This particular hotel, in common with all other first-class hotels in Paris, was forgetful about setting forth on its menu the prices of its best dishes and its special dishes.  I take it this arrangement was devised for the benefit of currency-quilted Americans.  A Frenchman asks the waiter the price of an unpriced dish and then orders something else; but the American, as a rule, is either too proud or too foolish to inquire into these details.  At home he is beset by a hideous fear that some waiter will think he is of a mercenary nature; and when he is abroad this trait in him is accentuated.  So, in his carefree American way, he orders a portion of a dish of an unspecified value; whereupon the head waiter slips out to the office and ascertains by private inquiry how large a letter of credit the American is carrying with him, and comes back and charges him all the traffic will bear.

As for the keeper of a fashionable cafe on a boulevard or in the Rue de la Paix—­well, alongside of him the most rapacious restaurant proprietor on Broadway is a kindly, Christian soul who is in business for his health—­and not feeling very healthy at that.  When you dine at one of the swagger boulevard places the head waiter always comes, just before you have finished, and places a display of fresh fruit before you, with a winning smile and a bow and a gesture, which, taken together, would seem to indicate that he is extending the compliments of the season and that the fruit will be on the house; but never did one of the intriguing scoundrels deceive me.  Somewhere, years before, I had read statistics on the cost of fresh fruit in a Paris restaurant, and so I had a care.  The sight of a bunch of hothouse grapes alone was sufficient to throw me into a cold perspiration right there at the table; and as for South African peaches, I carefully walked around them, getting farther away all the time.  A peach was just the same as a pesthouse to me, in Paris.

Alas though! no one had warned me about French oysters, and once—­just once—­I ate some, which made two mistakes on my part, one financial and the other gustatory.  They were not particularly flavorous oysters as we know oysters on this side of the ocean.  The French oyster is a small, copper-tinted proposition, and he tastes something like an indisposed mussel and something like a touch of biliousness; but he is sufficiently costly for all purposes.  The cafe proprietor cherishes him so highly that he refuses to vulgarize him by printing the asking price on the same menu.  A person in France desirous of making a really ostentatious display of his affluence, on finding a pearl in an oyster, would swallow the pearl and wear the oyster on his shirtfront.  That would stamp him as a person of wealth.