Café Frascati

**Status:** Defunct; founded in 1789 and later demolished. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Frascati)) **Literary passage:** “Those words, spoken not four paces from Frascati's, were magnetic in their effect.” — Honoré de Balzac, *Lost Illusions*. ([gutenberg.org](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13159/pg13159-images.html)) **Why it matters:** Frascati is the boulevard underworld in polished form: gaming tables, spectacle, expensive temptation, and social exposure. Balzac uses it as a machine that pulls characters toward ruin while still looking glamorous; the place is both gastronomic and predatory. The restaurant-café therefore plays a double role in nineteenth-century fiction, as a fashionable meeting-place and a trapdoor into debt, performance, and moral dissipation. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Frascati))

Corner of Boulevard Montmartre and Rue de Richelieu, Paris, France. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Frascati))