About Paris :: II THE SHOW-PLACES OF PARIS NIGHT

II THE SHOW-PLACES OF PARIS NIGHT

PARIS is the only city in the world which the visitor from the outside positively refuses to take seriously. He may have come to Paris with an earnest purpose to study art, or to investigate the intricacies of French law, or the historical changes of the city; or, if it be a woman, she may have come to choose a trousseau; but no matter how serious his purpose may be, there is always some one part of each day when the visitor rests from his labors and smiles indulgently and does as the Parisians do. Whether the city or the visitor is responsible for this, whether Paris adopts the visitor, or the visitor adapts himself to his surroundings, it is impossible to say. But there is certainly no other capital of the world in which the stranger so soon takes on the local color, in which he becomes so soon acclimated, and which brings to light in him so many new and unsuspected capacities for enjoyment and adventure.

Americans go to London for social triumph or to float railroad shares, to Rome for art's sake, and to Berlin to study music and to economize; but they go to Paris to enjoy themselves. And there are no young men of any nation who enter into the accomplishment of this so heartily and so completely as does the young American. It is hardly possible for the English youth to appreciate Paris perfectly, because he has been brought up to believe that "one Englishman can thrash three Frenchmen," and because he holds a nation that talks such an absurd language in some contempt; hence he is frequently while there irritable and rude, and jostles men at the public dances, and in other ways asserts his dignity.

But the American goes to Paris as though returning to his inheritance and to his own people. He approaches it with the friendly confidence of a child. Its language holds no terrors for him; and he feels himself fully equipped if he can ask for his "edition," and say, "Cocher, allez Henry's tout sweet." There is nothing so joyous and confiding as the American during his first visit to the French metropolis. He has been told by older men of the gay, glad days of the Second Empire, and by his college chum of the summer of the last exposition, and he enters Paris determined to see all that any one else has ever seen, and to outdo all that any one else has ever done, and to stir that city to its suburbs. He saves his time, his money, and his superfluous energy for this visit, and the most amusing part of it is that he always leaves Paris fully assured that he has enjoyed himself while there more thoroughly than any one else has ever done, and that the city will require two or three months' rest before it can readjust itself after the shock and wonder due to his meteoric flight through its limits. London he dismisses in a week as a place in which you can get good clothes at moderate prices, and which supports some very entertaining music-halls; but Paris, he tells you, ecstatically, when he meets you on the boulevards or at the banker's, where he is drawing grandly on his letter of credit, is "the greatest place on earth," and he adds, as evidence of the truth of this, that he has not slept in three weeks. He is unsurpassed in his omnivorous capacity for sight-seeing, and in his ability to make himself immediately and contentedly at home. There is a story which illustrates this that is told by a young American banker who has been living in Paris for the last six years. He met one day on the boulevards an old college friend of his, and welcomed him with pleasure.

"You must let me be your guide," the banker said. "I have been here so long now that I know just what you ought to see, and I shall enjoy seeing it with you as much as though it were for the first time. When did you come?" The new arrival had reached Paris only three days before, and said that he was ready to see all that it had to show. "You have nothing to do to-night, then?" asked the banker. "Well, we will drop in at the gardens and the cafÉs chantants. There is nothing like them anywhere." His friend said he had made the tour of the gardens on the night of his arrival, but that he would be glad to revisit them. But that being the case, the banker would rather take him to the cafÉs—"The Black Cat," and Bruant's, and "The Dead Rat." These his friend had visited on his second evening.

"Oh, well, we can cross the river, then, and I will show you some slumming," said the banker. "You should see the places where the thieves go—the ChÂteau Rouge and PÈre Lunette."

"I went there last night," said the new-comer.

The man who had lived six years in Paris took the stranger by the arm and asked him if he was sure he was not engaged for that evening. "For if you are not," he said, "you might take me with you and show me some of the sights!"

The American visitor is not only undaunted by the strange language, but unimpressed by the signs of years of vivid history about him. He sandwiches a glimpse at the tomb of Napoleon, and a trip on a penny steamer up the Seine, and back again to the Morgue, with a rush through the Cathedral of Notre Dame, between the hours of his breakfast and the race-meeting at Longchamps the same afternoon. Nothing of present interest escapes him, and nothing bores him. He assimilates and grasps the method of Parisian existence with a rapidity that leaves you wondering in the rear, and at the end of a week can tell you that you should go to one side of the Grand HÔtel for cigars, and to the other to have your hat blocked. He knows at what hour Yvette Guilbert comes on at the Ambassadeurs', and on which mornings of the week the flower-market is held around the Madeleine. While you are still hunting for apartments he has visited the sewers under the earth, and the Eiffel Tower over the earth, and eaten his dinner in a tree at Robinson's, and driven a coach to Versailles over the same road upon which the mob tramped to bring Marie Antoinette back to Paris, without being the least impressed by the contrast which this offers to his own progress. He develops also a daring and reckless spirit of adventure, which would never have found vent in his native city or town, or in any other foreign city or town. It is in the air, and he enters into the childish good-nature of the place and of the people after the same manner that the head of a family grows young again at his class reunion.

