We are accused of severity in our allusion to this Long’s or Clarendon of the fashionable world of Paris. We exonerate ourselves by translating a page or two from a French work on Parisian manners, which has lately excited a considerable sensation among the Parisians.

‘The Café de Paris offers the abridgment or epitome of the manners of our times. It exhibits individuals, classes, passions, customs;, the folly of the spendthrift,, the union of luxury and beggary,, ignorance and presumption,, pride and courtiership;, the brokerage of consciences;, the venality whose current coin consists in treasury cheques and ribbons ;, the stock-jobbing which makes use of a telegraph instead of loaded dice or cut cards ;, the extravagance, which dishonours a distinguished name for a stud of blood-horses and a week of splendour ;, the juggling which traffics in literary reputation ;, the Industrie (whether of mights or manufacturers), which characterizes the present century in France.

These grand classes may be further indivualized. At the Cafe de Paris, we find a parcel of bankers who fix the price current of thrones ;, of stockjobbers, who endorse at the exchange the value of a political catastrophe;, of journalists, with paradoxes at the service of all ministers and parties ; of poor authors, whetting the whistle of their critics; privy councillors in perspective; King’s councillors on speculation; theatrical managers; keepers, and secretaries of royal academies, impotent guardians of the seraglio of the arts; young men of family, pledging themselves in post obits to the misery of their future days; mysterious individuals, the origin of whose wealth is inscrutable, but the name of whose tailors, coachbuilders, and horse-dealers are as notorious as their luck at hazard, their coolness in a duel, the groom two feet high behind their cab, and the lady six feet high within it!, such are the idlers of the Cafe de Paris!

People who, without a guinea of inheritance, a patent, or a manufactory, revel in luxuries ; till, rising one fine day from table, their voices husky with wine and their legs trembling, they are despatched by the magistrature on a long journey to the galleys!

Aristocrats of the new school, who throng within the columns of the Exchange, strut in a secretaryship of state, nibble a slice of the budget, and succeed in hiding their rags under a velvet mantle!

Empty pretenders of a century which, like the dying Mazurin, extends itself on a state bed with rouge upon its livid cheeks; disguising the gasp of death by humming an opera air! Fantastic personages, who drop from the clouds, booted spurred, and entilburyzed (entilbyrisés) to lounge a whole season long in the lobby of the opera, the saloons of Frascati, the alleys of the Bois de Boulogne, eclipsing, amazing, and splashing all the world and his wife, only to disappear as suddenly in the end, in order to make way for new adventurers. Such are the idlers of the Café de Paris!

There cannot be a better place for settling business between a knave and a fool.

There cannot be a better place for making a bargain of a literary reputation.

There cannot be a better place for ruining a reputation in an audible whisper.

There cannot be a better place for drawing on bills discounted at twenty per cent, sprinkled over with Burgundy and Champagne.

There cannot be a better place for a private secretary to complete his job for the sale of a place under government.

There cannot be a better place for a deputy to exchange his white ball for a dish of truffles.

There cannot be a better place for an editor to receive the new work, which he sells uncut, to circulating library, and cuts up in an article. Such are the idlers and such the business of the Café de Paris.’

From: The Court Journal. Gazette of the Fashionable World. September 21, 1833. No. 230.