Et comme l'a dit Brillat Savarin "Le plaisir de la table ne nuit pas aux autres plaisirs." Au contraire, qui sait si _indirectement_ je ne suis pas le papa de bien des Bébés rieurs, ou la cause au moins de certaines aventures que mes jolies clientes n'évoquent qu'en souriant derrière leur éventail? JOSEPH _Directeur du Savoy Restaurant, Londres, et du Restaurant de Marivaux, Paris._ XLIV THE SAVOY TO-DAY After the Houses of Parliament, the Law Courts, the National Gallery, St Paul's and Westminster Abbey, the Savoy Hotel is probably the building that the well-to-do Londoner knows best. He cannot walk or drive down the Strand without his eye being caught by its milk-white frontage on that tumultuous street, and by the stern-faced gilded warrior above the courtyard entrance who leans on a shield that bears an heraldic bird, which I have no doubt is a very noble eagle, but which looks as though it had been plucked. When he comes home from abroad he, if he is looking to the right as he crosses the railway bridge to Charing Cross, sees the garden front of the hotel, with its balconies and many windows, and its flag aflutter, and recalling many good dinners in the past, looks forward to many others in the immediate future. All the preliminaries to a dinner at the Savoy are pleasantly dignified. The drive into the courtyard, the cessation of noise as the wheels of car or carriage come upon the india-rubber paving under the glazed roof, the cream and dark green marbles of the entrance front, the trellis and flowers outside the Café, all contribute to pleasant anticipation; and once inside the doors, the hall panelled with dark woods, the glimpse through a long window of the light-coloured reading-room, and the progress down a flight of crimson-carpeted stairs, with walls of buff and brown marble on either side, form the first stage of the diner's progress to the restaurant. Servants in the handsome state livery they wear in the evening--French grey and dark blue--take one's coat and hat, and it always gives me a moment of gratification that I am such an old habitué that it is not considered necessary to give me a ticket. Then if one is a host there is nothing to do except to sit in one of the comfortable chairs in this ante-chamber and to look alternately up the crimson stairs to see whether one's guests are arriving and down another flight of stairs across the great lounge to the crystal screen of great panes framed in gilt metal which is the transparent barrier between the restaurant and its approaches.