PARIS AT MEALTIMES

There has never been a shortage of reasons to travel in France: gothic cathedrals, Norman churches, and royal châteaus are all attractions, but when all is said and done, star-hunting (by which I mean Michelin stars) is often the explanation for a tour de France. Measured against history, this is a new phenomenon. In the eighteenth century no one could have justified a trip to France for gastronomic reasons. Its people ate very badly. The high nobility and more refined townspeople were, of course, well served, their tables so prodigiously laden that guests consumed barely a third of what was offered (the surplus went first to servants, then to regrattiers, tradesmen who specialized in buying up leftovers). Few Paris apartments had a real kitchen; an oven was a rare exception. Most housewives had to make do with a cauldron often precariously balanced in the hearth. Roasting spits were only to be found in inns or substantial houses.

Despite these limitations, before the Revolution people ate at home (unless they were traveling or staying in another town) and received guests at home. Meals were regarded as something private and, except in a few privileged households, menus could hardly be called exciting. These were tough circumstances for travelers from far afield who had no friends or letters of introduction, and found themselves at the mercy of unpleasant innkeepers: they complained as much about the rudimentary food as the general lack of comfort.

They had to settle for whatever badly cooked fare was put on the table, with no element of choice. At an inn, you bought not a particular dish but the right to sit at the communal table; another, scarcely better solution consisted in going to a table d’hôte, a sort of boardinghouse where regulars met at a set time. If there was an empty chair, the traveler could sit down; if not he had to try his luck elsewhere. There was never anything pleasant about the experience. According to Mercier, the author of Tableau de Paris (1788), the middle of the table, where the hostess put the most desirable dishes, was only accessible to regulars. Equipped with indefatigable jaws, they left only crumbs for the unfortunate visitor, who never ate as much as he had paid for and, on top of that, had to tolerate their noisy but vacuous conversations. The famous English agronomist Arthur Young complained particularly about this enforced proximity to louts.

The visitor often ended up buying a saucisson or a slice of ham from a charcuterie stall, or a cooked chop or chicken wing from a rotisserie, and eating it in his room. If he wanted a hearty stew, he had to go to a traiteur, who had the monopoly of ragouts and would deliver whole prepared meals. There were also lively street markets, where women made the most of an age-old privilege and set up shop behind a great cauldron of simmering tripe while their partners tended constantly steaming pots of cooked chicken. The whole arrangement was neither practical nor salubrious. The guilds imposed stringent rules on every kind of tradesman and determined very precisely what each of them could sell or cook, therefore forbidding anything resembling what we would call a restaurant, in other words a place where the customer can sit at an individual table and order a meal he or she has chosen, paying only for this chosen food. In fact, in the eighteenth century, the French word restaurant* meant not an establishment but a food or drink with restorative qualities—a glass of wine, a cordial, or some reduced stock which was effectively essence of meat.

When in about 1780 a few unclassifiable establishments—neither grocers, inns, traiteurs, nor table d’hôtes—appeared in Paris as clean, discreet establishments where a lady could sit alone at a table covered with a cloth and order a bowl of stock or a salad, they were given the name restaurants because they seemed intended not to satisfy a major appetite but simply to offer passersby a pick-me-up, something restorative.

The first restaurant proper opened on the rue des Poulies (the present-day rue du Louvre); a few years later it moved to the Hôtel d’Aligre on the rue Saint-Honoré. The manager, whose name was Boulanger, served poached poultry with sea salt, fresh eggs, and, of course, highly concentrated stock. He could not serve stews but was exempted from the tough restrictions that imposed set mealtimes on table d’hôtes. The attraction of this new setup was that if someone felt a little tired during the course of the day, they could find something here to invigorate them. A rare few innovators followed this lead. There were only four or five restaurants in Paris before 1789. The most famous, Vacossin, played host to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who described the dinner he had as a picnic,* implying that the fare was light and the billsplit fairly.

Amongst many other things, the Revolution transformed the gastronomic landscape of Paris. It might seem frivolous to take an interest in the cuisine of an era scarred by violence, terror, murderous war, and scarcity culminating in 1794, but there are many factors that fully justify an interest in the subject: the astonishing parade of fine foods delivered to people in prison (those condemned to death made arrangements to have roasts and pâtés delivered by traiteurs and other suppliers, who made sure their cards were circulated around the dungeons); sumptuous public feasts; and, most significantly, a transformation of the entire industry of eating.

