You learn more by talk in a cafe, or at a theatre, in one half hour, than you would learn in ten years in the provinces.  Here, in truth, wherever you go, there is always something to see, something to learn, some comparison to make.  Extreme cheapness and excessive dearness—­there is Paris for you; there is honeycomb here for every bee, every nature finds its own nourishment.  So, though life is hard for me just now, I repent of nothing.  On the contrary, a fair future spreads out before me, and my heart rejoices though it is saddened for the moment.  Good-bye my dear sister.  Do not expect letters from me regularly; it is one of the peculiarities of Paris that one really does not know how the time goes.  Life is so alarmingly rapid.  I kiss the mother and you and David more tenderly than ever.

“LUCIEN.”

The name of Flicoteaux is engraved on many memories.  Few indeed were the students who lived in the Latin Quarter during the last twelve years of the Restoration and did not frequent that temple sacred to hunger and impecuniosity.  There a dinner of three courses, with a quarter bottle of wine or a bottle of beer, could be had for eighteen sous; or for twenty-two sous the quarter bottle becomes a bottle.  Flicoteaux, that friend of youth, would beyond a doubt have amassed a colossal fortune but for a line on his bill of fare, a line which rival establishments are wont to print in capital letters, thus—­BREAD AT DISCRETION, which, being interpreted, should read “indiscretion.”

Flicoteaux has been nursing-father to many an illustrious name.  Verily, the heart of more than one great man ought to wax warm with innumerable recollections of inexpressible enjoyment at the sight of the small, square window panes that look upon the Place de la Sorbonne, and the Rue Neuve-de-Richelieu.  Flicoteaux II. and Flicoteaux III. respected the old exterior, maintaining the dingy hue and general air of a respectable, old-established house, showing thereby the depth of their contempt for the charlatanism of the shop-front, the kind of advertisement which feasts the eyes at the expense of the stomach, to which your modern restaurant almost always has recourse.  Here you beheld no piles of straw-stuffed game never destined to make the acquaintance of the spit, no fantastical fish to justify the mountebank’s remark, “I saw a fine carp to-day; I expect to buy it this day week.”  Instead of the prime vegetables more fittingly described by the word primeval, artfully displayed in the window for the delectation of the military man and his fellow country-woman the nursemaid, honest Flicoteaux exhibited full salad-bowls adorned with many a rivet, or pyramids of stewed prunes to rejoice the sight of the customer, and assure him that the word “dessert,” with which other handbills made too free, was in this case no charter to hoodwink the public.  Loaves of six pounds’ weight, cut in four quarters, made good the promise of “bread at discretion.”  Such was the plenty of the establishment, that Moliere would have celebrated it if it had been in existence in his day, so comically appropriate is the name.