“M’sieur!”

“What have you that you can especially recommend this morning?”

The waiter, with that nasal volubility peculiar to his race, rapidly ran over the whole vegetable and animal creation.

Mueller listened with polite incredulity.

“Nothing else?” said he, when the other stopped, apparently from want of breath.

“Mais oui, M’sieur!” and, thus stimulated, the waiter, having “exhausted worlds and then imagined new,” launched forth into a second and still more impossible catalogue.

Mueller turned to me.

“The resources of this establishment, you observe,” he said, very gravely, “are inexhaustible.  One might have a Roc’s egg a la Sindbad for the asking.”

The waiter looked puzzled, shuffled his slippered feet, and murmured something about “oeufs sur le plat.”

“Unfortunately, however,” continued Mueller, “we are but men—­not fortresses provisioning for a siege.  Antoine, mon enfant, we know thee to be a fellow of incontestible veracity, and thy list is magnificent; but we will be content with a vol-au-vent of fish, a bifteck aux pommes frites, an omelette sucree, and a bottle of thy 1840 Bordeaux with the yellow seal.  Now vanish!”

The waiter, wearing an expression of intense relief, vanished accordingly.

Meanwhile more students had come in, and more kept coming.  Hats and caps cropped up rapidly wherever there were pegs to hang them on, and the talking became fast and furious.

I soon found that everybody knew everybody at the Cafe Procope, and that the specialty of the establishment was dominoes—­just as the specialty of the Cafe de la Regence is chess.  There were games going on before long at almost every table, and groups of lookers-on gathered about those who enjoyed the reputation of being skilful players.

Gradually breakfast after breakfast emerged from some mysterious nether world known only to the waiters, and the war of dominoes languished.

“These are all students, of course,” I said presently, “and yet, though I meet a couple of hundred fellows at our hospital lectures, I don’t see a face I know.”

“You would find some by this time, I dare say, in the other room,” replied Mueller.  “I brought you in here that you might sit at Voltaire’s table, and eat your steak under the shadow of Voltaire’s bust; but this salon is chiefly frequented by law-students—­the other by medical and art students.  Your place, mon cher, as well as mine, is in the outer sanctuary.”

“That infernal Martial!” groaned one of the domino-players at the other end of the table.  “So ends the seventh game, and here we are still. Parbleu! Horace, hasn’t that absinthe given you an inconvenient amount of appetite?”

“Alas! my friend—­don’t mention it.  And when the absinthe is paid for, I haven’t a sou.”

“My own case precisely.  What’s to be done?”