Three days after the storming of the Bastille, when the Prince of Condé fled into exile, he left behind an army of spit roasters, sauce makers, and pastry cooks who had all worked under orders from the chef, Monsieur Robert. The latter lost no time in opening a restaurant, which he called Robert, at 104 rue de Richelieu—a real restaurant with a varied menu, serving whatever he wanted. Regulations, some of which dated back to the Middle Ages, had just been slackened, and the primary beneficiaries were these newcomers, the restaurateurs. The head cook to the Comte de Provence, the king’s brother, set himself up at the Galerie de Valois in the Palais-Royal as soon as the prince had left in June 1791, and unabashedly invited diners into this luxurious setting and offered them a doorstop-sized menu. The whole neighborhood was soon a meeting place for gastronomes ... and there were hordes of them.

The nouveaux riches, who were plentiful because there was no shortage of opportunities to make money, had good appetites. But in these troubled times no one was keen to display their wealth—at least not before the post-Revolutionary regime, the Directory, was established. Setting up and running a household in grand style or laying oneself open to envy or denunciation by giving dazzling dinners would have been dangerous; it was better to invite and receive guests at a restaurant, where private rooms even offered a degree of discretion. Still more important: at the time, Paris thronged with single men, members of the Assembly, journalists, interested onlookers, and foreign observers. Many had no connections in the capital but still had to eat, hence the rush to these pleasant modern establishments with menus to suit every purse and meals at every hour of the day. The sheer convenience of this arrangement meant that restaurants opened in every quarter, and their numbers kept on growing. The movement expanded further under the Consulate and the Empire, and one English journalist, Francis Blagdon, who came to Paris once peace was restored in 1802, eager to see the result of more than ten years of war and revolution, described the capital in one word: restaurants. At the time, the accepted figure was two thousand establishments, a figure that rose again under the Restoration and reached three thousand. (Table d’hôtes had mostly disappeared or had adopted the current fashion by adding a few individual tables to their dining rooms and offering a choice of dishes.) One consequence of this phenomenon was that a new timetable was adopted, and this had a profound effect on the structure of the day for Parisians.

Before the Revolution, people in good society ate three times a day: they had something between six and eight in the morning, then dined at about two o’clock and supped after nine o’clock. Peasants and laborers made do with two meals. Supper was reserved for the privileged minority who went to balls or performances. During the Revolution, the system dissolved: all those men unleashed into the streets of Paris at the crack of dawn for discussions in the Assembly, clubs, and various societies, were collapsing by eleven o’clock … and eagerly headed for restaurants toward the end of the morning, which did nothing to stop them from wanting to eat again at about six o’clock in the evening. This late morning meal was then given the name déjeuner,* as compared to the petit déjeuner (little breakfast) eaten on rising, and the last meal of the day took on the name dîner (dinner). Souper (supper) all but vanished. This was a wonderful windfall for restaurateurs, who now benefited from two sittings a day.

From that point on, people took to gathering with friends and arranging to meet and eat in public places, and this was true of all social classes. It was a period in which cooking was granted incredible importance; it became the order of the day and remained so during the Empire and the following regimes. Gastronomy became a subject of conversation and even of literature. In the seventeenth century, two books of recipes—Le cuisinier français and Les délices de la campagne—had been all that housewives needed for generations, but these gave way to ambitious works by Cabanis and Brillat-Savarin, whose La physiologie du goût, a series of meditations on the art of eating, was prodigiously successful. Alexandre Dumas published a cookbook with witty illustrations, crammed with anecdotes and excellent recipes. France had become the homeland of great cooking. And Balzac, who depicted its times, its people, and its interests, appointed himself as a mouthpiece for this trend.

“If the French have as great an aversion to traveling as the English have a propensity for it,” he said, “both English and French have perhaps sufficient reasons. Something better than England is everywhere to be found; whereas it is excessively difficult to find the charms of France outside France.” And the essence of these French charms lay in its cooking; “as Borel [the great chef at Le Rocher de Cancale] elaborates it for those who can appreciate it … it is the wines of France, which … are to be regarded as myths.” And Balzac had a tremendous time disparaging foreign cooking. Italy was the country where they put cheese in soup, he wrote disdainfully in Gambara, and Poland the one where there were seventy-seven ways of preparing gruel, not to mention their repulsive beet soup, barkschz (Balzac perhaps chose this variant spelling because it comes close to the French word for “yuk”). The Germans, he claimed, liked different sorts of vinegar, collectively referring to them as Rhineland wines. As for the English, they needed fiery condiments to reawaken their taste buds.

