his head.
"I shall be charmed to cook the duck for Monsieur, but to cook it as le Roi des Canards cooks it?—Non, I have not the skill."
Tribute from a rival is tribute indeed. Frederic is King of the Ducks, and he sits alone upon his throne.
You will probably find the king in the little ante-room to his restaurant if you go down to the Tour d'Argent early enough to have a talk with its autocrat. There in the little ante-room are displayed game, meats, delicacies, dozens of things a patron might like to order for his meal, and there stands Frederic, a typical French host, with his long grey frock-coat clinging lovingly to his portly body, his side whiskers framing his ruddy, beaming face, his napkin or towel over his arm.
If he has seen you before he will know you. If he has seen you twice, you and he are old friends.
His face takes on more luminous cheer as he catches sight of you, and he bows profoundly, with a dramatic flourish of the napkin.
"Ah, bon soir, M'sieu. Tout va toujours bien?—et Madame?—et le petit?"
He leads you into the restaurant and finds a table for you. The important matter of the dinner is settled, and then, if you are of the favoured, Frederic will talk to you of his art, and you will hear of refinements and subtleties of cookery which will make you smile until Frederic has proved to you that they are not poetic fancy but substantial fact. Your quail, for example, must be cooked before a grape-vine fire. Nothing but grape-vine will do the trick. Frederic is very positive on that point, and if you are skeptic, he may perhaps take you out and show you the grape-vine fire. Afterward you eat the quail and skepticism melts away into unquestioning faith.
That is only one of the mysteries of Frederic's cuisine. The man loves his art, goes to all lengths to achieve the results he desires, would rather invent a successful sauce than inherit a million, is as proud of his canneton à la presse as is a painter or poet of his masterpiece. On the whole, a majority of the public would probably prefer the masterpiece of Frederic to that of the poet or the painter, and in the chef's own mind there would be no doubt as to the comparative excellence of poem, picture, and duck.
It takes three ducks to supply one duck to a patron at Frederic's. The two extra birds give up their juices for the sauce that is served with the bird—that wonderful sauce which Frederic makes himself in the double brazier or chafing-dish which he sets on a side table near the diner.
It is a treat to watch the making of that sauce, from the moment when, after touching a match to the first brazier burner, Monsieur daintily takes up some of the flame between his forefinger and thumb and deposits it upon the other burner, to the final moment when with an air of triumph the artist announces his complete success.
It is a treat too to see Frederic come and serve the duck. You are not getting your money's worth if he does not do it himself.
And it is a treat, beyond the telling, to eat the duck and the sauce which le Roi des Canards has prepared.
Small wonder that there are smart folk mingled with the marchands des vins at the Tour d'Argent nowadays, and that the birds of passage flitting through Paris go to Frederic's for a dinner or a luncheon.
Marguery is another of the chefs of the old French school, but he has become business man rather than chef, as have most of the restaurateurs of Paris. Only Frederic devotes himself passionately to his art, lives for his cuisine, burns his grape-vine fires, and makes a religious rite of preparing his sauces.
He is not only Roi des Canards, but the last of a royal line.
ROUND THE NORMANDY CIRCUIT WITH MADAME
A slight hush falls upon the fashionable Parisian world after Grand Prix has rung down the curtain upon the Paris season. The élégantes pause to draw breath before plunging into the swirling tide of the summer circuit, but the breathing time is short. A few leisurely days, a few final visits to dressmakers and milliners, a closing of town houses, and then, ho for Trouville.
There are many popular resorts on the Normandy coast, but Trouville is queen of them all in so far as smart Parisian society is concerned. Madame follows the races and is in evidence at every fashionable racing event of the Normandy circuit, from the opening at Caen to the close at Ostend—or at least to the last of the French courses at Dieppe; but she is merely a bird of passage at the shifting rendezvous. Her summer nest is at Trouville-Deauville.
They are practically one resort, these two places of hyphenated association. Familiars even shorten the name to Trou-Deauville; but the little ferry that crosses the river Tuch between the two towns, and is heavily freighted with holiday-making folk from morning until night, traverses a gulf wider than the casual traveller would imagine. Trouville has the Casino, the promenade des planches, the Rue de Paris, the famous Hôtel de Paris; but Deauville has the race course, the hyperswell club, the villas of the ultra-chic. All the world is eligible to the pleasures of Trouville—or at least such share of the world as has the price at which Trouville pleasures are rated—but Deauville is for the favoured few, for the crowd of Puteaux and la Boulié, and the Polo Club of the Bois. The races draw the human potpourri of Trouville across the ferry; but after the races, the ferry carries the crowd back, while the social elect move on to the exclusive club grounds for polo or tennis or tea. A small distinction when put into mere words, but a mighty matter as viewed by the Parisienne, and there are many women whose whole ambition but compasses the crossing of that expressive hyphen in Trouville-Deauville.
