Paris, Dec. 27. Paris has not had a real réveillon, or Christmas Eve celebration, for six years. It has just been making up for lost time, and doing it very thoroughly. One could safely affirm that this was the first real feasting that has taken place since the war. In former times the réveillon suppers of oysters, turkey, black puddings and other vanities that are a weariness to the flesh on the morrow, were served only at the big restaurants and brasseness. This year the desire to celebrate the occasion was so general that scores of small restaurant and eating-houses announced suppers and a firm determination to stay open all night; and the patron had the keen satisfaction of telling his customers, just as if he were Emile of the Cafe Extra-Splendide or Henri of the Ambassadeurs Extraordinaires, that they would have to book their tables well in advance if they expected to be served.
one who knows the cost of living in Paris will not need to be told that the prices charged easily outstripped all records. Twenty-five francs a head without wine was the lowest price I have heard of. Fifty or 60 francs was quite an ordinary figure, and the newest and most luxurious of our Elysean hotels calmly asked, and got, 300 franes a head, also without anything in the way of liquid. If, as is highly probable, the cost of living goes on rising throughout the coming year, we may see an invasion of these places by the famished proletariat. This Christmas Eve the sentiment of the masses was voiced only by crowds which collected outside one or two of the best-known night haunts, raising ironical cheers for the guests as they arrived and calling them noureaux riches.
For the following vivid account of one of these suppers I am indebted to a gifted compatriot, Mrs. Adam, whose recently published book "Paris Sees it Throygh" is by far the best account of life in this city during the war—a book that will be for Paris and the great war the equivalent of what Henry Labouchere wrote in 1871
Tae Brace Was Fir.
"J find it difficult to describe this réveillon; I lall back on what I actually saw; for who was I that, like my fellow-heathen I should not rage together? I passed the hour of the Virgin's travail in a place which thought that calling itself a 'Monastery' fulfilled the debt. owed to the birth of Christ. Scarlet. carpets, scarlet walls; red, white and blue lights; silken banners of many colours on the tables; these surroundings greeted the privileged of the ground floor. Upstairs a monasterial decoration remotely resembling choir-stalls, as they would have been if plaster and brown varnish had satisfied
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.