Morgan O’Dogherty was wrong—and, sooth to say, he was not often so—when he pronounced a Mess to be ‘the perfection of dinner society.’ In the first place, there can be no perfection anywhere or in anything, it is evident, where ladies are not. Secondly, a number of persons so purely professional, and therefore so very much alike in their habits, tone of thinking, and expression, can scarcely be expected to make up that complex amalgam so indispensable to pleasant society. Lastly, the very fact of meeting the same people each day, looking the very same way too, is a sad damper to that flow of spirits which for their free current demand all the chances and vicissitudes of a fresh audience. In a word, in the one case a man becomes like a Dutch canal, standing stagnant and slow between its trim banks; in the other, he is a bounding rivulet, careering pleasantly through grassy meadows and smiling fields—now basking in the gay sunshine, now lingering in the cool shade; at one moment hurrying along between rocks and moss-grown pebbles, brawling, breaking, and foaming; at the next, expanding into some little lake, calm and deep and mirrorlike.

It is the very chances and changes of conversation, its ups and downs, its lights and shadows—so like those of life itself—that make its great charm; and for this, generally, a mixed party gives the only security. Now, a Mess has very little indeed of this requisite; on the contrary, its great stronghold is the fact that it offers an easy tableland for all capacities. It has its little, dry, stale jokes, as flat and as dull as the orderly book—the regular quiz about Jones’s whiskers, or Tobin’s horse; the hackneyed stories about Simpson of Ours, or Nokes of Yours—of which the major is never tired, and the newly-joined sub is enraptured. Bless their honest hearts! very little fun goes far in the army; like the regimental allowance of wine, it will never intoxicate, and no man is expected to call for a fresh supply.

I have dined at more Messes than any red-coat of them all, at home and abroad—cavalry, artillery, and infantry, ‘horse, foot, and dragoons,’ as Grattan has it. In gala parties, with a general and his staff for guests; after sweltering field-days, where all the claret could not clear your throat of pipe-clay and contract-powder; in the colonies, where flannel-jackets were substituted for regulation coats, and land-crabs and pepper-pot for saddles and sirloins; in Connemara, Calcutta, or Corfu—it was all the same: caelum non animum, etc. Not but that they had all their little peculiarities among themselves— so much so, indeed, that I offer a fifty, that, if you set me down blindfolded at any Mess in the service, I will tell you what corps they belong to before the cheese appears; and before the bottle goes half around, I’ll engage to distinguish the hussars from the heavies, the fusiliers from the light-bobs; and when the president is ringing for more claret, it will go hard with me if I don’t make a shrewd guess at the number of the regiment.

The great charm of the Mess is to those young, ardent spirits fresh from Sandhurst or Eton, sick of mathematics and bored with false quantities. To them the change is indeed a glorious one, and I’d ask nothing better than to be sixteen, and enjoy it all; but for the old stagers, it is slow work indeed. A man curls his whiskers at forty with far less satisfaction than he surveys their growth and development at eighteen; he tightens his waist, too, at that period, with a very different sense of enjoyment. His first trip to Jamaica is little more than a ‘lark’; his fourth or fifth, with a wife and four brats, is scarcely a party of pleasure—and all these things react on the Mess. Besides, it is against human nature itself to like the people who rival us; and who could enjoy the jokes of a man who stands between him and a majority?

Yet, taking them all in all, the military ‘cut up’ better than any other professionals. The doctors might be agreeable; they know a vast deal of life, and in a way too that other people never see it; but meet them en masse, they are little better than body-snatchers. There is not a malady too dreadful, nor an operation too bloody, to tell you over your soup; every slice of the turkey suggests an amputation, and they sever a wing with the anatomical precision they would extirpate a thigh bone. Life to them has no interest except where it verges on death; and from habit and hardening, they forget that human suffering has any other phase than a source of wealth to the medical profession.

The lawyers are even worse. To listen to them, you would suppose that the highest order of intellect was a skill in chicanery; that trick and stratagem were the foremost walks of talent; that to browbeat a poor man and to confound a simple one were great triumphs of genius; and that the fairest gift of the human mind was that which enabled a man to feign every emotion of charity, benevolence, pity, anger, grief, and joy, for the sum of twenty pounds sterling, wrung from abject poverty and briefed by an ‘honest attorney.’

As to the parsons, I must acquit them honestly of any portion of this charge. It has been my fortune to ‘assist’ at more than one visitation dinner, and I can safely aver that never by any accident did the conversation become professional, nor did I hear a word of piety during the entertainment.

