The Complete Writings, vol 2 | Page 7

assaulting you.
A great contrast between the habits of the people of London and Paris
is shown by their eating and drinking. Paris is brilliant with cafes: all
the world frequents them to sip coffee (and too often absinthe), read the
papers, and gossip over the news; take them away, as all travelers know,
and Paris would not know itself. There is not a cafe in London: instead
of cafes, there are gin-mills; instead of light wine, there is heavy beer.
The restaurants and restaurant life are as different as can be. You can
get anything you wish in Paris: you can live very cheaply or very
dearly, as you like. The range is more limited in London. I do not fancy
the usual run of Paris restaurants. You get a great deal for your money,
in variety and quantity; but you don't exactly know what it is: and in
time you tire of odds and ends, which destroy your hunger without
exactly satisfying you. For myself, after a pretty good run of French

cookery (and it beats the world for making the most out of little), when
I sat down again to what the eminently respectable waiter in white and
black calls "a dinner off the Joint, sir," with what belongs to it, and
ended up with an attack on a section of a cheese as big as a bass-drum,
not to forget a pewter mug of amber liquid, I felt as if I had touched
bottom again,--got something substantial, had what you call a square
meal. The English give you the substantials, and better, I believe, than
any other people. Thackeray used to come over to Paris to get a good
dinner now and then. I have tried his favorite restaurant here, the
cuisine of which is famous far beyond the banks of the Seine; but I
think if he, hearty trencher-man that he was, had lived in Paris, he
would have gone to London for a dinner oftener than he came here.
And as for a lunch,--this eating is a fascinating theme,--commend me to
a quiet inn of England. We happened to be out at Kew Gardens the
other afternoon. You ought to go to Kew, even if the Duchess of
Cambridge is not at home. There is not such a park out of England,
considering how beautiful the Thames is there. What splendid trees it
has! the horse-chestnut, now a mass of pink-and-white blossoms, from
its broad base, which rests on the ground, to its high rounded dome; the
hawthorns, white and red, in full flower; the sweeps and glades of
living green,--turf on which you walk with a grateful sense of drawing
life directly from the yielding, bountiful earth,--a green set out and
heightened by flowers in masses of color (a great variety of
rhododendrons, for one thing), to say nothing of magnificent
greenhouses and outlying flower-gardens. Just beyond are Richmond
Hill and Hampton Court, and five or six centuries of tradition and
history and romance. Before you enter the garden, you pass the green.
On one side of it are cottages, and on the other the old village church
and its quiet churchyard. Some boys were playing cricket on the sward,
and children were getting as intimate with the turf and the sweet earth
as their nurses would let them. We turned into a little cottage, which
gave notice of hospitality for a consideration; and were shown, by a
pretty maid in calico, into an upper room,--a neat, cheerful, common
room, with bright flowers in the open windows, and white muslin
curtains for contrast. We looked out on the green and over to the
beautiful churchyard, where one of England's greatest painters,
Gainsborough, lies in rural repose. It is nothing to you, who always

dine off the best at home, and never encounter dirty restaurants and
snuffy inns, or run the gauntlet of Continental hotels, every meal being
an experiment of great interest, if not of danger, to say that this brisk
little waitress spread a snowy cloth, and set thereon meat and bread and
butter and a salad: that conveys no idea to your mind. Because you
cannot see that the loaf of wheaten bread was white and delicate, and
full of the goodness of the grain; or that the butter, yellow as a guinea,
tasted of grass and cows, and all the rich juices of the verdant year, and
was not mere flavorless grease; or that the cuts of roast beef, fat and
lean, had qualities that indicate to me some moral elevation in the
cattle,--high-toned, rich meat; or that the salad was crisp and delicious,
and rather seemed to enjoy being eaten, at least, did n't disconsolately
wilt down at the prospect, as most salad does. I do not wonder that
Walter Scott