Heretofore had been the very heart of all France--her hot blood had leaped hottest here, sending the throb of its pulsing life to uttermost valley and hamlet of this vast realm. In this little coffee-house, now fallen into neglect, had met together the great wits of France, her master-minds. Nay, rumour hath it that here indeed was very name of coffee-house begotten, begun, made manifest; for here was first given, to France, coffee to chase the dinner and to comfort the stomach of France. Hither wandering, our Orange William being just come to the throne of England, there had entered into possession, in curly long peruke and somewhat dandified exterior to his shrewd inner man, Master François Procope, in that same year that the Comedy of France took possession of the then Théâtre Français over the way; and, forthwith, glory and fame came to his Café Procope--the wits gathering there to the sipping of coffee and making of elaborate waggeries, not without wrangle, and swords whipped from sullen scabbards, and the like follies manifold. Here had descended from sedan-chair the bent lean figure of Voltaire, his play _Irene_ being in rehearsal opposite, and sipped the cup of coffee that was now become the mode in France, the maker of mode. The keen eyes had roved over these panelled walls--here he had stood sneering away the tawdry pretence of popes and kings and laughing to death the diseased and putrid hereditary aristocracy of France. These walls knew the lean mocker well. In yonder sombre little room you shall see still the chair and table at which he was used to sit and write his vitriol jibes, that were the severe medicine for the corrupt body of the decayed nobility. Here, in fantastic riot, had Rousseau been carried shoulder high after a dramatic triumph; here had Condorcet, in intervals of writing upon the Integral Calculus, been not above horseplay; here had sat Diderot, scheming his encyclopædic schemes, talking tomfool solemn travesties of dangerous talk with winking eye upon his fellow-wags, to lead on the over-zealous police agents to the fussy discovery of large mares’ nests of conspiracy.