But for those who can appreciate plain fare, the little restaurant in the Rue des Ours will answer well their midday needs. There are few things more difficult to get than plain things done to perfection at a restaurant which thinks great guns--I mean great _entrées_--of itself. The most appetising breakfast dish I have ever had in my life--even now my lips long to make a certain appreciative sound in memory of it!--consisted of certain slices of bacon cooked at a little fire on an island, during a camping-out excursion on the river near Marlow some years ago. I may as well add that I had no share in the cooking of it, only in the eating of it. Everybody sits at the little, narrow, long tables which are set at intervals over the little room with its sanded floor, at my restaurant, with the exception of those who sit at marble ones, which are there also, only in less numbers. I remember one special day when a paper had provided great food for excitement for two men who sat smoking in a corner and discussing matters of state over two cups of black coffee, which had been aided and abetted by two liqueurs. The woman, who was the middle-woman between the cook--or manufacturer--and the consumer, went to and fro rapidly, shouting from time to time, "_Plats!_" with the names of those required, with an added and imperative "_Vite! Vite!_" From time to time a burning match from the pipes of the two conspirators fell as softly on the sanded floor as, on a November night, a shooting star sinks, and is extinguished on the dark sky. Presently, a bustling little man in a wide-awake entered with a huge pile of pink and yellow advertisement leaflets, it recommended some _horloges_, which had but recently swum "into the ken" of the inhabitants who live on the outskirts of Rue des Ours. Immediately on entering, he saluted with confident and easy grace, and handed round with characteristic aplomb and dignity, the leaflets with which he identified himself for the time, though having no connection with the business with which they were concerned, save that of a purely temporary one. No Englishman could deliver leaflets like that. He would never take the trouble to attempt unfamiliar "airs and graces" to push someone else's concern. He would deliver simply and baldly, and would consider that good measure for his pay. But the Frenchman's is "good measure running over," and his manner in doing it is half the battle, though the Englishman cannot understand how this can be so. I remember in this connection, an Englishwoman, who had lived much in France, saying to me the other day, _à propos_ of Frenchwomen: "They make charming speeches and compliments which one likes exceedingly to hear, until you find suddenly in some practical matter, some emergency, that they really mean nothing at all by them,--well then, when I recognised that, I just felt as if I'd no ground to go on at all, and I didn't care any longer for any of their professions.