It is pleasant to read of Alexandre Dumas' culinary skill, though the repetition of the fact has appeared in the works of well-nigh every writer who has written of the Paris of the fifties and sixties. The dinners at his apartments in the Boulevard Malesherbes were worthy of Soyer or even of Brillat-Savarin himself in his best days. In his last "Causeries Culinaires," the author of "Monte Cristo" tells us that the Bourbon kings were specially fond of soup. "The family," he writes, "from Louis XIV. to the last of their race who reigned in France, have been great eaters. The Grand Monarque commenced his dinner by two and sometimes three different kinds of soup; Louis-Philippe by four plates of various species of this comestible; in the fifth plate his Majesty usually mixed portions of the four varieties he had eaten, and appeared to enjoy this singular culinary combination." Dumas' reputation as an epicure must have been formed early; he describes in his "Mémoires" how, on a certain occasion, when he had first become installed in Paris, he met a gentleman, Charles Nodier, in the stalls of the Porte St. Martin, who was reading a well-worn Elzevir entitled "La Pastissier Française." He says, "I address him.... 'Pardon my impertinence, but are you very fond of eggs?' 'Why so?' 'That book you are reading, does it not give recipes for cooking eggs in sixty different ways?' 'It does.' 'If I could but procure a copy.' 'But this is an Elzevir,' says my neighbour." The Parisian is without a rival as an epicure and a _gastronome_, and he associates no stigma with the epithet. In Anglo-Saxon lands the reverse is the case, though why it is hard to see. "Frog-legs" came to be a tidbit in the _tables d'hôte_ of New York and London many years ago, but sympathy has been withheld from the luscious _escargot_. There be those fearless individuals who by reason of the _entente cordiale_ have tasted of him and found him good, but learning that in the cookshops of Paris they have at last learned to fabricate them to equal the native grown article of Bourgogne, have tabooed them once for all, and threaten to withdraw their liking for that other succulent dainty, the frog. At any rate, the schoolboy idea that the Parisian's staple fare is snails and frogs is quite exploded, and small wonder it is that Anglo-Saxon palates never became wholly inured to them. But what about England's peculiar dishes? Marrow-bones and stewed eels, for instance? * * * * * Dumas' familiarity with the good things of the table is nowhere more strongly advanced than in the opening chapter of "The Queen's Necklace," wherein the author recounts the incident of "the nobleman and his _maître d'hôtel_." The scene was laid in 1784, and runs as follows: "The marshal turned toward his _maître d'hôtel_, and said, 'Sir, I suppose you have prepared me a good dinner?' "'Certainly, your Grace.' "'You have the list of my guests?'