you can live very cheaply or very dearly, as you like.The range is more limited in London.I do not fancy the usual run of Paris restaurants.You get a great deal for your money, in variety and quantity; but you don't exactly know what it is: and in time you tire of odds and ends, which destroy your hunger without exactly satisfying you.For myself, after a pretty good run of French cookery (and it beats the world for making the most out of little), when I sat down again to what the eminently respectable waiter in white and black calls "a dinner off the Joint, sir," with what belongs to it, and ended up with an attack on a section of a cheese as big as a bass-drum, not to forget a pewter mug of amber liquid, Ifelt as if I had touched bottom again,--got something substantial, had what you call a square meal.The English give you the substantials, and better, I believe, than any other people.
Thackeray used to come over to Paris to get a good dinner now and then.I have tried his favorite restaurant here, the cuisine of which is famous far beyond the banks of the Seine; but I think if he, hearty trencher-man that he was, had lived in Paris, he would have gone to London for a dinner oftener than he came here.
And as for a lunch,--this eating is a fascinating theme,--commend me to a quiet inn of England.We happened to be out at Kew Gardens the other afternoon.You ought to go to Kew, even if the Duchess of Cambridge is not at home.There is not such a park out of England, considering how beautiful the Thames is there.What splendid trees it has! the horse-chestnut, now a mass of pink-and-white blossoms, from its broad base, which rests on the ground, to its high rounded dome; the hawthorns, white and red, in full flower; the sweeps and glades of living green,--turf on which you walk with a grateful sense of drawing life directly from the yielding, bountiful earth,--a green set out and heightened by flowers in masses of color (a great variety of rhododendrons, for one thing), to say nothing of magnificent greenhouses and outlying flower-gardens.Just beyond are Richmond Hill and Hampton Court, and five or six centuries of tradition and history and romance.Before you enter the garden, you pass the green.On one side of it are cottages, and on the other the old village church and its quiet churchyard.Some boys were playing cricket on the sward, and children were getting as intimate with the turf and the sweet earth as their nurses would let them.We turned into a little cottage, which gave notice of hospitality for a consideration; and were shown, by a pretty maid in calico, into an upper room,--a neat, cheerful, common room, with bright flowers in the open windows, and white muslin curtains for contrast.We looked out on the green and over to the beautiful churchyard, where one of England's greatest painters, Gainsborough, lies in rural repose.It is nothing to you, who always dine off the best at home, and never encounter dirty restaurants and snuffy inns, or run the gauntlet of Continental hotels, every meal being an experiment of great interest, if not of danger, to say that this brisk little waitress spread a snowy cloth, and set thereon meat and bread and butter and a salad:
that conveys no idea to your mind.Because you cannot see that the loaf of wheaten bread was white and delicate, and full of the goodness of the grain; or that the butter, yellow as a guinea, tasted of grass and cows, and all the rich juices of the verdant year, and was not mere flavorless grease; or that the cuts of roast beef, fat and lean, had qualities that indicate to me some moral elevation in the cattle,--high-toned, rich meat; or that the salad was crisp and delicious, and rather seemed to enjoy being eaten, at least, did n't disconsolately wilt down at the prospect, as most salad does.I do not wonder that Walter Scott dwells so much on eating, or lets his heroes pull at the pewter mugs so often.Perhaps one might find a better lunch in Paris, but he surely couldn't find this one.
PARIS IN MAY--FRENCH GIRLS--THE EMPEROR AT LONGCHAMPSIt was the first of May when we came up from Italy.The spring grew on us as we advanced north; vegetation seemed further along than it was south of the Alps.Paris was bathed in sunshine, wrapped in delicious weather, adorned with all the delicate colors of blushing spring.Now the horse-chestnuts are all in bloom) and so is the hawthorn; and in parks and gardens there are rows and alleys of trees, with blossoms of pink and of white; patches of flowers set in the light green grass; solid masses of gorgeous color, which fill all the air with perfume; fountains that dance in the sunlight as if just released from prison; and everywhere the soft suffusion of May.
Young maidens who make their first communion go into the churches in processions of hundreds, all in white, from the flowing veil to the satin slipper; and I see them everywhere for a week after the ceremony, in their robes of innocence, often with bouquets of flowers, and attended by their friends; all concerned making it a joyful holiday, as it ought to be.I hear, of course, with what false ideas of life these girls are educated; how they are watched before marriage; how the marriage is only one of arrangement, and what liberty they eagerly seek afterwards.I met a charming Paris lady last winter in Italy, recently married, who said she had never been in the Louvre in her life; never had seen any of the magnificent pictures or world-famous statuary there, because girls were not allowed to go there, lest they should see something that they ought not to see.I suppose they look with wonder at the young American girls who march up to anything that ever was created, with undismayed front.