here they would have been promptly removed. You smoke slowly, quietly,
like a Turk, following your thoughts among the blue curves.

If you have a voluptuous desire to taste some warm or refreshing
beverage, well-trained waiters bring it to you immediately. If you feel
like talking with clever men who will not bully you, you have within
reach light sheets on which are printed winged thoughts, rapid, written
for you, which you are not forced to bind and preserve in a library when
they have ceased to please you. This place, the paradise of
civilization, the last and inviolable refuge of the free man, is
the café.

It is the café; but in the ideal, as we dream it, as it ought to be. The
lack of room and the fabulous cost of land on the boulevards of Paris
make it hideous in actuality. In these little boxes--of which the rent
is that of a palace--one would be foolish to look for the space of a
vestiary. Besides, the walls are decorated with stovepipe hats and
overcoats hung on clothes-pegs--an abominable sight, for which atonement
is offered by multitudes of white panels and ignoble gilding, imitations
made by economical process.

And (let us not deceive ourselves) the overcoat, with which one never
knows what to do, and which makes us worry everywhere,--in society, at
the theatre, at balls,--is the great enemy and the abominable
enslavement of modern life. Happy the gentlemen of the age of Louis
XIV., who in the morning dressed themselves for all day, in satin and
velvet, their brows protected by wigs, and who remained superb even when
beaten by the storm, and who, moreover, brave as lions, ran the risk of
pneumonia even if they had to put on, one outside the other, the
innumerable waistcoats of Jodelet in 'Les Précieuses Ridicules'!