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Updated: June 22, 2025
At midnight the supper-rooms were thrown open and we formed into little parties of six, each having a table, nobly served with plate, a lackey in attendance, and a gratifying ice-pail or two of champagne to egayer the supper. It was no small cost to serve five hundred people on silver, and the repast was certainly a princely and magnificent one.
It is well-nigh midnight, the hour when young London is most astir in his favorite haunts; when ragged and well-starved flower-girls, issuing from no one knows where, beset your path through Trafalgar and Liecester squares, and pierce your heart with their pleadings; when the Casinoes of the Haymarket and Picadilly are vomiting into the streets their frail but richly-dressed women; when gaudy supper-rooms, reeking of lobster and bad liquor, are made noisy with the demands of their flauntily-dressed customers; when little girls of thirteen are dodging in and out of mysterious courts and passages leading to and from Liecester square; when wily cabmen, ranged around the "great globe," importune you for a last fare; and when the aristocratic swell, with hectic face and maudlin laugh, saunters from his club-room to seek excitement in the revels at Vauxhall.
Nor, not even after he had mounted to the veranda and stepped inside the house, was there any sign that his visit was expected. He stood in a hall, and in front of him rose a broad flight of stairs that he guessed led to the private supper-rooms. On his left was the restaurant.
I have been up to look at the dance and supper-rooms, for the inauguration ball at the Patent office; and I could not help thinking, what a different scene they presented to my view a while since, fill'd with a crowded mass of the worst wounded of the war, brought in from second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburgh.
But I have just been getting a glass of wine and a biscuit in the little supper-room at the further end there." "What, are there two supper-rooms? I did not know that!" "Only a buffet in the little room at the end, where the papers generally are. It was mainly Ludovico's doing, in order to have less crowd in the supper-room, and perhaps to have a quiet place for a tete-a-tete supper himself. Oh!
Hours passed in this way, until one by one the shops were closed and only the theatres, public bars, and supper-rooms seemed to be open. I turned into a restaurant in the Haymarket, for I had taken no dinner.
We could not catch even a glimpse of the supper-rooms, but we saw a man in the fourth story front room filling dozens of little glass vases, each with its single malmaison, rose, or camellia, and despatching them by an assistant to another part of the house; so we could imagine from this the scheme of decoration at the tables. No, not new, perhaps, but simple and effective.
And now, as I probe this poignant psychological moment, I find that, although I perfectly well realised that all pleasures were then in my reach women, elegant dress, theatres, and supper-rooms, I hardly thought at all of them, and much more of certain drawings from the plaster cast. I would be an artist.
And now people began to move towards the supper-rooms, of which there were two, luxuriously arranged with numerous round tables in the way that was still a novelty when "Lothair" was written. This gave more room for the dancers.
I looked out from the cab window across the river to where, towering above the Embankment, that place of a thousand tragedies, the light of some of London's greatest caravanserais formed a sort of minor constellation. From the subdued blaze that showed the public supper-rooms I looked up to the hundreds of starry points marking the private apartments of those giant inns.
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