The seashore season opens on the first of July, and from that time on to the first of September the villas and hotels of Trou-Deauville are filled with the most fashionable folk of Europe, though there is much skurrying about the coast in automobile, coach, or train, and constant interchange of social courtesies with the owners of villas in neighbouring resorts. The Normandy shore line is crowded with picturesque little villages of more or less ancient fame and more or less fashionable repute, and there are Parisians who deliberately choose villas at these smaller resorts, even when they might have the entrée at Deauville, did they elect to join the crowd there. Life at the little place is better for the children than life at Trouville, and it is possible for the elders to relax slightly in the quieter atmosphere, though they can easily find feverish gaiety within motoring distance when they care to go in search of it.
They are charming, these little Normandy towns, but it would be difficult for a town not to be charming on the Normandy coast. To be sure the average seashore villa of France is a blot on the landscape, but there are exceptions to the rule,—quaint modern houses of true Norman type,—and there are, too, old timbered farmhouses and picturesque châteaux which have been invaded by the tide of Parisian modernity. Even the ugliest of the villas is likely to have a delightful little garden, and over many of the architectural horrors charitable roses clamber riotously, softening the hideous outlines and bringing the dissonant notes into harmony with the melody round about. Green fields and fruitful orchards run down to meet the sea, and smooth white poplar-fringed roads that are the joy of the automobilist run away in every direction through the smiling fertile country. Broad shining beaches stretch along beside the sunlit waves and are dotted with gay striped tents under which children play in the sand and grown-ups idle away the hours. Perhaps a mediæval church and a quaint market-place form a background for the summer settlement, and sturdy Norman fisher folk come and go among the holiday aliens.
"Gossip Street" at Trouville
Yes, they are charming, these little places, and they are, too, more exclusively French than most of the larger resorts,—but not more French than Trouville. Nothing could be more French than Trouville. Dieppe has a tremendous American, English, Austrian, German, Russian contingent that elbows the French element; Boulogne is given over largely to bank-holiday crowds from England; Ostend is more cosmopolitan than French; but Trouville is of the French Frenchy, and to know Trouville is to know the Parisienne in her gayest summer rôle.
A popular French seashore resort must be seen to be appreciated, and no American whose theories of seaside customs is limited to an acquaintance with the shore resorts of Jersey, Long Island, Massachusetts, etc., can have the slightest conception of seaside life in a French translation. There is, in the latter, a spice, a colour, an audacity, lacking in the Anglo-Saxon version. An English or American imitation of Trouville would be hopelessly vulgar, but Trouville—well, it is Trouville. It is all bubble, sparkle, brilliancy, extravagance, folly. It is Paris with an added laissez aller, Paris set to a new tune. There is much to shock the sober-minded as there is in Paris, but the sober-minded should not go to Trouville. It is the refuge of the light-hearted, the buoyant, the volatile; and soberness has no place in its scheme. What would electrify Newport, Bar Harbor, even Narragansett Pier, will not create even a ripple of excitement at Trouville. Someone has said that the difference between smart society in New York and in Paris is the difference between the immoral and the unmoral. French seashore life in its most exaggerated phase is distinctly unmoral, but like Paris life, it is also distinctly picturesque. The most shocking thing about Gallic impropriety is the fact that it fails to shock.
But when one talks of morals, one is taking Trouville seriously, and to take Trouville seriously is altogether out of the question. It is all froth and effervescence, all laughter and irresponsibility. Beau monde, bourgeoisie, actresses, dressmakers, milliners, cocottes, titled folk and millionaires from all over the world, gamblers, racing touts, English polo players, American yacht owners—all jostle each other on the promenade, in the Casino, at the Hôtel de Paris; for the exclusive set of Deauville does not cling to its own select haunts but crosses the ferry often in search of diversion less monotonously comme il faut.
The Rue de Paris is the great meeting-place for this class during the morning hours, and on a bright August morning one may find the most noted social celebrities of Europe grouped before the doors of the little shops that line the crooked street.
