I immediately resolved to accomplish such a design on the morrow. But I had not to wait so long for the renewal of the acquaintance. Having been charged by George IV. with private letters to the King which an audience had already enabled me to deliver, on that day, in honour of so august an introduction, I was to dine at the Tuileries.

My mind misgave me, as I proceeded up that self-same stair-case where the limbs of the unfortunate Louis XVI. and his Queen so often dragged themselves while prisoners of state in their own palace,-my mind misgave me, I say, that the royal cook might have been changed on the accession of Charles X. as well as the royal confessor and physician.Du tout!—His Majesty had more faith in the orthodoxy of his royal predecessor's faith as a gastronome, than as a Christian; and the eating and drinking of the Tuileries were consequently as laudable as ever.

I have often thought,—(ye readers who eat

to live instead of wisely living to eat, pardon the digression!) that the popular fable of the marmite perpétuelle which has been stewing away for three centuries in some popular gargote of the quartier des Innocens, ought to be nationally realized by the endowment of a royal cuisine à perpétuité for national enlightenment; unsusceptible of revolutionary changes, unattackable by infernal machines. It is awful to consider the influence exercised by the governmental vicissitudes of the last half century on the gastronomy of France!-Other sciences have advanced; for they had their Observatory, their Jardin des Plantes,their Ecole de Médecine ;-and whether of royal or national designation, the same cases of beetles, the same dissecting rooms, assisted the progress of natural history and physiology,— the same old telescopes and orreries tended to the discovery of new planetary systems. Even during the Reign of Terror, Martin l'ours montait à l'arbre; and the Board of Lon

gitude pursued its sapient observations on moonshine, in the official star-gazery at the Barrière d'Enfer.

But what is to be expected by the stomach of la grande nation so long as the traditions of its cuisine share the fluctuating fortunes dependent upon the foolishness of its anointed Sovereigns?-Napoleon, a great man in his way, bolted his food like an American, and knew not roast from boiled.-Robespierre and Marat probably eat cutlets of enfant Normand en papillotte, or slices of raw young lady, en vinaigrette. Even Louis XVI. fed coarsely; and from the days of Vatel to our own, nothing can have been more uncertain in France than the fortunes of cookery.-The edge of the sword and the guillotine have superseded the prosperity of the carving-knife.

Let some enlightened legislator, therefore, intent upon restoring to la belle France her ascendancy over the appetites of Europe, establish and endow a college for the cultivation

of gastronomy in all its branches;-with professorial chairs of chemistry and anatomy, and every other science connected with the interests of degustation; so that the nation whose dinners and people were formerly considered the best dressed in the universe, may once more toss up an omelet against the world.

The political results of such a measure are scarcely to be comprehended at a glance.Time was, that not a Sovereign in Europe but entertained a Frenchman in his kitchen; and we all know that the cuisine of a Sovereign is the nearest approach to his heart.-England, Russia, Spain, however they might abhor the plumage of the Gallic eagle or Gallic cock,―ate unflinchingly of the Gallic dinde truffée; and while barbarous Russ, or crack-jaw German,— Spanish or Portuguese, issued from the state paper offices of Petersburg, Vienna, Madrid or Lisbon, French alone was admitted into that only infallible state paper,-the royal menu of those cuisinier impérial-ridden capitals!

It is not so now.-The Sovereigns of Portugal have returned to their garlic, and Schönbrunn to its wallowing in sauerkraut, solely because the interests of the solemn science have been destroyed by political vicissitudes; till the classical school of Parisian cookery has become as degenerate as Shakespeare réchauffé by David Garrick.

To return however to the last days of Pompeii-the dinner table of Charles X.

Right opposite to me at table sat a heavy man, whose eyes were like those of a parboiled fish, whose face seemed moulded in putty, so ponderously stedfast were its muscles, and who emulated in proportions the model of the Elephant of the Bastille ;-yet in whose person I seemed to discern features of a former acquaintance. I was not mistaken. This very heavy man was Monsieur le Comte de St. Gratien, Ministre de l'instruction publique.

And Madame!-I was beginning to be as full of curiosity as the fumet of the purée