One Harvard graduate arrived in Paris summer before last during those riots which originated with the students, and were carried on by the working-people, and which were cynically spoken of on the boulevards as the Revolution of Sarah Brown. In any other city he would have watched these ebullitions from the outskirts of the mob, or remained a passive spectator of what did not concern him, but being in Paris, and for the first time, he mounted a barricade, and made a stirring address to the students behind it in his best Harvard French, and was promptly cut over the head by a gendarme and conveyed to a hospital, where he remained during his stay in the gay metropolis. But he still holds that Paris is the finest place that he has ever seen. There was another American youth who stood up suddenly in the first row of seats at the Nouveau Cirque and wagered the men with him that he would jump into the water with which the circus ring is flooded nightly, and swim, "accoutred as he was," to the other side. They promptly took him at his word, and the audience of French bourgeois were charmed by the spectacle of a young gentleman in evening dress swimming calmly across the tank, and clambering leisurely out on the other side. He was loudly applauded for this, and the management sent the "American original" home in a fiacre. In any other city he would have been hustled by the ushers and handed over to the police.

Those show-places of Paris which are seen only at night, and of which one hears the most frequently, are curiously few in number. It is their quality and not their quantity which has made them talked about. It is quite as possible to tell off on the fingers of two hands the names and the places to which the visitor to Paris will be taken as it is quite impossible to count the number of times he will revisit them.

In London there are so many licensed places of amusement that a man might visit one every night for a year and never enter the same place twice, and those of unofficial entertainment are so numerous that men spend years in London and never hear of nooks and corners in it as odd and strange as Stevenson's Suicide Club or Fagan's School for Thieves—public-houses where blind beggars regain their sight and the halt and lame walk and dance, music-halls where the line is strictly drawn between the gentleman who smokes a clay pipe and the one who smokes a brier, and arenas like the Lambeth School of Arms, from which boy pugilists and coal-heavers graduate to the prize-ring, and such thoroughfares as Ship's Alley, where in the space of fifty yards twenty murders have occurred in three years.

In Paris there are virtually no slums at all. The dangerous classes are there, and there is an army of beggars and wretches as poor and brutal as are to be found at large in any part of the world, but the Parisian criminal has no environment, no setting. He plays the part quite as effectively as does the London or New York criminal, but he has no appropriate scenery or mechanical effects.

If he wishes to commit murder, he is forced to make the best of the well-paved, well-lighted, and cleanly swept avenue. He cannot choose a labyrinth of alleyways and covered passages, as he could were he in Whitechapel, or a net-work of tenements and narrow side streets, as he could were he in the city of New York.

Young men who have spent a couple of weeks in Paris, and who have been taken slumming by paid guides, may possibly question the accuracy of this. They saw some very awful places indeed—one place they remember in particular, called the ChÂteau Rouge, and another called PÈre Lunette. The reason they so particularly remember these two places is that these are the only two places any one ever sees, and they do not recall the fact that the neighboring houses were of hopeless respectability, and that they were able to pick up a cab within a hundred yards of these houses. Young Frenchmen who know all the worlds of Paris tell you mysteriously of these places, and of how they visited them disguised in blue smocks and guarded by detectives; detectives themselves speak to you of them as a fisherman speaks to you of a favorite rock or a deep hole where you can always count on finding fish, and every newspaper correspondent who visits Paris for the first time writes home of them as typical of Parisian low life. They are as typical of Parisian low life as the animals in the Zoo in Central Park are typical of the other animals we see drawing stages and horse-cars and broughams on the city streets, and you require the guardianship of a detective when you visit them as much as you would need a policeman in Mulberry Bend or at an organ recital in Carnegie Hall. They are show-places, or at least they have become so, and though they would no doubt exist without the aid of the tourist or the man about town of intrepid spirit, they count upon him, and are prepared for him with set speeches, and are as ready to show him all that there is to see as are the guides around the Capitol at Washington.