The jewellers and dressmakers of Paris have branch establishments here, and around their thresholds flutter the women who are the best patrons of those Paris tradesfolk, met to flirt and gossip and show in their frocks and jewels what may be achieved with the assistance of the firms whose names are written large above the open doors. It is called La Potinière, the gossip rendezvous, this little Rue de Paris, and there is gossip enough abroad there on any morning to justify the name. There is so much excuse for gossip at Trouville.
Eleven o'clock is the magic hour that really opens the ball at Trouville. Before that, there may possibly have been a private pigeon shoot, but that calls out only a small clique and takes in one of the most exclusive sets of Europe. No entrance here for the rank and file even of the fashionable world, and no open sesame for women whom the haughty dames of the French aristocracy do not put upon their visiting list. If Monsieur and Madame appear together anywhere at Trouville it is likely to be at the pigeon shoot.
But it is at eleven that the doors of the villas and hotels fly open. Out flock all of the somebodies and a choice assortment of nobodies, and every path to the beach is filled with the gay throng. Not that all of the Trouville world takes a dip in the surf. No indeed,—the truly smart folk scorn sea bathing, but they go to the beach to meet each other, to watch the throng, to promenade, to show their pretty morning frocks, to put in the time until déjeuner, and their decorative value in the bathing hour scene is tremendous.
Those women who do intend to go into the water, or to wear fetching bathing costumes at a safe distance from the waves, dress in their own rooms, if they live anywhere near the beach, and issue cloaked, hatted, and followed by maids. The maid is an essential feature of the scenic effect. She carries anything that may be needed, and she gives cachet to her mistress. There is a theory, too, that she represents the proprieties. It is quite improper to go to the beach without a maid, and so the Parisienne, no matter how lurid her reputation nor how startling her attire, goes beachward with her maid trotting demurely at her heels.
The bathing at Trouville is not particularly picturesque, though much imaginative description of its startling features has been written, and conditions at the resort seem favourable for a spectacular display of sea nymphs. Trouville is the summer paradise of Parisian cocottes, and the average Parisian cocotte is not as a rule strikingly averse to conspicuous rôles; but Narragansett Pier can show, during one fine summer day, more audacious bathing costumes than will be seen at Trouville in a week; and though little chorus girls up from Paris for a holiday may tumble about in the waves, among a crowd of bathers that but repeats the bathing types familiar the world over, the notorious "filles" do not go into the water any more than do the great ladies of Deauville.
There are some piquant and attractive bathing costumes worn on the sands by women who do not go in for serious bathing, but the Trouville show at the bathing hour is under the gay striped tents or on the promenade, where women in Paris frocks and hats chat lightly with men in informal summer attire, and where the grande dame of the Faubourg St. Germain touches elbows with the cocotte of the Boulevards.
After the bathing hour the crowd scatters again to the hotels and villas, and though in the afternoon there is an immense and amusing crowd on the promenade, the very smart set is not seen there again until the next morning.
It is so very busy, this smart set. The days are not long enough for the goings and comings that must be crowded into them. The fashionable women make elaborate toilettes for déjeuner at café or club or villa, and after the déjeuner they pour out upon the terraces, arrayed in their most ravishing costumes. Automobiles, coaches, smart traps of all kinds, are in waiting. Madame enters the one that is to have the honour of harbouring her mousseline and silk and lace, lifts her exquisite sunshade, scatters smiles and gay jests among her friends, and is off to the races.
Not even at Auteuil, Chantilly, or the Grand Prix can one see more superb and extravagant costuming than in the Tribune or the pesage at Trouville. The crowd is less mixed than at the Paris races and there is more uniform elegance of dress, while the beautiful pesage with its velvety turf, its masses of bloom, its shaded paths, offers the most delightful of settings in which to display the latest creation of Paquin, or a daring but successful innovation from Reboux.
The club of Deauville provides a scenic arrangement even more perfectly adapted to the great show of frocks and mondaines, than is the pesage, and here is the centre of that exclusive social life of which the outsider can form but a vague idea, though the other side of Trouville may afford him most enjoyable entertainment. The golf course of the club is said to be the finest on the continent, the tennis courts are always full, polo is played there by the crack players of all Europe, and there is never a time when there is not something amusing on the club tapis.
