They had thus the guise of a colony of barbers coming up from the gold
diggings, full of nuggets and old clothes.
By previous arrangement, the chair was taken by Andy Plade, supported by
two young ladies, and, after saying a welcome to the guests in elegant
French, he made a significant gesture to the chief waiter. The most
luscious Ostend oysters were at once introduced; they lifted them with
bright silver _fourchettes_ from plates of Sevres porcelain, and each
guest touched his lips afterward with a glass of refined _vermeuth_.
Three descriptions of soup came successively, an amber _Julien_, in
which the microscope would have been baffled to detect one vegetable
fibre, yet it bore all the flavors of the garden; a tureen of _potage a
la Bisque_, in which the rarest and tiniest shell-fish had dissolved
themselves; and at the last a _tortue_, small in quantity, but so
delicious that murmurs of "_encore_" were made.
Morsels of _viande_, so alternated that the appetite was prolonged--each
dish seeming a better variation of the preceding--were helped toward
digestion by the finest vintages of Burgundy; and the luscious _pates de
foie gras_--for which the plumpest geese in Bretagne had been invalids
all their days, and, if gossip be true, submitted in the end to a slow
roasting alive--introduced the fish, which, by the then reformed
Parisian mode, must appear after, not before, the _entree_.
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