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.
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