Perhaps, instead of races or club events, a garden party at one of the Deauville villas claims the fashionables. Or perhaps the garden party is in some nearby resort such as Houlgate or Villers, and the clean white road leading to the rendezvous is crowded with automobiles and traps as the appointed hour approaches. The automobile has added much to the gaiety of the Normandy season. It has brought the resorts closer together, has made intimate social intercourse between them more possible. For great social events, the clans gather from every direction, coming even from far-away spas and châteaux. Wherever the races are in progress, there a host of automobiles makes its appearance, each machine laden with a jolly party from some one of the innumerable Normandy resorts. There is much motoring, too, in quest of luncheon or dinner. Madame and her friends forsake the Parisian cuisine of the Trouville hotel and motor merrily along the wonderful road to Caen, where in one of the quaint old restaurants that huddle near the market-place, one may have the best of Norman cooking and enjoy—or at least sample—one of the tripe dinners for which the restaurant is famed. A vulgar dish, tripe—but not tripe à la mode de Caen. The chef will tell you proudly that there are fifty Norman ways of cooking tripe, each more masterly than the other, and he will prove to you that the ordinary domestic tripe is to the tripe of Caen as the fried egg of the Bowery restaurant to the œufs sur le plat of the Café Foyot,—or to the omelette of Madame Poulard.
The omelette of Madame Poulard is another excuse for a motor pilgrimage from Trouville. One goes all the way to Mont St. Michel for it, but the run is a beautiful one and the omelette would be well worth even a journey over a corduroy road. Rural Normandy and Brittany still make pilgrimages to the shrine of the Archangel St. Michel, but even the pious pilgrims make their obeisance to the famous omelette as well as to the worthy saint, and the motor parties from Trouville know more about omelette than shrine. They are not profoundly pious, ces gens là, but they see the beauty of the sacred mountain where it towers between sea and sky, and they appreciate the omelette which Madame, with due ceremony, makes in a great casserole over the glowing logs in her cavernous fireplace.
And then there is Dives, with its ancient hostellerie Guillaume le Conquerant, whose praises have been sung so often and so eloquently that even a mere mention of its charms seems rank plagiarism. All the Trouville crowd motors over to Dives for luncheon or for dinner, and divides the tables with other motor parties from Paris and from all the country round; for it is famous, this inn of William the Conqueror, the most picturesque and popular of the provincial taverns of France.
The great William himself saw to the building of the inn when he chose Dives as the most convenient place in which to build the boats needed for his little excursion to England; and since that far day a multitude of famous personages has found shelter there, though the place has not always been used for an inn. Kings and queens of France have slept under the low roof, Madame de Sévigné and other great ladies of her day dined in the feudal dining-room and chatted in the Salle des Marmousets.
But the rooms were not, in Madame de Sévigné's time, what they are now. Monsieur Paul has made of his old Norman inn a treasure-house. He is artist, antiquary, and inn-keeper, this quiet M. Le Remois, and his inn is his hobby as collecting is his passion. He has ransacked the hidden places of Europe for rare and wonderful things that would add beauty and interest to the three low-raftered rooms in which he serves private dinners and luncheons and suppers, and his collection has overflowed into every corner of the inn. Fourteenth-century glass gleams like jewel mosaic in some of the windows; marvellous old tapestries, rare antique carvings, embroideries, brasses, ivories, laces, porcelains are everywhere, yet all are disposed with an eye to artistic effect and the result is a harmonious interior, not a museum jumble of curios. Even in the kitchen, antiquity holds sway; the carved cupboards and walls are rich in old Normandy brasses and in porcelains and pottery that would drive a collector wild with covetousness. Up in the sleeping-rooms that open from a vine-embowered gallery are old carved bedsteads and presses and dressing-tables, quaint chintzes, ewers and basins and bric-à-brac and candelabra of a far-away time. They are named for illustrious visitors who have slept in them, these chambers along the rambling galleries. One, with seventeenth-century coquetry, is sacred to Madame de Sévigné. Another bears the name of Dumas; for Dumas and all the other famous writers, artists, bohemians of France have at one time or another frequented the inn at Dives. From the galleries one looks down upon a courtyard surrounded by the timbered, gable-roofed, many-winged old building. It is all abloom with flowers, this court. Doves flutter and coo about the low eaves and the niches in which stand queer, stiff, archaic images. Flamingoes and herons and peacocks pick their way over the cobblestones. Cockatoos swing from mullioned windows.
