of French agriculture. By eating your dinners at Flicoteaux's you
learn a host of things of which the wealthy, the idle, and folk
indifferent to the phases of Nature have no suspicion, and the student
penned up in the Latin Quarter is kept accurately informed of the
state of the weather and good or bad seasons. He knows when it is a
good year for peas or French beans, and the kind of salad stuff that
is plentiful; when the Great Market is glutted with cabbages, he is at
once aware of the fact, and the failure of the beetroot crop is
brought home to his mind. A slander, old in circulation in Lucien's
time, connected the appearance of beef-steaks with a mortality among
horseflesh.

Few Parisian restaurants are so well worth seeing. Every one at
Flicoteaux's is young; you see nothing but youth; and although earnest
faces and grave, gloomy, anxious faces are not lacking, you see hope
and confidence and poverty gaily endured. Dress, as a rule, is
careless, and regular comers in decent clothes are marked exceptions.
Everybody knows at once that something extraordinary is afoot: a
mistress to visit, a theatre party, or some excursion into higher
spheres. Here, it is said, friendships have been made among students
who became famous men in after days, as will be seen in the course of
this narrative; but with the exception of a few knots of young fellows
from the same part of France who make a group about the end of a
table, the gravity of the diners is hardly relaxed. Perhaps this
gravity is due to the catholicity of the wine, which checks good
fellowship of any kind.

Flicoteaux's frequenters may recollect certain sombre and mysterious
figures enveloped in the gloom of the chilliest penury; these beings
would dine there daily for a couple of years and then vanish, and the