Balzac takes us all over Paris, on the right bank as much as the left, sending his characters off into the most refined establishments and the most lowly, and through his succession of novels gives us a real social and gastronomic report on the capital. Some forty restaurants are referred to in The Human Comedy, because he is not satisfied with mentioning only the biggest names. Whether discussing the most spectacular or the most modest, Balzac lingers over the menu. As is always the case with him, he is also interested in the cost. His work, therefore, amounts to a guide, one that discerns the stars but does not neglect the bill. Two restaurants in The Human Comedy warrant the full three stars: Véry and Le Rocher de Cancale. Let us start with the oldest, Véry, because it was here that Balzac took Lucien de Rubempré to be initiated into the joys and perils of Parisian life.

The ninth day of Thermidor* marked the end of Robespierre’s reign and of the terrible excesses of the Terror. The guillotine with its cortege of executioners and victims was transferred from the place de la Concorde to the eastern outskirts of Paris. Parisians could start to breathe more freely. The Terrasse des Feuillants on the northern edge of the Tuileries Gardens, cut off from the road by a wall covered in arbors, was a delightful spot once more. It was here that, under the Directory, two brothers from the Lorraine region set up a magnificent restaurant that they called Chez Véry. Gastronomic purists occasionally criticized the fare for staying so classic and having little inclination for innovation, but the quality of the service, the luxurious décor, and—in particular—the profusion of mirrors attracted and dazzled customers. Véry had to move in 1801 when the rue de Rivoli was laid down. But it did not leave the neighborhood: it moved toward Palais-Royal to take over premises in the rue de Beaujolais which are now home to the restaurant Le Grand Véfour. Like other restaurants, Véry set out individual tables in the main room where columns afforded space between the tables. A movable screen could be used to divide up the room, and Véry went one step further by offering large groups or intimate twosomes private rooms where the waiter never entered without knocking.

Véry’s fame was unstoppable. Russian officers coming into France with the 1814 invasion headed to the Palais-Royal at the gallop, crying “Véry, Véry.” “As soon as a stomach arrives in Paris, that is the first table it wishes to visit, and it will return again and again. For it is quite sure that there, throughout the year, it can eat fish as fresh as in the sea, excellent game, trotters stuffed with truffles, white pudding and black pudding, papillotes of partridge with truffles, brains and even macaroni … Véry is the palace of all restaurants and the restaurant of palaces,” according to a diners’ guide from the Restoration. Hardly surprising then that the hero of Lost Illusions, the young poet Lucien Rubempré, who is reeling after a chilly rebuff from the woman who lured him to Paris, decides to go there to console himself. He has to demonstrate a degree of courage to venture into the best and most elegant restaurant in Paris fresh from his provincial home, when he ate in a restaurant for the first time only the day before.

Lucien is so new to Paris that he has to ask the way to Palais-Royal, but he boldly “went to Véry’s and ordered dinner by way of an initiation into the pleasures of Paris and a solace for his discouragement. A bottle of Bordeaux, oysters from Ostend, a dish of fish, a partridge, a dish of macaroni and dessert—this was the ne plus ultra of his desire. He enjoyed this little debauch, studying the while how to give the Marquise d’Espard proof of his wit, and redeem the shabbiness of his grotesque accoutrements by the display of intellectual riches. The total of the bill drew him down from these dreams, and left him the poorer by fifty of the francs which were to have gone such a long way in Paris. He could have lived in Angouleme for a month on the price of that dinner. Wherefore he closed the door of the palace with awe, thinking as he did so that he should never set foot in it again.”

Balzac himself was often surprised by the extraordinary final sum of his bill at Véry’s, but unlike his character, he had perfected a strategy. He gave a large tip, signed the bill, and had it sent to his publisher by Madame Véry (a tremendously buxom woman, if we are to believe a sketch by the English painter Rowlandson), who presided over the room behind her counter, keeping a watchful eye on waiters and customers while she swiftly totted up figures.