And into this place of mediæval memories come the worldly moderns of Trouville and Paris. They flutter about the courtyard scattering the doves, and rivalling the peacocks and flamingoes in brilliance of plumage. They make their toilettes in the low-ceilinged rooms off the vine-draped galleries, they lunch and dine in the Salle des Marmousets, or the Chambre de la Pucelle, among the marvellous carvings and tapestries and bibelots.
An American millionaire once offered M. Paul five hundred thousand dollars for the feudal dining-room just as it stood, woodwork, fireplace, glass, furnishings and all. Doubtless he had visions of sensational New York dinners framed in such setting, but the dream was a vain one. Sell a part of the inn? M. Paul would sell as readily his head or heart, but millionaires do not always understand the artist temperament.
The meals served in the treasure rooms are worthy of their setting, for the artist is a prince of inn-keepers as well as a connoisseur of parts; and some of his dishes have long been the joy of Parisian epicures and the despair of Parisian chefs. There, for example, is his poulet vallée d'Auge. One sees the name upon Parisian menus now, but one tastes the real thing only in the dining-rooms of the old inn at Dives. Here is a luncheon menu prepared for a motor party from Trouville, a menu not too long, but calculated to call up to the gourmet who has lunched in the Salle des Marmousets memories of past delights.
Potage Dives.
Melon.
Sole à la Normande.
Poulets à la vallée d'Auge.
Aloyau Hastings.
Pêches flambées à la Guillaume le Conquerant.
Gallette.
Fruits.
Oh, that fish sauce, those little chickens cooked in fresh cream, those peaches flavoured with other fruits and dropped in raspberry syrup and brandy—all eaten from a genuine fifteenth-century carved table in a room that might serve for a curio collector's dream of heaven! Verily the epicureans of Trouville and Paris should mention M. Le Remois in their prayers.
In the Club Grounds at Deauville
A sound all modern comes in through the Gothic doorway and wakens the group around the fifteenth-century tables from their dream of bliss. The car is waiting in the courtyard and driving the cockatoos to hysteria. There is a hasty donning of dust-coats, a climbing into the huge touring-car, an exchange of compliments with M. Paul, a waving of hands, and then the long white road through a green, green land, and Trouville in time for polo and dinner and the Casino.
Such excursions are now essential features of the seashore life. Trouville is motor-mad as is Paris, and last season there was not half enough garage room to accommodate the crowd. At every hour of the day great machines dash up to the hotels and unload well-known men and women from Hamburg, from Carlsbad, from Vichy, from Vienna, from Berlin, from Brittany, from Paris, from anywhere and everywhere. The King of Greece arrives at the Hôtel Paris in a Mercedes, the Shah of Persia spins blithely up to the Casino in a Panhard, a Russian Princess steers her motor into the narrow winding way of the Rue de Paris and brings it up with quick turn before Doucet's popular corner or in front of the fashionable pâtisserie. An English Duke has run up from Boulogne in his Daimler, the American Millionaire has made sixty miles an hour from Paris in his Packard, in order to meet his yacht in the bay of Deauville. It is an automobile show of the finest, the grande semaine at Trouville, and, later, automobile week at Ostend brings together a host of cars even more cosmopolitan, just as it brings together a crowd of folk still more cosmopolitan, than that of Trouville.
Yachting, too, is an important feature of Trouville life, and the bay is always well filled with sleek sea-going craft during grand semaine. Few of the very large yachts are French, but a fleet of beautiful small yachts has sailed up the Seine from Melun which is the anchorage for the Yacht Club of France, and there are a few imposing yachts flying the French colours. Trim English and American yachts by the dozen anchor off the Trouville shore for the great week, and there is a constant going and coming between boats and shore, a perpetual interchange of courtesies between the smart folk of villas and hotels, and the yachting visitors. Sometimes it is not the villa set that lunches and dines aboard the yacht. There are hilarious doings out there on the sea, when certain parties from the Hôtel de Paris are entertained, but those who hear tales of these doings when they stroll through la Potinière only shrug their shoulders, What can one expect when the season at Trou-Deauville, according to the traditional phrase, "bat son plein"?