I should not wish to be misunderstood as saying that these are the only abodes of poverty and the only meeting-places for criminals in Paris, which would of course be absurd, but they are the only places of such interest that the visitor sees. There are other places, chiefly wine-shops in cellars in the districts of la GlaciÈre, Montrouge, or la Villette, but unless an inspector of police leads you to them, and points out such and such men as thieves, you would not be able to distinguish any difference between them and the wine-shops and their habituÉs north of the bridges and within sound of the boulevards. The paternal municipality of Paris, and the thought it has spent in laying out the streets, and the generous manner in which it has lighted them, are responsible for the lack of slums. Houses of white stucco, and broad, cleanly swept boulevards with double lines of gas lamps and shade trees, extend, without consideration for the criminal, to the fortifications and beyond, and the thief and bully whose interests are so little regarded is forced in consequence to hide himself underground in cellars or in the dark shadows of the Bois de Boulogne at night. This used to appeal to me as one of the most peculiar characteristics of Paris—that the most desperate poverty and the most heartless of crimes continued in neighborhoods notorious chiefly for their wickedness, and yet which were in appearance as well-ordered and commonplace-looking as the new model tenements in Harlem or the trim working-men's homes in the factory districts of Philadelphia.

The ChÂteau Rouge was originally the house of some stately family in the time of Louis XIV. They will tell you there that it was one of the mistresses of this monarch who occupied it, and will point to the frescos of one room to show how magnificent her abode then was. This tradition may or may not be true, but it adds an interest to the house, and furnishes the dramatic contrast to its present wretchedness. It is a tall building painted red, and set back from the street in a court. There are four rooms filled with deal tables on the first floor, and a long counter with the usual leaden top. "Whoever buys a glass of wine here may sleep with his or her head on the table, or lie at length up-stairs on the floor of that room where one still sees the stucco cupids of the fine lady's boudoir. It is now a lodging-house for beggars and for those who collect the ends of castaway cigars and cigarettes on the boulevards, and possibly for those who thieve in a small way. By ten o'clock each night the place is filled with men and women sleeping heavily at the tables, with their heads on their arms, or gathered together for miserable company, whispering and gossiping, each sipping jealously of his glass of red wine."

THE CHÂTEAU ROUGE

There is a little room at the rear, the walls of which are painted with scenes of celebrated murders, and the portraits of the murderers, of anarchists, and of their foes the police. A sharp-faced boy points to these with his cap, and recites his lesson in a high singsong, and in an argot which makes all he says quite unintelligible. He is interesting chiefly because the men of whom he speaks are heroes to him, and he roars forth the name of "Antoine, who murdered the policeman Jervois," as though he were saying Gambetta, the founder of the republic, and with the innocent confidence that you will share with him in his enthusiasm. The pictures are ghastly things, in which the artist has chiefly done himself honor in the generous use of scarlet paint for blood, and in the way he has shown how by rapid gradations the criminal descends from well-dressed innocence to ragged viciousness, until he reaches the steps of the guillotine at Roquette. It is a miserable chamber of horrors, in which the heavy-eyed absinthe-drinkers raise their heads to stare mistily at the visitor, and to listen for the hundredth time to the boy's glib explanation of each daub in the gallery around them, from the picture of the vermilion-cheeked young woman who caused the trouble, to an imaginative picture of Montfaucon covered with skulls, where, many years in the past, criminals swung in chains.

The cafÉ of PÈre Lunette is just around several sharp corners from the ChÂteau Rouge. It was originally presided over by an old gentleman who wore spectacles, which gave his shop its name. It is a resort of the lowest class of women and men, and its walls are painted throughout with faces and scenes a little better in execution than those in the ChÂteau Rouge, and a little worse in subject. It is a very small place to enjoy so wide-spread a reputation, and its front room is uninteresting, save for a row of casks resting on their sides, on the head of each of which is painted the portrait of some noted Parisian, like Zola, Eiffel, or Boulanger. The young proprietor fell upon us as his natural prey the night we visited the place, and drove us before him into a room in the rear of the wineshop. He was followed as a matter of course by a dozen men in blouses, and as many bareheaded women, who placed themselves expectantly at the deal tables, and signified what it was they wished to drink before going through the form of asking us if we meant to pay for it. They were as ready to do their part of the entertainment as the actors of the theatre are ready to go on when the curtain rises, and there was nothing about any of them to suggest that he or she was there for any other reason than the hope of a windfall in the person of a stranger who would supply him or her with money or liquor. A long-haired boy with a three days' growth of hair upon his chin, of whom the proprietor spoke proudly as a poet, recited in verse a long descriptive story of what the pictures on the wall were intended to represent, and another youth, with a Vandyck beard and slouched hat, and curls hanging to his shoulder, sang Aristide Bruant's song of "Saint Lazare." All of the women of the place belonged to the class which spends many months of each year in that prison. The music of the song is in a minor key, and is strangely sad and eerie. It is the plaint of a young girl writing to her lover from within the walls of the prison, begging him to be faithful to her while she is gone, and Bruant cynically makes her designate three or four feminine friends as those whose society she particularly desires him to avoid. The women, all of whom sang with sodden seriousness, may not have appreciated how well the words of the song applied to themselves, but you could imagine that they did, and this gave to the moment and the scene a certain touch of interest. Apart from this the place was dreary, and the pictures indecent and stupid.

