At Home He
Is Beset By A Hideous Fear That Some Waiter Will Think He Is Of A
Mercenary Nature; And When He Is Abroad This Trait In Him Is
Accentuated.
So, in his carefree American way, he orders a portion
of a dish of an unspecified value; whereupon the
Head waiter slips
out to the office and ascertains by private inquiry how large a
letter of credit the American is carrying with him, and comes back
and charges him all the traffic will bear.
As for the keeper of a fashionable cafe on a boulevard or in the
Rue de la Paix - well, alongside of him the most rapacious restaurant
proprietor on Broadway is a kindly, Christian soul who is in
business for his health - and not feeling very healthy at that.
When you dine at one of the swagger boulevard places the head
waiter always comes, just before you have finished, and places a
display of fresh fruit before you, with a winning smile and a bow
and a gesture, which, taken together, would seem to indicate that
he is extending the compliments of the season and that the fruit
will be on the house; but never did one of the intriguing scoundrels
deceive me. Somewhere, years before, I had read statistics on the
cost of fresh fruit in a Paris restaurant, and so I had a care.
The sight of a bunch of hothouse grapes alone was sufficient to
throw me into a cold perspiration right there at the table; and
as for South African peaches, I carefully walked around them,
getting farther away all the time. A peach was just the same as
a pesthouse to me, in Paris.
Alas though! no one had warned me about French oysters, and
once - just once - I ate some, which made two mistakes on my part,
one financial and the other gustatory. They were not particularly
flavorous oysters as we know oysters on this side of the ocean.
The French oyster is a small, copper-tinted proposition, and he
tastes something like an indisposed mussel and something like a
touch of biliousness; but he is sufficiently costly for all purposes.
The cafe proprietor cherishes him so highly that he refuses to
vulgarize him by printing the asking price on the same menu. A
person in France desirous of making a really ostentatious display
of his affluence, on finding a pearl in an oyster, would swallow
the pearl and wear the oyster on his shirtfront. That would stamp
him as a person of wealth.
However, I am not claiming that all French cookery is ultra-exorbitant
in price or of excessively low grade. We had one of the surprises
of our lives when, by direction of a friend who knew Paris, we
went to a little obscure cafe that was off the tourist route and
therefore - as yet - unspoiled and uncommercialized. This place
was up a back street near one of the markets; a small and smellsome
place it was, decorated most atrociously.
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