Evening at Trouville means an elaborate dinner at one of the private villas or hotels, and an hour or two at the Casino, or perhaps some private social function following in the wake of a dinner—dancing, bridge, music, theatricals. The Hôtel de Paris is the public dining-place par excellence, the best vantage-ground from which to watch the passing show, but it is no easy matter to secure a table at the Hôtel de Paris during the height of the season. The most extravagant and modish part of the Trouville crowd—aside from the occupants of the handsomest villas—is quartered at the Hôtel de Paris. A crowd quite as swell but more inclined to quiet goes to the Grand Hôtel de Deauville, but rooms at this hotel are all taken months in advance by folk belonging to the Deauville set. The Hôtel de Paris rooms are reserved far in advance, too, but by a clientèle less exclusive. Money is the one essential at the Hôtel de Paris, but one must have plenty of that. There are always famous mondaines, millionaires, royal personages, staying at the Paris; but there, too, one finds the Parisian demi-mondaine, the noted jockey, the great actress, the wealthy tourist, and the worthy bourgeois of Paris will often save thriftily all year in order that he may afford a week at the Paris during the season. It is chic to stay at the Paris, and it is vastly amusing. Incidentally it is, as has been hinted, expensive. To have the humblest and scrappiest of rooms one must pay at least six dollars a day, and the prices of suites run up into appalling sums. Restaurant prices, too, are monumental and tips are no small item. The waiter who serves one is the most ingratiating, the most efficient, the most knowing of his kind, but if one does not give the suave Shylock the full ten per cent of his bill, which is the letter of his bond, it will be much better not to come back again. They have retentive memories, those waiters; they are used to lavish generosity—and tables are always at a premium.
It is practically impossible to secure a table for dinner without first enlisting the head waiter's sympathy by a discreet tip of from five to fifty francs, and a thousand francs has been paid for a table during grande semaine. The cuisine is not remarkable—not so good, for instance, as that of the Paris Café de Paris, which is under the same management; but much beside food goes to make up one's money's worth when the coveted table has at last been obtained, and there are few things more amusing to a student of men, women, and things than to sit in some corner of the café and watch the world go by. To thoroughly appreciate the show one should have, across the table, a friend who is versed in the gossip of the European capitals, and who can name the diners and tell their stories; but even the stranger within the gates can get a vast amount of entertainment out of the heterogeneous crowd, the amazing types, the beautiful clothes, the superb jewels, and many of the stories are written so plainly that he who runs may read.
After dinner the crowd drifts into the great Casino and now for a certain part of the idlers begins the serious business of the day. It is the custom to say that there is no high play in France to-day and that the great days of gambling are over, but every year folk go away from Trouville who could furnish circumstantial evidence to refute that theory. Play is more guarded than it once was. The gambling does not jump at the eyes. On the first floor of the Casino near the music a few modest tables of petits chevaux attract a crowd of players whose heaviest plunging is but a matter of a few francs, and many transient visitors go away thinking that this outfit represents the gambling of Trouville; but habitués of the place know better than that. Up on the second floor there are trente et quarante and baccarat, but even here the limit is not high. Many women surround the tables here, and women make up a large percentage of the crowd admitted to the tables of the third floor, where play runs high and admittance is not altogether easy to obtain; but on the fourth floor are tables from which women are barred and to which only the men accustomed to play for very high stakes are welcomed. Here is the innermost circle of the Trouville gambling Inferno, and here are found men whose very names ooze money. Here are found, too, men who have no colossal fortunes behind them, but who can play high because they are willing to risk all they have. A Rothschild, a Vanderbilt, a Menier, may rub shoulders at the tables, but they will perhaps have an actor, a restaurant proprietor, and a great dressmaker for vis-à-vis, and no one is playing for less than one thousand dollars a point. Last season an American actor was one of the heavy losers in this fourth-floor room, but a theatrical manager evened things up by cashing in a goodly heap of counters representing ten thousand dollars each at the end of a spectacular evening's play in which several of the wealthiest men of Europe took a hand. Men have been beggared at these tables. One prominent racing man lost his stables down to the last horse and bridle in an evening of play. A famous English yacht changed hands as a result of an hour at baccarat. Some of those who are knowing in such matters contend that the heaviest gambling in the world to-day goes on in the Trouville Casino during grande semaine, but one gives that statement for what it is worth, and authentic gambling statistics are not easy to obtain.