There is much more of interest in the CafÉ of Aristide Bruant, on the Boulevard Rochechouart. Bruant is the modern FranÇois Villon. He is the poet of the people, and more especially of the criminal classes. He sings the virtues or the lack of virtue of the several districts of Paris, with the life of which he claims an intimate familiarity. He is the bard of the bully, and of the thief, and of the men who live on the earnings of women. He is unquestionably one of the most picturesque figures in Paris, but his picturesqueness is spoiled in some degree by the evident fact that he is conscious of it. He is a poet, but he is very much more of a poseur.

AT BRUANT'S

Bruant began by singing his own songs in the cafÉ chantant in the Champs ÉlysÉes, and celebrating in them the life of Montmartre and the Place de la RÉpublique, and of the Bastille. He has done for the Parisian bully what Albert Chevallier has done for the coster of Whitechapel, and Edward Harrigan for the East Side of New York, but with the important difference that the Frenchman claims to be one of the class of whom he writes, and the audacity with which he robs stray visitors to his cafÉ would seem to justify his claims. There is no question as to the strength in his poems, nor that he gives you the spirit of the places which he describes, and that he sees whatever is dramatic and characteristic in them. But the utter heartlessness with which he writes of the wickedness of his friends the souteneurs rings false, and sounds like an affectation. One of the best specimens of his verse is that in which he tells of the Bois de Boulogne at night, when the woods, he says, cloak all manner of evil things, and when, instead of the rustling of the leaves, you hear the groans of the homeless tossing in their sleep under the sky, and calls for help suddenly hushed, and the angry cries of thieves who have fallen out over their spoils and who fight among themselves; or the hurried footsteps of a belated old gentleman hastening home, and followed silently in the shadow of the trees by men who fall upon and rob him after the fashion invented and perfected by le PÈre FranÇois. Others of his poems are like the most realistic paragraphs of L'Assommoir and Nana put into verse.

Bruant himself is a young man, and an extremely handsome one. He wears his yellow hair separated in the middle and combed smoothly back over his ears, and dresses at all times in brown velvet, with trousers tucked in high boots, and a red shirt and broad sombrero. He has had the compliment paid him of the most sincere imitation, for a young man made up to look exactly like him now sings his songs in the cafÉs, even the characteristically modest one in which Bruant slaps his chest and exclaims at the end of each verse: "And I? I am Bruant." The real Bruant sings every night in his own cafÉ, but as his under-study at the Ambassadeurs' is frequently mistaken for him, he may be said to have accomplished the rather difficult task of being in two places at once.

Bruant's cafÉ is a little shop barred and black without, and guarded by a commissionnaire dressed to represent a policeman. If you desire to enter, this man raps on the door, and Bruant, when he is quite ready, pushes back a little panel, and scrutinizes the visitor through the grated opening. If he approves of you he unbars the door, with much jangling of chains and rasping of locks, and you enter a tiny shop, filled with three long tables, and hung with all that is absurd and fantastic in decoration, from ChÉret's bill-posters to unframed oil-paintings, and from beer-mugs to plaster death-masks. There is a different salutation for every one who enters this cafÉ, in which all those already in the place join in chorus. A woman is greeted by a certain burst of melody, and a man by another, and a soldier with easy satire, as representing the government, by an imitation of the fanfare which is blown by the trumpeters whenever the President appears in public. There did not seem to be any greeting which exactly fitted our case, so Bruant waved us to a bench, and explained to his guests, with a shrug: "These are two gentlemen from the boulevards who have come to see the thieves of Montmartre. If they are quiet and well-behaved we will not rob them." After this somewhat discouraging reception we, in our innocence, sat perfectly still, and tried to think we were enjoying ourselves, while we allowed ourselves to be robbed by waiters and venders of songs and books without daring to murmur or protest.