Country gentlemen are scarcely professional, however the similarity of their tastes and occupations might seem to warrant the classification—fox-hunting, grouse-shooting, game-preserving, road-jobbing, rent-extracting, land-tilling, being propensities in common. They are the slowest of all; and the odds are long against any one keeping awake after the conversation has taken its steady turn into shorthorns, Swedish turnips, subsoiling, and southdowns.

Artists are occasionally well enough, if only for their vanity and self-conceit.

Authors are better still, for ditto and ditto.

Actors are most amusing from the innocent delusion they labour under that all that goes on in life is unreal, except what takes place in Covent Garden or Drury Lane.

In a word, professional cliques are usually detestable, the individuals who compose them being frequently admirable ingredients, but intolerable when unmixed; and society, like a macÉdoine, is never so good as when its details are a little incongruous.

For my own part, I knew few things better than a table d’hÔte, that pleasant reunion of all nations, from Stockholm to Stamboul; of every rank, from the grand-duke to the bagman; men and women, or, if you like the phrase better, ladies and gentlemen—some travelling for pleasure, some for profit; some on wedding tours, some in the grief of widowhood; some rattling along the road of life in all the freshness of youth, health, and well-stored purses, others creeping by the wayside cautiously and quietly; sedate and sententious English, lively Italians, plodding Germans, witty Frenchmen, wily Russians, and stupid Belgians— all pell-mell, seated side by side, and actually shuffled into momentary intimacy by soup, fish, fowl, and entremets. The very fact that you are en route gives a frankness and a freedom to all you say. Your passport is signed, your carriage packed; to-morrow you will be a hundred miles away. What matter, then, if the old baron with the white moustache has smiled at your German, or if the thin-faced lady in the Dunstable bonnet has frowned at your morality?—you ‘ll never, in all likelihood, meet either again. You do your best to be agreeable—it is the only distinction recognised; here are no places of honour, no favoured guests—each starts fair in the race, and a pleasant course I have always deemed it.

Now, let no one, while condemning the vulgarity of this taste of mine—for such I anticipate as the ready objection, though the dissentient should be a tailor from Bond Street or a schoolmistress from Brighton—for a moment suppose that I mean to include all tables d’hÔte in this sweeping laudation; far, very far from it. I, Arthur O’Leary, have travelled some hundreds of thousands of miles in every quarter and region of the globe, and yet would have considerable difficulty in enumerating even six such as fairly to warrant the praise I have pronounced.

In the first place, the table d’hÔte, to possess all the requisites I desire, should not have its locale in any first-rate city, like Paris, London, or St. Petersburg; no, it should rather be in Brussels, Dresden, Munich, Berne, or Florence. Again, it should not be in the great overgrown mammoth-hotel of the town, with three hundred daily devourers, and a steam-engine to slice the bouilli. It should, and will usually, be found in some retired and quiet spot—frequently within a small court, with orange-trees round the walls, and a tiny modest jet d’eau in the middle; a glass-door entering from a flight of low steps into a neat ante-chamber, where an attentive but unobtrusive waiter is ready to take your hat and cane, and, instinctively divining your dinner intentions, ushers you respectfully into the salon, and leans down your chair beside the place you select.

The few guests already arrived have the air of habituÉs; they are chatting together when you enter, but they conceive it necessary to do the honours of the place to the stranger, and at once include you in the conversation; a word or two suffices, and you see that they are not chance folk, whom hunger has overtaken at the door, but daily visitors, who know the house and appreciate it. The table itself is far from large—at most sixteen persons could sit down at it; the usual number is about twelve or fourteen. There is, if it be summer, a delicious bouquet in the midst; and the snowy whiteness of the cloth and the clear lustre of the water strike you instantly. The covers are as bright as when they left the hands of the silversmith, and the temperature of the room at once shows that nothing has been neglected that can contribute to the comfort of the guests. The very plash of the fountain is a grateful sound, and the long necks of the hock-bottles, reposing in the little basin, have an air of luxury far from unpleasing. While the champagne indulges its more southern character in the ice-pails in the shade, a sweet, faint odour of pineapples and nectarines is diffused about; nor am I disposed to quarrel with the chance view I catch, between the orange-trees, of a window where asparagus, game, oranges, and melons are grouped confusedly together, yet with a harmony of colour and effect Schneider would have gloried in. There is a noiseless activity about, a certain air of preparation—not such as by bustle can interfere with the placid enjoyment you feel, but something which denotes care and skill. You feel, in fact, that impatience on your part would only militate against your own interest, and that when the moment arrives for serving, the potage has then received the last finishing touch of the artist. By this time the company are assembled; the majority are men, but there are four or five ladies. They are en chapeau too; but it is a toilette that shows taste and elegance, and the freshness—that delightful characteristic of foreign dress—of their light muslin dresses is in keeping with all about. Then follows that little pleasant bustle of meeting; the interchange of a number of small courtesies, which cost little but are very delightful; the news of the theatre for the night; some soiree, well known, or some promenade, forms the whole—and we are at table.

