I looked round, and found myself in a dingy, ordinary sort of Cafe, in no wise differing from any other dingy, ordinary sort of Cafe in that part of Paris.  The decorations were ugly enough to be modern.  The ceiling was as black with gas-fumes and tobacco smoke as any other ceiling in any other estaminet in the Quartier Latin.  The waiters looked as waiters always look before midday—­sleepy, discontented, and unwashed.  A few young men of the regular student type were scattered about here and there at various tables, reading, smoking, chatting, breakfasting, and reading the morning papers.  In an alcove at the upper end of the second room (for there were two, one opening from the other) stood a blackened, broken-nosed, plaster bust of Voltaire, upon the summit of whose august wig some irreverent customer had perched a particularly rakish-looking hat.  Just in front of this alcove and below the bust stood a marble-topped table, at one end of which two young men were playing dominoes to the accompaniment of the matutinal absinthe.

“And this,” said Mueller, with another flourish, “is the still more immortal table of the still more supremely immortal Voltaire.  Here he was wont to rest his sublime elbows and sip his demi-tasse.  Here, upon this very table, he wrote that famous letter to Marie Antoinette that Freron stole, and in revenge for which he wrote the comedy called l’Ecossaise; but of this admirable satire you English, who only know Voltaire in his Henriade and his history of Charles the Twelfth, have probably never heard till this moment! Eh bien!  I’m not much wiser than you—­so never mind.  I’ll be hanged if I’ve ever read a line of it.  Anyhow, here is the table, and at this other end of it we’ll have our breakfast.”

It was a large, old-fashioned, Louis Quatorze piece of furniture, the top of which, formed from a single slab of some kind of gray and yellow marble, was stained all over with the coffee, wine, and ink-splashes of many generations of customers.  It looked as old—­nay, older—­than the house itself.

The young men who were playing at dominoes looked up and nodded, as three or four others had done in the outer room when we passed through.

“Bonjour, l’ami,” said the one who seemed to be winning.  “Hast thou chanced to see anything of Martial, coming along!”

“I observed a nose defiling round the corner of the Rue de Bussy,” replied Mueller, “and it looked as if Martial might be somewhere in the far distance, but I didn’t wait to see.  Are you expecting him?”

“Confound him—­yes!  We’ve been waiting more than half an hour.”

“If you have invited him to breakfast,” said Mueller, “he is sure to come.”

“On the contrary, he has invited us to breakfast.”

“Ah, that alters the case,” said Mueller, philosophically.  “Then he is sure not to come.”  “Garcon!”

A bullet-headed, short-jacketed, long-aproned waiter, who looked as if he had not been to bed since his early youth, answered the summons,