Bruant is assisted in the entertainment of his guests by two or three young men who sing his songs, the others in the room joining with them. Every third number is sung by the great man himself, swaggering up and down the narrow limits of the place, with his hands sunk deep in the pockets of his coat, and his head rolling on his shoulders. At the end of each verse he withdraws his hands, and brushes his hair back over his ears, and shakes it out like a mane. One of his perquisites as host is the privilege of saluting all of the women as they leave, of which privilege he avails himself when they are pretty, or resigns it and bows gravely when they are not. It is amusing to notice how the different women approach the door when it is time to go, and how the escort of each smiles proudly when the young man deigns to bend his head over the lips of the girl and kiss her good-night.

The cafÉ of the Black Cat is much finer and much more pretentious than Bruant's shop, and is of wider fame. It is, indeed, of an entirely different class, but it comes in here under the head of the show-places of Paris at night. It was originally a sort of club where journalists and artists and poets met round the tables of a restaurant-keeper who happened to be a patron of art as well, and fitted out his cafÉ with the canvases of his customers, and adopted their suggestions in the arrangement of its decoration. The outside world of Paris heard of these gatherings at the Black Cat, as the cafÉ and club were called, and of the wit and spirit of its habituÉs, and sought admittance to its meetings, which was at first granted as a great privilege. But at the present day the cafÉ has been turned over into other hands, and is a show-place pure and simple, and a most interesting one. The cafÉ proper is fitted throughout with heavy black oak, or something in imitation of it. There are heavy broad tables and high wainscoting and an immense fireplace and massive rafters.

AT THE BLACK CAT

To set off the sombreness of this, the walls are covered with panels in the richest of colors, by Steinlen, the most imaginative and original of the Parisian illustrators, in all of which the black cat appears as a subject, but in a different rÔle and with separate treatment. Upon one panel hundreds of black cats race over the ocean, in another they are waltzing with naiads in the woods, and in another they are whirling through space over red-tiled roofs, followed by beautiful young women, gendarmes, and boulevardiers in hot pursuit. And in every other part of the cafÉ the black cat appears as frequently as did the head of Charles I. in the writings of Mr. Dick. It stalks stuffed in its natural skin, or carved in wood, with round glass eyes and long red tongue, or it perches upon the chimney-piece with back arched and tail erect, peering down from among the pewter pots and salvers. The gas-jets shoot from the mouths of wrought-iron cats, and the dismembered heads of others grin out into the night from the stained-glass windows. The room shows the struggle for what is odd and bizarre, but the drawings in black and white and the watercolors and oil-paintings on the walls are signed by some of the cleverest artists in Paris. The inscriptions and rules and regulations are as odd as the decorations. As, for example, the one placed halfway up the narrow flight of stairs which leads to the tiny theatre, and which commemorates the fact that the cafÉ was on such a night visited by President Carnot, who—so the inscription adds, lest the visitor should suppose the Black Cat was at all impressed by the honor—"is the successor of Charlemagne and Napoleon I." Another fancy of the Black Cat was at one time to dress all the waiters in the green coat and gold olive leaves of the members of the Institute, to show how little the poets and artists of the cafÉ thought of the other artists and poets who belonged to that ancient institution across the bridges. But this has now been given up, either because the uniforms proved too expensive, or because some one of the Black Cat's habituÉs had left his friends "for a ribbon to wear in his coat," and so spoiled the satire.

Three times a week there is a performance in the theatre up-stairs, at which poets of the neighborhood recite their own verses, and some clever individual tells a story, with a stereopticon and a caste of pasteboard actors for accessories. These latter little plays are very clever and well arranged, and as nearly proper as a Frenchman with such a temptation to be otherwise could be expected to make them. It is a most informal gathering, more like a performance in a private house than a theatre, and the most curious thing about it is the character of the audience, which, instead of being bohemian and artistic, is composed chiefly of worthy bourgeoisie, and young men and young women properly chaperoned by the parents of each. They sit on very stiff wooden chairs, while a young man stands on the floor in front of them with his arms comfortably folded and recites a poem or a monologue, or plays a composition of his own. And then the lights are all put out, and a tiny curtain is rung up, showing a square hole in the proscenium, covered with a curtain of white linen. On this are thrown the shadows of the pasteboard figures, who do the most remarkable things with a naturalness which might well shame some living actors.

