The Restaurant "Au Bon Bourgeois" faced on a dingy Soho street, the newly painted white door flanked by myrtle-trees in tubs. The entrance was through a narrow passage which led to a low room in the rear, divided from the one in front by a partition of plate glass.
The latter place was reserved for the Café, where marble tables were closely packed on a red-tiled and sanded floor; and it boasted its own separate entrance, carefully remote from the other. It gave a Bohemian atmosphere to the newly opened Restaurant. For the diners in the room beyond could watch the ever-changing scene—undisturbed by smoke or chatter—like a slice of French life cut bodily from the gay capital over seas.
The proprietor had been head-waiter in a fashionable London hôtel; a shrewd Swiss—known as "Monsieur Augu