The destiny that made me a traveller has blessed me with either the contentment of the most simple or the perfect enjoyment of the most cultivated cuisine; and if I have eaten tripe de rocher with Parry at the Pole, I have never lost thereby the acme of my relish for truffles at the ‘FrÈres.’ Therefore, trust me that in my mention of a table d’hÔte I have not forgotten the most essential of its features—for this, the smallness and consequent selectness of the party is always a guarantee.

Thus, then, you are at table; your napkin is spread, but you see no soup. The reason is at once evident, and you accept with gratefulness the little plate of Ostend oysters, each somewhat smaller than a five-franc piece, that are before you. Who would seek for pearls without when such treasures are to be found within the shell—cool and juicy and succulent; suggestive of delights to come, and so suited to the limpid glass of Chablis. What preparatives for the potage, which already I perceive to be a printaniÈre.

But why dwell on all this? These memoranda of mine were intended rather to form a humble companion to some of John Murray’s inestimable treatises on the road; some stray recollection of what in my rambles had struck me as worth mention; something that might serve to lighten a half-hour here or an evening there; some hint for the wanderer of a hotel or a church or a view or an actor or a poet, a picture or a pÂte, for which his halting-place is remarkable, but of whose existence he knew not. And to come back once more, such a picture as I have presented is but a weak and imperfect sketch of the HÔtel de France in Brussels—at least, of what I once remember it.

Poor Biennais, he was an artiste! He commenced his career under Chicaud, and rose to the dignity of rÔtisseur under Napoleon. With what enthusiasm he used to speak of his successes during the Empire, when Bonaparte gave him carte-blanche to compose a dinner for a ‘party of kings!’ Napoleon himself was but an inferior gastronome. With him, the great requisite was to serve anywhere and at any moment; and though the bill of fare was a modest one, it was sometimes a matter of difficulty to prepare it in the depths of the Black Forest or on the sandy plains of Prussia, amid the mud-covered fields of Poland or the snows of Muscovy. A poulet, a cutlet, and a cup of coffee was the whole affair; but it should be ready as if by magic. Among his followers were several distinguished gourmets. CambacÉrÈs was well known; Murat also, and DecrÈs, the Minister of Marine, kept admirable tables. Of these, Biennais spoke with ecstasy; he remembered their various tastes, and would ever remark, when placing some masterpiece of skill before you, how the King of Naples loved or the arch-chancellor praised it. To him the overthrow of the empire was but the downfall of the cuisine; and he saw nothing more affecting in the last days of Fontainebleau than that the Emperor had left untouched a fondue he had always eaten of with delight. ‘After that,’ said Biennais, ‘I saw the game was up.’ With the Hundred Days he was ‘restored,’ like his master; but, alas! the empire of casseroles was departed; the thunder of the cannon foundries, and the roar of the shot furnaces were more congenial sounds than the simmering of sauces and the gentle murmur of a stew-pan. No wonder, thought he, there should come a Waterloo, when the spirit of the nation had thus degenerated. Napoleon spent his last days in exile; Biennais took his departure for Belgium. The park was his Longwood; and, indeed, he himself saw invariable points of resemblance in the two destinies. Happily for those who frequented the HÔtel de France, he did not occupy his remaining years in dictating his memoirs to some Las Casas of the kitchen, but persevered to the last in the practice of his great art, and died, so to speak, ladle in hand.

To me the HÔtel de France has many charms. I remember it, I shall not say how many years—its cool, delightful salon, looking out upon that beautiful little park whose shady alleys are such a resource in the evenings of summer; its lime-trees, beneath which you may sit and sip your coffee, as you watch the groups that pass and repass before you, weaving stories to yourself which become thicker and thicker as the shade deepens, and the flitting shapes are barely seen as they glide along the silent alleys, while a distant sound of music—some air of the Fatherland—is all that breaks the stillness, and you forget in the dreamy silence that you are in the midst of a great city.

The HÔtel de France has other memories than these, too. I ‘m not sure that I shall not make a confession, yet somehow I half shrink from it. You might call it a love adventure, and I should not like that; besides, there is scarcely a moral in it—though who knows?