It would be impossible to write of the entertainment Paris affords at night without cataloguing the open-air concerts and the public gardens and dance-halls. The best of the cafÉs chantants in Paris is the Ambassadeurs'. There are many others, but the Ambassadeurs' is the best known, is nearest to the boulevards, and has the best restaurant. It is like all the rest in its general arrangement, or all the others copy it, so that what is true of the Ambassadeurs' may be considered as descriptive of them all.

The Ambassadeurs' is a roof-garden on the ground, except that there are comfortable benches instead of tables with chairs about them, and that there is gravel underfoot in place of wooden flooring. Lining the block of benches on either side are rows of boxes, and at the extreme rear is the restaurant, with a wide balcony, where people sit and dine, and listen to the music of the songs without running any risk of hearing the words. The stage is shut in with mirrors and set with artificial flowers, which make a bad background for the artists, and which at matinÉes, in the broad sunlight, look very ghastly indeed. But at night, when all the gas-jets are lit and the place is crowded, it is very gay, joyous, and pretty.

A CAFÉ CHANTANT

The Parisian may economize in household matters, in the question of another egg for his breakfast, and in the turning of an uneaten entrÉe into a soup, but in public he is most generous; and he is in nothing so generous as in his reckless use of gas. He raises ten lamp-posts to every one that is put up in London or New York, and he does not plant them only to light some thing or some person, but because they are pleasing to look at in themselves. It is difficult to feel gloomy in a city which is so genuinely illuminated that one can sit in the third-story window of a hotel and read a newspaper by the glare of the gas-lamps in the street below. This is a very wise generosity, for it helps to attract people to Paris, who spend money there, so that in the end the lighting of the city may be said to pay for itself. If we had as good government in New York as there is in Paris, Madison Square would not depend for its brilliancy at night on the illuminated advertising of two business firms.

Individuals follow the municipality of Paris in this extravagance, and the Ambassadeurs' is in consequence as brilliant as many rows of gas-jets can make it, and these globes of white light among the green branches of the trees are one of the prettiest effects on the Champs ÉlysÉes at night. They do not turn night into day, but they make the darkness itself more attractive by contrast. The performers at the Ambassadeurs' are the best in their line of work, and the audiences are composed of what in London would be called the middle class, mixed with cocottes and boulevardiers. You will also often see American men and women who are well known at home dining there on the balcony, but they do not bring young girls with them.

It is interesting to note what pleases French people of the class who gather at these open-air concerts. What is artistic they seem to appreciate much more fully than would an American or an English audience—at least, they are more demonstrative in their applause; but the contradictory feature of their appreciation lies in their delight and boisterous enthusiasm, not only over what is very good, but also over what is most childish horse-play. They enjoy with equal zest the quiet, inimitable character studies of Nicolle and the efforts of two trained dogs to play upon a fiddle, while a hideous, gaunt creature, six foot tall, in a woman's ballet costume, throws them off their chairs in convulsions of delight. They are like children with a mature sense of the artistic, and still with an infantile delight in what is merely noisy and absurd.

It is also interesting to note how much these audiences will permit from the stage in the direction of suggestiveness, and what would be called elsewhere "outraged propriety." This is furnished them to the highest degree by Yvette Guilbert. It seems that as this artist became less of a novelty, she recognized that it would be necessary for her to increase the audacity of her songs if she meant to hold her original place in the interest of her audiences, and she has now reached a point in daring which seems hardly possible for her or any one else to pass. No one can help delighting in her and in her line of work, in her subtlety, her grace, and the absolute knowledge she possesses of what she wants to do and how to do it. But her songs are beyond anything that one finds in the most impossible of French novels or among the legends of the Viennese illustrated papers. These latter may treat of certain subjects in a too realistic or in a scoffing but amusing manner, but Guilbert talks of things which are limited generally to the clinique of a hospital and the blague of medical students; things which are neither funny, witty, nor quaint, but simply nasty and offensive. The French audiences of the open-air concerts, however, enjoy these, and encore her six times nightly. At Pastor's Theatre last year a French girl sang a song which probably not one out of three hundred in the audience understood, but which she delivered with such appropriateness of gesture as to make her meaning plain. When she left the stage there was absolute silence in the house, and in the wings the horrified manager seized her by the arms, and in spite of her protests refused to allow her to reappear. So her performance in this country was limited to that one song. It was a very long trip to take for such a disappointment, and the management were, of course, to blame for not knowing what they wanted and what their audiences did not want, but the incident is interesting as showing how widely an American and a French audience differs in matters of this sort.

