Of course, with all this increase of luxury, you must expect an increase of expense: but if you do not now dine here at so reasonable a rate as formerly, at least you are sumptuously served for your money. If you wish to dine frugally, there are numbers of _restaurateurs_, where you may be decently served with _potage_, _bouilli_, an _entrée_, an _entremet_, bread and desert, for the moderate sum of from twenty-six to thirty _sous_. The addresses of these cheap eating-houses, if they are not put into your hand in the street, will present themselves to your eye, at the corner of almost every wall in Paris. Indeed, all things considered, I am of opinion that the difference in the expense of a dinner at a _restaurateur's_ at present, and what it was ten or eleven years ago, is not more than in the due proportion of the increased price of provisions, house-rent, and taxes. The difference the most worthy of remark in these rendezvous of good cheer, unquestionably consists in the company who frequent them. In former times, the dining-rooms of the fashionable _restaurateurs_ were chiefly resorted to by young men of good character and connexions, just entering into life, superannuated officers and batchelors in easy circumstances, foreigners on their travels, &c. At this day, these are, in a great measure, succeeded by stock-jobbers, contractors, fortunate speculators, and professed gamblers. In defiance of the old proverb, "_le ventre est le plus grand de tous nos ennemis,_" guttling and guzzling is the rage of these upstarts. It is by no means uncommon to see many of them begin their dinner by swallowing six or seven dozen of oysters and a bottle of white wine, by way of laying a foundation for a _potage en tortue_ and eight or ten other rich dishes. Such are the modern parvenus, whose craving appetites, in eating and drinking, as in every thing else, are not easily satiated.