If you should chance to breakfast at “Lavenue’s,” or, as it is called, the “HÔtel de France et Bretagne,” for years famous as a rendezvous of men celebrated in art and letters, you will be impressed first with the simplicity of the three little rooms forming the popular side of this restaurant, and secondly with the distinguished appearance of its clientÈle.

As you enter the front room, you pass good Mademoiselle Fanny at the desk, a cheery, white-capped, genial old lady, who has sat behind that desk for forty years, and has seen many a “bon garÇon” struggle up the ladder of fame—from the days when he was a student at the Beaux-Arts, until his name became known the world over. It has long been a favorite restaurant with men like Rodin, the sculptor—and Colin, the painter—and the late FalguiÈre—and Jean Paul Laurens and Bonnat, and dozens of others equally celebrated—and with our own men, like Whistler and Sargent and Harrison, and St. Gaudens and Macmonnies.

These three plain little rooms are totally different from the “other side,” as it is called, of the Maison Lavenue. Here one finds quite a gorgeous cafÉ, with a pretty garden in the rear, and another room—opening into the garden—done in delicate green lattice and mirrors. This side is far more expensive to dine in than the side with the three plain little rooms, and the gentlemen with little red ribbons in their buttonholes; but as the same good cook dispenses from the single big kitchen, which serves for the dear and the cheap side the same good things to eat at just half the price, the reason for the popularity of the “cheap side” among the crowd who come here daily is evident.

It is a quiet, restful place, this Maison Lavenue, and the best place I know in which to dine or breakfast from day to day. There is an air of intime and cosiness about Lavenue’s that makes one always wish to return.

You will see a family of rich bourgeois enter, just in from the country, for the Montparnasse station is opposite. The fat, sunburned mama, and the equally rotund and genial farmer-papa, and the pretty daughter, and the newly married son and his demure wife, and the two younger children—and all talking and laughing over a good dinner with champagne, and many toasts to the young couple—and to mama and papa, and little Josephine—with ices, and fruit, and coffee, and liqueur to follow.

All these you will see at Lavenue’s on the “cheap side”—and the beautiful model, too, who poses for Courbel, who is breakfasting with one of the jeunesse of Paris. The waiters after 2 P.M. dine in the front room with the rest, and jump up now and then to wait on madame and monsieur.

It is a very democratic little place, this popular side of the house of M. Lavenue, founded in 1854.

And there is a jolly old painter who dines there, who is also an excellent musician, with an ear for rhythm so sensitive that he could never go to sleep unless the clock in his studio ticked in regular time, and at last was obliged to give up his favorite atelier, with its picturesque garden——

“For two reasons, monsieur,” he explained to me excitedly; “a little girl on the floor below me played a polka—the same polka half the day—always forgetting to put in the top note; and the fellow over me whistled it the rest of the day and put in the top note false; and so I moved to the rue St. PÈres, where one only hears, within the cool court-yard, the distant hum of the busy city. The roar of Paris, so full of chords and melody! Listen to it sometimes, monsieur, and you will hear a symphony!”

And Mademoiselle Fanny will tell you of the famous men she has known for years, and how she has found the most celebrated of them simple in their tastes, and free from ostentation—“in fact it is always so, is it not, with les hommes cÉlÈbres? C’est toujours comme Ça, monsieur, toujours!” and mentions one who has grown gray in the service of art and can count his decorations from half a dozen governments. Madame will wax enthusiastic—her face wreathed in smiles. “Ah! he is a bon garÇon; he always eats with the rest, for three or four francs, never more! He is so amiable, and, you know, he is very celebrated and very rich”; and madame will not only tell you his entire history, but about his work—the beauty of his wife and how “aimables” his children are. Mademoiselle Fanny knows them all.

But the men who come here to lunch are not idlers; they come in, many of them, fresh from a hard morning’s work in the studio. The tall sculptor opposite you has been at work, since his morning coffee, on a group for the government; another, bare-armed and in his flannel shirt, has been building up masses of clay, punching and modeling, and scraping away, all the morning, until he produces, in the rough, the body of a giantess, a huge caryatide that is destined, for the rest of her existence, to hold upon her broad shoulders part of the faÇade of an American building. The “giantess” in the flesh is lunching with him—a Juno-like woman of perhaps twenty-five, with a superb head well poised, her figure firm and erect. You will find her exceedingly interesting, quiet, and refined, and with a knowledge of things in general that will surprise you, until you discover she has, in her life as a model, been thrown daily in conversation with men of genius, and has acquired a smattering of the knowledge of many things—of art and literature—of the theater and its playwrights—plunging now and then into medicine and law and poetry—all these things she has picked up in the studios, in the cafÉs, in the course of her Bohemian life. This “vernis,” as the French call it, one finds constantly among the women here, for their days are passed among men of intelligence and ability, whose lives and energy are surrounded and encouraged by an atmosphere of art.

In an hour, the sculptor and his Juno-like model will stroll back to the studio, where work will be resumed as long as the light lasts.

The painter breakfasting at the next table is hard at work on a decorative panel for a ceiling. It is already laid out and squared up, from careful pencil drawings. Two young architects are working for him, laying out the architectural balustrade, through which one, a month later, looks up at the allegorical figures painted against the dome of the blue heavens, as a background. And so the painter swallows his eggs, mayonnaise, and demi of beer, at a gulp, for he has a model coming at two, and he must finish this ceiling on time, and ship it, by a fast liner, to a millionaire, who has built a vault-like structure on the Hudson, with iron dogs on the lawn. Here this beautiful panel will be unrolled and installed in the dome of the hard-wood billiard-room, where its rich, mellow scheme of color will count as naught; and the cupids and the flesh-tones of the chic little model, who came at two, will appear jaundiced; and Aunt Maria and Uncle John, and the twins from Ithaca, will come in after the family Sunday dinner of roast beef and potatoes and rice pudding and ice-water, and look up into the dome and agree “it’s grand.” But the painter does not care, for he has locked up his studio, and taken his twenty thousand francs and the model—who came at two—with him to Trouville.

At night you will find a typical crowd of Bohemians at the Closerie des Lilas, where they sit under a little clump of trees on the sloping dirt terrace in front. Here you will see the true type of the Quarter. It is the farthest up the Boulevard St. Michel of any of the cafÉs, and just opposite the “Bal Bullier,” on the Place de l’Observatoire. The terrace is crowded with its habituÉs, for it is out of the way of the stream of people along the “Boul’ Miche.” The terrace is quite dark, its only light coming from the cafÉ, back of a green hedge, and it is cool there, too, in summer, with the fresh night air coming from the Luxembourg Gardens. Below it is the cafÉ and restaurant de la Rotonde, a very well-built looking place, with its rounding faÇade on the corner.

(brocanteur shop front)