There was another Frenchwoman who appeared in New York last winter, named Duclerc. She is a very beautiful woman, and very popular in Paris, and I used to think her amusing at the Ambassadeurs', where she appealed to a sympathetic audience; but in a New York theatre she gave you a sense of personal responsibility that sent cold shivers down your back, and you lacked the courage to applaud, when even the gallery looked on with sullen disapproval. And when the Irish comedian who followed her said that he did not understand her song, but that she was quite right to sing it under an umbrella, there was a roar of relief from the audience which showed it wanted some one to express its sentiments, which it had been too polite to do except in silence. This tolerance impressed me very much, especially because I had seen the same woman suffer at the hands of her own people, whom she had chanced to offend. The incident is interesting, perhaps, as showing that the French have at times not only the child's quick delight, but also the cruelty of a child, than which there is nothing more unreasoning and nothing more savage.

ON MONTMARTRE

One night at the Ambassadeurs', when Duclerc had finished the first verse of her song, a man rose suddenly in the front row of seats and insulted her. Had he used the same words in any American or English theatre, he would have been hit over the head by the member of the orchestra nearest him, and then thrown out of the theatre into the street. It appeared from this man's remarks that the actress had formerly cared for him, but that she had ceased to do so, and that he had come there that night to show her how well he could stand such treatment. He did this by bringing another woman with him, and by placing a dozen bullies from Montmartre among the audience to hiss the actress when she appeared. This they did with a rare good-will, while the rejected suitor in the front row continued to insult her, assisted at the same time by his feminine companion. No one in the audience seemed to heed this, or to look upon it as unfair to himself or to the actress, who was becoming visibly hysterical. There was a piece of wood lying on the stage that had been used in a previous act, and Duclerc, in a frenzy at a word which the man finally called to her, suddenly stooped, and, picking this up, hurled it at him. In an instant the entire audience was on its feet. This last was an insult to itself. As long as it was Duclerc who was being attacked, it did not feel nor show any responsibility, but when she dared to hurl sticks of wood at the face of a Parisian audience, it rose in its might and shouted its indignation. Under the cover of this confusion the hired bullies stooped, and, scooping up handfuls of the gravel with which the place is strewn, hurled them at Duclerc, until the stones rattled around her on the stage like a fall of hail. She showed herself a very plucky woman, and continued her song, even though you could see her face growing white beneath the rouge, and her legs twisting and sinking under her when she tried to dance. It was an awful scene, breaking so suddenly into the easy programme of the evening, and one of the most cowardly and unmanly exhibitions that I have ever witnessed. There did not seem to be a man in the place who was not standing up and yelling "À bas Duclerc!" and the groans and hisses and abuse were like the worst efforts of a mob. Of course the stones did not hurt the woman, but the insult of being stoned did. They put an end to her misery at last by ringing down the curtain, and they said at the stage door afterwards that she had been taken home in a fit.

When I saw her a few months later at Pastor's, I was thankful that, as a people, our self-respect is not so easily hurt as to make us revenge a slight upon it by throwing stones at a woman. Of course a Frenchman might say that it is not fair to judge the Parisians by the audience of a music-hall, but there were several ladies of title and gentlemen of both worlds in the audience, who a few months later assailed Jane Harding when she appeared as Phryne in the OpÉra Comique with exactly the same violence and for as little cause. These outbursts are only temporary aberrations, however; as one of the attendants of the Ambassadeurs' said, "To-morrow they will applaud her the more to make up for it," which they probably did. It is in the same spirit that they change the names of streets, and pull down columns only to rebuild them again, until it would seem a wise plan for them, as one Englishman suggested, to put the Column of VendÔme on a hinge, so that it could be raised and lowered with less trouble.

Of the public gardens and dance-halls there are a great number, and the men who have visited Paris do not have to be told much concerning them, and the women obtain a sufficiently correct idea of what they are like from the photographs along the Rue de Rivoli to prevent their wishing to learn more. What these gardens were in the days of the Second Empire, when the Jardin Mabille and the Bal Bullier were celebrated through books and illustrations, and by word of mouth by every English and American traveller who had visited them, it is now difficult to say. It may be that they were the scenes of mad abandon and fascinating frenzy, of which the last generation wrote with mock horror and with suggestive smiles, and of which its members now speak with a sigh of regret. But we are always ready to doubt whether that which has passed away, and which in consequence we cannot see, was as remarkable as it is made to appear. We depreciate it in order to console ourselves. And if the Mabille and the Bullier were no more wickedly attractive in those days than is the Moulin Rouge which has taken their place under the Republic, we cannot but feel that the men of the last generation visited Paris when they were very young. Perhaps it is true that Paris was more careless and happy then. It can easily be argued so, for there was more money spent under the Empire, and more money given away in fÊtes and in spectacles and in public pleasures, and the Parisian in those days had no responsibility. Now that he has a voice and a vote, and is the equal of his President, he devotes himself to those things which did not concern him at all in the earlier times. Then the Emperor and his ministers felt the responsibility, and asked of him only that he should enjoy himself.