In order to cover the gambling, the Casino ranks as a club, though everybody gets in—at least on the first floor. While fortunes are changing hands overhead, down here all is light and laughter and mirth. There is no drinking, but that does not trouble thirsty folk for there is first aid near at hand in the Café de Paris; and dinner is still a recent memory. The music is always good and there is dancing for those who want it. Perhaps some popular chanteuse or dancer from Paris is a feature of the evening entertainment, or there may be a costume ball or an effective cotillon. The best theatrical companies of Paris play in the little theatre, and always there are the petits chevaux to offer amusement of a mildly exciting sort.
All goes merrily until eleven o'clock, then the crowd pours out into the night, the doors close, the lights go out, and the great building stands dark and grim until morning. The board walk is thronged for a time with late strollers, but it is a poor imitation of Atlantic City's pride, this narrow board walk stretching from the Hôtel de Paris to the Rochers Noirs. Only Ostend can offer a board walk that appeals to Americans as something approaching the real thing.
The strollers melt away from the promenade, the cafés empty, and at a fairly respectable hour Trouville is given over to quiet and night shadow. Late hilarity is the exception rather than the rule, but enough gaiety is crowded into the hours between eleven A.M. and midnight to last the ordinary summer resort for a fortnight.
Dieppe, of course, echoes certain notes of the Trouville season and is as gay in its own way, though it has not the fine sparkle of the more Parisian resort nor such an exclusively chic villa set as that of Deauville.
One hears as much English as French in the Hôtel Royale and the Casino and on the beach, and more swell Americans congregate at Dieppe than at any other one of the European summer resorts. For the great racing week crowds flock in, as at Trouville, from all the coast and inland resorts, and in at least one feature the Dieppe races surpass any others of the seashore circuit. No finer natural steeple chase course is known to the racing world than that at Dieppe, and the steeple chase races there are events that make a notable sensation even among the many sensations of the Normandy season.
At Ostend it is German that disputes supremacy with French, and there are more Austrians and Germans there than at any other place on the Jockey Club racing circuit, but one misses the familiar Parisian faces, for my lady of Deauville does not often go to Ostend even for the grande quinzaine of August; and, oddly enough, even the "filles de Paris" do not make much of the Ostend season.
The crowd is an immense and interesting one even without the French element, and money is spent as prodigally as at Trouville—even more prodigally perhaps and a trifle more crudely. The Café de la Plage has the reputation of being one of the most expensive places in the world in which one may order a dinner, the promenade, as has been said, is the best on the coast, and the Kursaal is one of the finest in Europe. The programme of the days is as crowded as that of Trouville, and life at Ostend moves at a breathless pace,—tennis tournaments, golf tournaments, automobile races, motor-boat races, horse races, children's fêtes, balls, flower festivals, theatre, excursions, déjeuners, dinners, yachting—but the list is endless. There is gambling, too, at Ostend. Gambling cuts comparatively little figure at Dieppe, and the Belgian government has muzzled it at Ostend, but here as in Paris one may always play at one's private club, and there is a private club at Ostend where during the quinzaine play rivals that of the famous fourth-floor room at Trouville during grande semaine. Many of the same players are in evidence in both places, but at Ostend entrance to the club is a very serious matter. The king of Belgium, notorious viveur and most practical sovereign, has been extremely firm in regard to Ostend play, and permits it only on the guarantee of the club that no scandal shall arise to discredit the little Belgian country. Any serious gambling fracas would mean an immense forfeit to the government, and consequently rigid measures are taken to safeguard the play. Anyone desiring admission must be introduced by reliable members and his name must be posted for three days before he is accepted. No exceptions are made, and a rich American who presented written introductions from two of the best known and wealthiest men of Europe last season was promptly turned down.
"These gentlemen are members. We know them well. Monsieur is doubtless altogether eligible, but our rules are our rules. We cannot accept cards of introduction, but if Monsieur will come here with sponsors who are members—"
Money would not buy the entrée. The directors of the Ostend Club take no chances. They leave that to the gamblers at the club tables.
With Ostend the season ends, and during the next week all of the expresses running to Paris are crowded with homing holiday folk. Dinard and the other Brittany resorts have been crowded as has Normandy, but Dinard is not so popular with the smart Parisienne as is Trouville, and money is not spent so lavishly in the Brittany resorts as in those of Normandy. Some Parisians of the fashionable set have wandered to Switzerland or to German or French spas. Others have spent the summer in quiet country houses and châteaux far from fashion's haunts; but from all quarters they flock to Paris when August is past, and Paris welcomes them with smiles. She has amused herself after a fashion, but the summer has been long and a trifle dull.