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Updated: May 24, 2025
People used their own "kitchenettes" for breakfast and lunch, but there was a table-d'hote arrangement for dinner on the ground floor; and after dinner bridge was played all evening, an attraction powerful with Fanny. She had "made all the arrangements," she reported, and nervously appealed for approval, asking if she hadn't shown herself "pretty practical" in such matters.
It was open and the proprietress, who was knitting, told me the table-d'hôte dinner was ready. Not wishing to miss dinner, I halted an aged citizen who was fleeing from the city and asked him to carry a note to the American consul inviting him to dine. But the aged man said the consulate was close to where the shells were falling and that to approach it was as much as his life was worth.
The most slipshod descriptions of every thing that has been described before; sketches of peasant character taken from the beggars at the roadside; national traits taken from the commonplaces of the table-d'hôte, and court secrets copied from the newspapers all are disgorged into the Journal.
The table-d'hôte dinner was just over, and everybody had come out to enjoy the air, till it was time for the dancing to begin.
To my knowledge I had never consciously eaten vitamines unless a vitamine was what gave guaranteed strictly fresh string beans, as served at a table-d'hôte restaurant, that peculiar flavor. Here all along I had figured it was the tinny taste of the can, which shows how ignorant one may be touching on vitally important matters.
We reached the hotel just in time for twelve o'clock table-d'hôte breakfast, and, after an acceptable rest, sallied forth again, this time on donkeys, to see the bazaars and the sunset from the citadel. We went across squares and gardens and through wide streets, for, alas! Cairo is being rapidly Haussmannised.
As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d'hôte shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal; as suites of rooms are closed, carpets taken up, and waiters sent away; those boarders who are staying on, en pension, until the next year's full re-opening, cannot help being somewhat affected by all these flittings and farewells, this eager discussion of plans, routes, and fresh quarters, this daily shrinkage in the stream of comradeship.
I found that I had arrived in the very "nick of time:" for just as I returned from the stable, and was entering the verandah of the hotel, I heard the bell calling its guests to supper. There was no ado made about me: neither landlord or waiter met me with a word; and following the stream of "boarders" or travellers who had arrived before me, I took my seat at the common table-d'hote.
Nothing, in general, can be more adverse to the quiet, the ease, or the good-sense of English manners. The table-d'hote is essentially vulgar; and no excellence of cuisine, or completeness of equipment, can prevent it from exhibiting proof of its original purpose, namely to give a cheap dinner to a miscellaneous rabble.
As for the inn business, my governor never served such atrocious meals at his table-d'hote as you serve to your guests at state banquets, and don't you forget it." Whether these arguments overcame Bonaparte's scruples or not is not known, but a few days later he relented, and Caroline became the wife of Murat. "I never regretted it," said Bonaparte, some years later.
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