But whatever may have been true of the spirit of Paris then, the man who visits it to-day expecting to see Leech's illustrations and Mark Twain's description of the Mabille reproduced in the Jardin de Paris and the Moulin Rouge will be disappointed. He will, on the contrary, find a great deal of light and some very good music, and a mixed crowd composed chiefly of young women and Frenchmen well advanced in years and English and American tourists. The young women have all the charm that only a Frenchwoman possesses, and parade quietly below the boxes, and before the rows of seats that stretch around the hall or the garden, as it happens to be, and are much better behaved and infinitely more self-respecting and attractive in appearance than the women of their class in London or New York. But there are no students nor grisettes to kick off high hats and to dance in an ecstasy of abandon. There are in their places from four to a dozen ugly women and shamefaced-looking men, who are hired to dance, and who go sadly through the figures of the quadrille, while one of the women after another shows how high she can kick, and from what a height she can fall on the asphalt, and do what in the language of acrobats is called a "split;" there is no other name for it. It is not an edifying nor thrilling spectacle.

AT THE MOULIN ROUGE

The most notorious of these dance-halls is the Moulin Rouge. You must have noticed when journeying through France the great windmills that stand against the sky-line on so many hilltops. They are a picturesque and typical feature of the landscape, and seem to signify the honest industry and primitiveness of the French people of the provinces. And as the great arms turn in the wind you can imagine you can hear the sound of the mill-wheel clacking while the wheels inside grind out the flour that is to give life and health. And so when you see the great Red Mill turn high up where four streets meet on the side of Montmartre, and know its purpose, you are impressed with the grim contrast of its past uses and its present notoriety. An imaginative person could not fail to be impressed by the sight of the Moulin Rouge at night. It glows like a furnace, and the glare from its lamps reddens the sky and lights up the surrounding streets and cafÉs and the faces of the people passing like a conflagration. The mill is red, the thatched roof is red, the arms are picked out in electric lights in red globes, and arches of red lamp-shades rise on every side against the blackness of the night. Young men and women are fed into the blazing doors of the mill nightly, and the great arms, as they turn unceasingly and noisily in a fiery circle through the air, seem to tell of the wheels within that are grinding out the life and the health and souls of these young people of Montmartre.

If you have visited many of the places touched upon in this article in the same night, you will find yourself caught in the act by the early sunlight, and as it will then be too late to go to bed, you can do nothing better than turn your steps towards the Madeleine. There you may find the market-people taking the flowers out of the black canvas wagons and putting up the temporary booths, while the sidewalk is hidden with a mass of roses in their white paper cornucopiÆ and the dark, damp green of palms and ferns.

It will be well worth your while to go on through the silent streets from this market of flowers to the market of food in the Halles Centrales, where there are strawberry patches stretching for a block, and bounded by acres of radishes or acres of mushrooms, and by queer fruits from as far south as Algiers and Tunis, just arrived from Marseilles on the train, and green pease and carrots from no greater a distance than just beyond the fortifications. It is the only spot in the city where many people are awake. Everybody is awake here, bustling and laughing and scolding—porters with brass badges on their sleeves carrying great piles of vegetables, and plump market-women in white sleeves and caps, and drivers in blue blouses smacking their lips over their hot coffee after their long ride through the night. It is like a great exposition building of food exhibits, with the difference that all of these exhibits are to be scattered and are to disappear on the breakfast-tables of Paris that same morning. Loud-voiced gentlemen are auctioneering off whole crops of potatoes, a sidewalk at a time, or a small riverful of fish with a single clap of the hands; live lobsters and great turtles crawl and squirm on marble slabs, and vistas of red meat stretch on iron hooks from one street corner to the next.

You are, and feel that you are, a drone in this busy place, and salute with a sense of guilty companionship the groups of men and girls in dinner dress who have been up all night, and who come singing and chaffing in their open carriages in search of coffee and a box of strawberries, or a bunch of cold, crisp radishes with the dew still on them, which they buy from a virtuous matron of grim and disapproving countenance at a price which throws a lurid light on the profits of Bignon's and Laurent's.

And then you become conscious of your evening dress and generally dissolute and out-of-place air, and hurry home through the bright sunlight to put out your sputtering candle and to creep shamefacedly to bed.

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