Let us make our way through this crowd of idlers and cross the Boulevard to Tortoni’s. It was here that Isabelle the flowergirl of the Jockey Club first made her appearance to the Parisian dandy. She was patronised by ces dames, and fondled by ces messieurs, and before a couple of years were over she had her entrée to the Jockey Club. All that portion of elegant Parisians who delight in drinking champagne till an early hour in the morning, remember the child who, standing at the top of the staircase, offered them a bouquet in exchange for a petit louis. Since then the child has become a woman, and has planted rosebuds in the button-holes of everything that is noble in the land; but she may still be seen in the cabinets of the Cafe Anglais, Tortoni, and the Maison Dorée, exchanging her roses and camelias for the napoleons of tipsy young France. Tortoni’s may be considered as the cafe of the French dandy. He lives near it, perhaps in an entresol in the Rue Laffitte, surrounded by all those luxuries which are necessary to his indolent life. He generally rises as the clock of the church of Notre Dame de Lorette is striking mid-day, and after a careful toilette, saunters down to Tortoni’s to take a curaçoa and bitters before breakfast, and at the hour of absinthe, after the fashionable promenade in the Wood, he will be found either in one of the rooms or lounging on a couple of chairs outside, exhibiting his elaborate get up to the idlers on the Boulevard.

As the small hand of the clock under the colonnade of the Bourse approaches the hour of six, as the bankers’-clerks and newspaper correspondents are rushing to the post-office with their letters, the loiterers on the Boulevards begin to disperse ; the dandy begins to think where he shall go and dine, and what he shall do with himself after dinner; and the English major strolls down to the Grand Hotel to take a last glass of sherry and bitters. In half-an-hour the cafés will be as deserted as they were at two o’ clock, to be crowded again at eight, principally by the harder working portion of the Parisian population, who come out at this hour to breathe a little fresh air and sip their cup of coffee.

From: “The hour of Absinthe.” In: Once a week. Nr. 28. (July 11, 1868)