So far I have mainly mentioned the haunts of Bohemians with the means and inclination for a certain amount of self-indulgence. But in Bohemia occasions preponderated when indulgence in anything beyond bare necessities was an impossibility. The left bank swarmed with cheap refuges for those who had hearty appetites and only a few pence. There was Viot's for the poorest of the poor; Dagneaux's or Magny's in the Rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine--rather superior houses where it was possible to procure a semblance of good cheer; and the Cabaret of Mère Cadet outside the Barrière Montparnasse, where Schaunard had his first meeting with Colline over the stewed rabbit with two heads. This last had a garden which ran along the Montparnasse cemetery, and under the shade of its dusty shrubs not only literary Bohemians but nearly all the young actors and actresses of the Théâtre Montparnasse and the Théâtre du Luxembourg made their scanty meals. You might as well have asked for sphinx there as chicken, says Delvau, the staple dishes being stewed rabbit and _choucroute garnie_. To give a longer catalogue of such places would be neither instructive nor amusing, and their types are easily enough found in the Paris of to-day. There are two, however, that call for special mention, for fiction has carried their fame beyond the days of their material existence. No reader of Balzac's "Illusions Perdues" can have forgotten the description of the cheap eating-house at the corner of the Place de la Sorbonne and the Rue Neuve de Richelieu, with the small panes of glass of its front window, its comforting announcement of _pain à discrétion_, its long tables like those of a monastic refectory, its varieties of cow's flesh and veal, and the hurried air of its diners, who came there to eat and not to loiter. This famous house, where a dinner of three dishes with a _carafon_ of wine or a bottle of beer cost ninepence, where Lucien de Rubempré met Lousteau and made the acquaintance of d'Arthez and his virtuous friends, was the restaurant of Flicoteaux, no product of Balzac's imagination, but a name known to all the strugglers for fame and fortune. It was a sure ground on which to observe Bohemia, not indeed in its greatest indigence, but on the days when there was at least no margin. Thackeray mentions it in his "Paris Sketch-Book," and there is a passage in Lytton Bulwer's "France" which vividly gives the impression produced by Flicoteaux on an English eye: