imperial quality by tossing to the waiter a golden louis he had won by betting on a game. The café was the favourite resort of Robespierre, a devoted chess-player, who lived close by in the Rue St. Honoré (No. 398), and of the young Napoleon Bonaparte when waiting on fortune in Paris. The latter is said to have been a rough, impatient player, and a bad loser. Hats were kept on to economise space, and on a winter Sunday afternoon a chair was worth a monarch's ransom: when a champion player entered, hats were raised, and fifty challengers leapt from their seats to offer a game. So proud was the proprietor of the distinction conferred on his café, that long after Rousseau's and Voltaire's deaths he would call to the waiter, "Serve Jean Jacques!" "Look to Voltaire!" if any customers sat down at the tables where the famous philosophers had been wont to sit. While the big game of political chess was being enacted in the streets of Paris during the three days of July 1830, the players of the café are said to have calmly pushed their wooden pieces undisturbed by the fighting outside, during which the front of the building was injured. The original café no longer exists, for in 1852 the Régence was removed from the Place du Palais Royal to the Rue St. Honoré. Last year the writer was startled by an amazing exuviation of the somewhat faded café, which had assumed a new decoration of most brilliant and approved modernity; it now vies in splendour with the cafes of the Boulevards. A few chess-players still linger on and are relegated to a recessed room. Shortly after the foundation of the Régence another café was opened by Widow Marion on the old Carrefour de l'Opéra, where the Academicians gathered and discussed of matters affecting the French language. At Guadot's, on the Place de l'Ecole, was heard the clank of spur and sabre. Soon every phase of Parisian social life found its appropriate coffee-house, and by the end of the eighteenth century some nine hundred cafés were established in the city.