It was a famous French sociologist who declared, from extended personal investigations of the private life of the Parisian mendicants, that the best _champagne brut_ he had yet encountered he had found on the dinner tables of professional beggars.
Along the lighted streets and boulevards are the great _brasseries_ for Munich beer and German dishes, and the richly decorated taverns, some of them in black oak shining in pewter and ornate with medieval decoration and stained glass. These are swarming with eddies from the passing world until long after midnight. Many of these are the habitual rendezvous of journalists, like the Café Navarin. Others, like the Café des Variétés and the Taverne de la Capitale, are the favorite places for actors, and still others for painters and musicians. There is hardly a resort in Paris which has not its distinct clientèle, from the _buvettes_ of the _cochers_ to Maxime’s.
And of soberer kind are the innumerable, perfectly kept establishments created by Duval and imitated by Boulant. They are big places for small purses; everything is of excellent quality, well cooked, and served by respectable women in spotless white caps and aprons.
There are hundreds of other restaurants besides, with _dîners_ and _déjeuners_ at a _prix fixe_, in which a secondary quality of food is turned into a clever imitation of the best, and where the wine is plain and harmless and included with a course dinner _au choix_ for two francs fifty and less. On _fête_ days and Sundays these well patronized _petits dîners de Paris_ are crowded with bourgeois folk: clerks with their sweethearts, _commerçants_ and their families, economical bachelors, and others, frugal-minded, from out of Paris who have come into the metropolis to spend a long-anticipated holiday.
And in contrast to all these dining places are the smart restaurants, filled with the correct _grand monde_ and the chic _demi-monde_—the Café de Madrid, the Maison Anglaise, Paillard, Arménonville, La Rue, Joseph, Ledoyen, Voisin and the Café de Paris. There are serious old places, such as the Tour d’Argent, plain and unadorned, where all the wealth is in the _casserolles_ and the cobwebbed bottles. Then, too, there is the ancient Restaurant Foyot, with its clientèle of senators, academicians and military officers, and the Restaurant La Pérouse on the quay of the Seine, where resort savants and magistrates and others less grave—an old-fashioned place with a narrow stairway leading to quaint, low-ceiled _cabinets particuliers_ and excellent things simmering over the kitchen fires below stairs and certain rare old Burgundy lining the walls of the cellar.