All the same, I wonder whether Balzac did not prefer Véry’s great rival, Le Rocher de Cancale, which was more cheerful and modern with a more relaxed atmosphere, as is fitting for a restaurant in Les Halles, a neighborhood with a greater working-class population than Palais-Royal. And Le Rocher particularly distinguished itself for the quality of its oysters. Now Balzac—and in this he differed little from his contemporaries—seems to have had a real fixation for oysters. Louis XVIII often swallowed a hundred of them at the start of a meal while he was in refuge at Gand during the Hundred Days, the brief period in 1815 when Napoleon reclaimed power after his escape from Elba. As the dining room looked out over the street, the officer on duty had to shoo away street children who heaved themselves up to the windows to count how many platefuls the exiled king ate. It is therefore hardly remarkable that Balzac’s characters consume them with such abandon.

From a conversation reported in The Duchess of Langeais, we are not surprised to learn that the Count of Montriveau, in exile in Saint Petersburg, consoles himself by gulping down a hundred oysters a day, without suffering gout or gallstones as a result of these excesses. The pretty Coralie, wanting to please her lover Lucien, orders oysters with lemon for their first lunch, and in César Birotteau there is nothing peculiar about the fact that the hideous Claparon, the corrupt traveling salesman who lives in a hovel, still manages to eat oysters on a corner of his paper-strewn work desk. Being a true connoisseur, the rich middle-class Balthasar Claes, the unhappy hero of The Quest of the Absolute, always orders them directly from Ostend.

In Paris, the king of oysters was the first owner of Le Rocher de Cancale, Alexis Balaine, who started out selling oysters in Les Halles, in the very heart of the fish market. It was a lucrative position. There was considerable demand for oysters in Paris, given that six million dozen were consumed a year. At the turn of the century, Balaine opened a restaurant on the corner of the rue Montorgueil and the rue Mandar; it was a good, second-tier establishment that attracted attention from connoisseurs, particularly Cambacérès, who was then second consul. The regime of the Consulate was instituted after the coup d’état of the eighteenth of Brumaire, when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power, and lasted from 1799 to 1804. Bonaparte, who had adopted the title of first consul, actually governed; Cambacérès, who was a legal specialist, and Lebrun, the third consul, who was in charge of financial affairs, both aided him but only had consultative powers. Cambacérès’s patronage could make a great difference for a restaurant because the excellence of his table was so well documented. One anecdote claims that, in 1801, enraged by an order from Bonaparte to reserve the postal service specifically for dispatches, he went straight to the first consul to protest, saying, as the rumor has it: “How do you expect us to make friends if we do not offer them sought-after delicacies? It is through food that one governs.” Confronted with such indignation, Bonaparte gave in to him and allowed him to continue taking delivery of turkeys stuffed with truffles from the provinces, pâté from Strasbourg, hams from Mayence, and his rock partridges, which he so preferred to the gray variety.

Soon the Société des Épicuriens (Epicurean Society) started holding their dinners there. Le Rocher de Cancale was launched, prices soared, and it sustained its reputation for many years. Balaine fine-tuned an exceptional menu and perfected stunning lighting but continued to offer the most simple dishes: ham with spinach, vol-au-vent pastries with cream, and, of course, oysters, all year round, always of the finest quality, even in stifling weather. In Balzac’s day, Balaine had already retired and sold his business to Borel (who had been tutored by one of the Prince de Condé’s former chefs) for 170,000 francs, a very considerable sum, equivalent to the dowry for a daughter of a marshal of the Empire, but this did the restaurant no harm at all. Balzac granted it preference, as is proved by the invitation he sent to one of his admirers, a young Russian called Monsieur de Lentz. The latter had insisted most vigorously that he wanted to meet him, Balzac reported to Madame Hanska. He eventually yielded and organized a dinner at Le Rocher with his friend Léon Gozlan and Victor Hugo, whom he invited with these words:

"My dear Master, I wish to speak to you and, as this entails a dinner to be had at the Rocher de Cancale this Thursday, take on no engagements and reserve your evening for me; I shall come to explain the above tomorrow morning, Wednesday. With my heartfelt regards,"
...

There will be only one Russian who adores you, Léon Gozlan and myself. Sadly, we know nothing of the menu, except that Balzac and Lentz nibbled on the odd prawn and radish while waiting for Hugo. They were welcomed most considerately by Borel, who looked after them as well he knew how for his most famous customers, and were seated before the most sumptuous and appetizing of spreads, where “the beauty of each piece, all braised and garnished, their freshness, their cleanness created a ravishing sight.”

The present-day equivalent of Le Rocher de Cancale would be a cross between Le Taillevent, the most highly reputed restaurant in Paris, and a large, varied, and bustling brasserie like La Coupole, with incomparable dishes and an interesting clientele in which politicians, journalists, writers, editors, actors, and high society all rub shoulders. It is hardly surprising that Balzac sends the whole of his Human Comedy there, some for a lover’s meal, others for business meetings, late-night suppers with courtesans, or society dinners, from 1815 right through to 1845, when the restaurant closed.* De Marsay goes there to quell his impatience and “drank like a fish, ate like a German” while waiting for his appointment with the mysterious Paquita; notary clerks gather here for a blowout feast that starts at three o’clock but does not end till ten! It is here that, in Lost Illusions, du Châtelet brings Madame de Bargeton, the great lady newly arrived from the provinces with her young lover, Lucien de Rubempré, the very evening of their arrival, in order to make sure the lady understands his standing as an elegant Parisian who feels “quite in his element [there]. He smiled at his rival’s hesitations, at his astonishment, at the questions he put, at the little mistakes which the latter ignorantly made, much as an old salt laughs at an apprentice who has not found his sea legs.” Knowing how to order from “waiters, whom a provincial might have taken for diplomatists but for their age, [who] stood solemnly, as knowing themselves to be overpaid,” and leafing confidently through a menu, required a certain savoir-faire that Lucien quickly learned when he started spending time with actresses—rather more cheery and indulgent guides than du Châtelet, who so longs to humiliate him.

It has to be said that the endless menu, which was printed in four columns of small print, could have been mistaken for Le Moniteur Universel, the government’s official newspaper. Like Véry, Borel offered over one hundred dishes. Veal alone could be ordered roasted, fried, stuffed with peas, as a blanquette, a fricandeau, or a plate of sliced meat, and as medallions, brains, marinated ear, head, tongue, sweetbreads, or chops. (We should not forget that the restaurateur often bought the whole carcass and was therefore impelled to sell not only the noble cuts, such as loin and rib, but the entire animal.) On top of this, the vocabulary, which was inherited from great houses where chefs had done their apprenticeship before the Revolution, was often impenetrable to the uninitiated. Was it better to order Toadstone Pigeon or “invest” in Pigeon à la financière? What on earth could an epigram of lamb be? How to choose between sauces that called themselves Hollandaise, German, Spanish, Italian, Bavarian, à la pluche, à la barigoule, and à la Robert?

This nomenclature continued to produce astonishment for a long time, according to Flaubert. Is it a political gesture to refuse a “Pudding à la d’Orléans” and should legitimists order their turbot “à la Chambord”?* To facilitate diners’ choices, a journalist called Honoré Blanc had the idea of collating menus from twenty-one restaurants, and translating them into simple French so that all apprentice gastronomes could order their meals without making fools of themselves in front of head-waiters who were far more familiar with the terms than their nouveaux riches customers.

Nevertheless, despite difficulties in choosing a meal, everyone was flattered to be invited to Le Rocher de Cancale. In The Muse of the Department, Dinah invites her lover there to soften the blow of her decision to leave him; in Lost Illusions, the awful Vautrin makes the most of an exquisite dinner to persuade the young courtesan Esther to obey him blindly; Baron Hulot takes Valérie Marneffe there again and again to win her favor in Cousin Betty. Even the Duchess of Maufrigneuse, who is too refined to go to restaurants, is intrigued by Le Rocher: “she liked anything amusing, anything improvised. Bohemian restaurants lay outside her experience; so d’Esgrignon [the young man wooing her] got up a charming little party at the Rocher de Cancale for her benefit, asked all the amiable scamps whom she cultivated and sermonized, and there was a vast amount of merriment, wit, and gaiety, and a corresponding bill to pay.” Despite the pretty Diane’s clearly demonstrated independence of mind, Balzac spares her from witnessing the final ending of Cousin Betty. At Le Rocher de Cancale that particular evening, “ravishing women walked through the dining room towards a large private room, their satin gowns trimmed with English lace in such quantities it would have fed an entire village for a month, wearing rare flowers in their hair and decked in pearls and diamonds.”

