This scene depicts the bustling yet refined atmosphere of a bourgeois restaurant during the nineteenth century. While the restaurant started slowly gaining popularity in the eighteenth century, it underwent many revisions before becoming what we think of when we hear the word 'restaurant' today. There were also many economic and social implications involved in the invention and the rise of the restaurant. Throughout the tumulous growth of restaurants, members of the bourgeoisie utilized cuisine to demonstrate their wealth and etiqette through the preparation of banquets that competed with those of the aristocracy. In Victor Hugo's novel, Les Miserables, we can see several representations of the role that restaurants played in revolutionary France.