At the time I am writing of (1868–9) club life in Paris, as in London, had not attained to anything like its present development. Nowadays almost every Parisian shopkeeper in a fair way of business is fired with the ambition to belong to a cercle, but five and twenty years ago the attractions of café life sufficed for the great majority of middle class Frenchmen. The visitor to Paris could not fail to observe the gathering which took place on the boulevards every afternoon between the hours of four and six. The cafés which had been comparatively deserted during the earlier part of the day then became crowded to excess. Incipient poets and artists descended from Montmartre, ces dames trooped down from the Quartier Bréda, the petits crevés and gandins—as the mashers of the time were called—sauntered forth from their entresols, and what was commonly known as the hour of absinthe then began.

In those days each of the boulevard cafés, between the Faubourg Montmartre and the Eue Scribe, had its distinctive clientele. Nobody but a military man would have dreamt of entering the Helder before midnight, financiers and stock-jobbers predominated at the Café Cardinal and the Café Gretry, actors and dramatic authors at the Café des Variétés and the Café de Suède, journalists at the Café de Madrid and the Café de Mulhouse, dandies at Tortoni's and the Café Riche, and Englishmen and their transatlantic cousins at the Grande café and the Café de la Paix.