Gathered around a table decorated with the silver service that Borel reserved for this sort of feast and under streaming lights, the noisy, laughing courtesans, surrounded by admirers, tucked into oysters and, still chattering and joking, started in on soups, poultry, pâtés, fish, and roast meats. What are we to think of the forty-two bottles consumed by fourteen diners? The figure seems unrealistic and yet, throughout the century, whether people ate alone, with one other person, or in groups, they drank heavily. Flaubert finds nothing remarkable in pointing out that in A Sentimental Education, Arnoux, the middle-class Parisian, and Frédéric, the provincial young student, order a bottle of Sauternes, a bottle of Burgundy, some champagne, and liqueurs at lunchtime. True, when Frédéric arrives home, even though he has drunk less than his companion, he feels he needs a siesta. Théophile Gautier once saw Balzac celebrate sending a manuscript off to his editor by downing “four bottles of Vouvray white wine, one of the most intoxicating known to man and [which] did nothing to alter his sturdy mind and only served to add an extra sparkle to his gaiety.” Wine did not have the least effect on him, perhaps, he thought, because of his longstanding habit of drinking coffee. All the same, Balzac did admit to being a “costly guest.”

So people drank a great deal at the time, and very rarely water. The only characters in The Human Comedy who drink nothing but water are the writer Daniel d’Arthez, the very picture of the idealistic artist, and the Marquise d’Espard, an inveterate coquette who wants to preserve her youthful looks. Balzac mentions one other man who drinks water, but he does so in very specific circumstances described in The Red Inn. In this passage, the banker Taillefer is at a dinner and hears another guest telling the story of a mysterious murder. As far as Taillefer is concerned, there is no mystery at all because the murderer is none other than himself. In his nervous state, he knocks back two whole carafes of water in quick succession, thereby awaking suspicions. Finally, at the end of The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, when Vautrin is reeling with concern about Lucien’s fate, he drinks a tub of water in his cell at the Conciergerie. In Balzac’s world, drinking a glass of water is never a natural gesture, it is a clue.

Balzac has too much fun at Le Rocher through his characters to give the same weight to the other great restaurants. He does, however, refer to Frères-Provençaux (Provence Brothers), whose owners, three cousins in fact, came up to Paris during the Revolution and moved into premises very close to Palais-Royal, on the rue Helvétius (now the rue Sainte-Anne), opposite the rue Louvois. On tables covered with oilcloths, they introduced Provence cuisine to Parisians, who delighted in their bouillabaisse and their brandades. After the terrible years of Robespierre’s reign, the Brothers moved to the galerie de Beaujolais and, although the prices were more modest than in the most famous restaurants, the cuisine matched theirs.

But Balzac does not linger there long and sends only unsympathetic characters to eat there, such as Félix de Vandenesse’s parents or the fake banker, the loathsome Claparon, who contributes to the ruin of César Birotteau, the honest perfumer brought down by his own credulity. The restaurant may well have been excellent, but in the Balzac guide, the Brothers do not warrant the stars of high repute. Nevertheless, the place continued to thrive, and Flaubert’s Arnoux was still eating there in 1848, complaining all the while that its food was not as impeccable as it once had been. What Balzac really did not like, in fact, was the Palais-Royal neighborhood.

It seems that from 1830 onward fashionable people actually started tiring of the district. Men might, for example, still meet at Grignon’s for lunch, but these lunches were more ostentatious than elegant and always disintegrated into drunken scenes. This was clearly a bad sign for the area. Somehow, Palais-Royal (which had been the belly of pleasure and business throughout the eighteenth century, with is galleries lined with shops, cafés, restaurants, gaming houses, and discreet brothels) had become unpleasant and even, in places, sinister. Esther, one of the famous courtesans of The Human Comedy, lives there for a while on the rue de Langlade, a “narrow street, dark and muddy ... [that] wears at night an aspect of mystery full of contrast.” In Gambara, Balzac has his hero walk along the rue Froidmanteau, “a dirty, poky, disreputable street—a sort of sewer tolerated by the police close to the purified purlieus of the Palais-Royal, as an Italian majordomo allows a careless servant to leave the sweepings of the rooms in a corner of the staircase. The young man hesitated. He might have been a bedizened citizen’s wife craning her neck over a gutter swollen by the rain.” Balzac uses the word bourgeoise for this “citizen’s wife,” and the word is chosen deliberately: the shamelessness and vice around Palais-Royal displeased the burgeoning bourgeoisie.

