Flicoteaux still subsists; so long as students are minded to live, Flicoteaux will make a living.  You feed there, neither more nor less; and you feed as you work, with morose or cheerful industry, according to the circumstances and the temperament.

At that time his well-known establishment consisted of two dining-halls, at right angles to each other; long, narrow, low-ceiled rooms, looking respectively on the Rue Neuve-de-Richelieu and the Place de la Sorbonne.  The furniture must have come originally from the refectory of some abbey, for there was a monastic look about the lengthy tables, where the serviettes of regular customers, each thrust through a numbered ring of crystallized tin plate, were laid by their places.  Flicoteaux I. only changed the serviettes of a Sunday; but Flicoteaux II. changed them twice a week, it is said, under pressure of competition which threatened his dynasty.

Flicoteaux’s restaurant is no banqueting-hall, with its refinements and luxuries; it is a workshop where suitable tools are provided, and everybody gets up and goes as soon as he has finished.  The coming and going within are swift.  There is no dawdling among the waiters; they are all busy; every one of them is wanted.

The fare is not very varied.  The potato is a permanent institution; there might not be a single tuber left in Ireland, and prevailing dearth elsewhere, but you would still find potatoes at Flicoteaux’s.  Not once in thirty years shall you miss its pale gold (the color beloved of Titian), sprinkled with chopped verdure; the potato enjoys a privilege that women might envy; such as you see it in 1814, so shall you find it in 1840.  Mutton cutlets and fillet of beef at Flicoteaux’s represent black game and fillet of sturgeon at Very’s; they are not on the regular bill of fare, that is, and must be ordered beforehand.  Beef of the feminine gender there prevails; the young of the bovine species appears in all kinds of ingenious disguises.  When the whiting and mackerel abound on our shores, they are likewise seen in large numbers at Flicoteaux’s; his whole establishment, indeed, is directly affected by the caprices of the season and the vicissitudes of French agriculture.  By eating your dinners at Flicoteaux’s you learn a host of things of which the wealthy, the idle, and folk indifferent to the phases of Nature have no suspicion, and the student penned up in the Latin Quarter is kept accurately informed of the state of the weather and good or bad seasons.  He knows when it is a good year for peas or French beans, and the kind of salad stuff that is plentiful; when the Great Market is glutted with cabbages, he is at once aware of the fact, and the failure of the beetroot crop is brought home to his mind.  A slander, old in circulation in Lucien’s time, connected the appearance of beef-steaks with a mortality among horseflesh.