From then on, the boulevard des Italiens—the thoroughfare that “anyone who was anyone crossed at least once a day”—became fashionable. In an article about new neighborhoods, Balzac enthuses: “The boulevards are now to Paris what the Grand Canal was to Venice … the Corso to Rome ... the Graben to Vienna … that is, where freedom of intelligence is to be found, and life itself.” It was the site of choice for the great cafés, Hardy’s on the corner of the rue Lafite, Riche’s on the corner of the rue Peletier, as well as the Café de Paris and the Café des Anglais. Of course, these “cafés” were restaurants, but new-wave restaurants, not as serious as the former greats of Palais-Royal that focused so intently on gastronomy. These were restaurants where cool counted for more than cost. People went there to be seen rather than to have a delectable meal, although the food was excellent at the Café des Anglais. The latter had the added advantage of having twenty-two private rooms. It is not surprising then that the pretty Delphine de Nucingen, who takes little persuasion to cheat her fat banker of a husband with the latest young men, has access to the place. It is from here that she orders a dinner to be delivered to the bachelor apartment she has just set up for her new lover Eugène de Rastignac. A few years later, Rastignac becomes a regular at the establishment, and is often seen there with the king of dandies, Henri de Marsay. While the cooking may have been discernibly worse at the Café de Paris, the decor was very refined, the furnishings were comfortable, the silverware was always gleaming, and this was where wealthy young things liked to be seen. They were happy to spend time there.

One of the great cafés is conspicuous by its absence in The Human Comedy: the Café Hardy, the place that introduced the déjeuner à la fourchette (fork lunch), so named because a waiter would stand in front of a large buffet and use a long fork to reach for the cold cuts pointed out by each customer. Indeed, when it opened during the Revolution, the owner, Madame Hardy, served no hot food. Her lone male customers ate oysters, tripe, cold meats, and pâtés from about eleven o’clock in the morning. Interestingly, salads were available, but no vegetables were served. For dessert there were table creams, charlottes, and ice creams. Then, when lunch became a more important meal under the Empire, Madame Hardy set up a large grill beside the buffet displaying her wares. Customers looked on while the headwaiter cooked breaded pigs’ trotters with truffles, kidneys or chicken fillets served with the “fires of hell,” which meant covered in a layer of salt and pepper strong enough to take the roof off your mouth. But, to its great regret, Hardy’s, which was wildly successful under the Empire, never established itself as an evening restaurant. It did not recover from its founder’s retirement, and lost much of its standing during the Restoration. It was relaunched many years later, in 1839, under the name Maison Dorée, a mixed establishment that was often frequented by women best described as escorts and where any respectable woman would be offended to be invited.

Lunch now became a meal that was highly prized by the young. Good manners dictated that this meal should not be taken too seriously, although it had become very substantial. In an article published in La Mode, Balzac advocated a sort of gracious disorder for lunch. Demonstrating too much elegance at this particular meal was the height of vulgarity. In The Unconscious Comedians, Sylvestre Gazonal, a lace maker recently arrived in Paris from the eastern Pyrenees on a business trip, is invited to lunch by his cousin, the fashionable painter Léon de Lora. The provincial guest makes the mistake of wearing his bright blue suit with gold buttons over a shirt with a jabot and a white waistcoat, as well as yellow gloves. Worse still, he commits the blunder of arriving early. Lunching at ten is considered ridiculous in Paris, the headwaiter points out to him: gentlemen here lunch between eleven o’clock and noon. Lora and Bixiou, his caricaturist friend, duly arrive at half past eleven, wearing whatever came to hand, according to Gazonal. They have a “monster” of a meal, “in the course of which they consumed six dozen Ostend oysters, half a dozen cutlets à la Soubise, chicken à la Marengo, a lobster mayonaise [sic], mushrooms on toast, and green peas, to say nothing of hors d’oeuvres, washed down with three bottles of bordeaux, three of champagne, several cups of coffee and liqueurs.” Gazonal was less impressed by the food than by the quantity of gold coins handed over in payment. He even noticed the tip the waiter was given, thirty sous, a day’s wages for a laborer, he pointed out to his friends back home in the country.

By Anka Muhlstein in "Balzac's Omelette", Other Press, New York, 2010, originally published in French as "Garçon, un Cent d’Huîtres, Balzac et la Table", translated by Adriana Hunter, excerpts chapter II. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

Share this post