“Mesdames et Messieurs,” announced the genial major-domo of the cabaret. “I have the honor to present to you our sympathetic comrade Mademoiselle Marcelle Tournon in her rÉpertoire.” He bowed low to a pretty dark-haired woman advancing through the crowded aisle, and, extending his hand, led her ceremoniously to the platform in front of the piano.

“Come, friends,” cried the director, his ruddy face beaming with enthusiasm, “a double-ban of applause for our distinguish artiste.”

Simultaneously there rose a cheer from the roomful of bohemians followed by a double round of handclapping in appreciative greeting. Then, settling themselves beneath the rifts of pipe and cigarette smoke, they remained quiet to listen to the singer. Marcelle smiled graciously in recognition. The owl-like accompanist ran a light arpeggio over the keys, and the singer, raising her music, poured forth her mellow voice in “Pierrot.” “Poor Pierrot, you could not give a necklace to Columbine,” sang Marcelle, “and so she left you. Columbine, grown vain and selfish, leaves you to shiver and think in your garret. The strings of your lute are broken, the tunes will not come any more, and your poor heart is aching from a cruel little crack clear across it that never, never, can be mended.

“Columbine fluttered like a butterfly out to the glitter of the world. Thorns scratched her in the garden as she hurried on, and beyond the wall of their paradise she found the world, but it was not at all like the world of her dreams. The rain faded her pretty dress, and hunger shriveled her delicate body; meanwhile the multitude rushed by her unheeding.

“Poor Pierrot! How she craved the sound of his voice now, his trustful eyes, the cool touch of his white cheeks! How merry were the tunes he strummed for her!

“She crawled back as best she could to what was once their paradise; she found herself at last at the gate, and, swallowing her pride, pulled the latch and entered the garden.

“The place was silent. The flowers drooped their heads; not even her old friends the roses nodded to her as she flew on up the path to the house. Here she paused to listen again. A bat squeaked in the eaves over her head, and in terror she pushed open the door and climbed the rickety stairs.

“‘Pierrot! Pierrot!’ she cried, and in the garret she found her Pierrot huddled upon a bed of straw, his poor white face turned towards the wall. Columbine called to him, feebly first, then in a frenzy, but he did not speak. A string of the lute snapped in the silence and Columbine sank down in a little heap, and cried, and cried, and cried. And they say that days afterwards the birds found them and covered them with leaves.”

The song was ended and Marcelle, amid a thunderous applause, joined a group of singers awaiting their turn.

As nightly my pipe added to the hazy atmosphere of the cabaret, I came to know Marcelle better. She was a woman of thirty, beautiful when she sang, fascinating when she smiled, but in repose her clean-cut features were saddened with the hardships of a bohemian life which had been not only a wearing struggle for recognition, but even one for existence. She often spoke of her present country home, of her garden, and how busy she was with it all in the hours in which she was free from the cafÉs-concerts and the cabarets. I thought I could discover upon a closer glance a tinge of sunburn in her complexion, and her hands looked like those of a woman who spent much of her life digging in her garden.

“You must come and see my garden,” she said one night, “it is on the summit of Montmartre, on the very top of the Butte. Ah! you should see the view from there! All Paris lies below. It is not like a city up there at all as you shall see; it is quite like a little country village. Come! I will show you how to find it,” and, taking a scrap of paper from her music roll, she drew me a plan, a zig-zag route up the Butte which, she assured me if I carefully followed it, would lead me in due time to her tiny villa.

“I call it the Villa Polichinelle,” she said. “That is a good name, is it not! It is only a little joke of a house any way. It is the last one as you turn down the lane and go through the orchard. The others are all occupied, so you see I have neighbors. Madame Franelli, a danseuse at the OpÉra and her two daughters, live in the first house. ThÉrÈse, the youngest, took a prize at the Conservatoire. She is very beautiful; you may remember her at the ChÂtelet, a slight blonde, exquisitely made. It is in her blood to dance well; her mother was once a great dancer but is almost an invalid now and rarely goes on.

“In the second lives a poet of Montmartre; the third is occupied by a famous old clown; a painter has the fourth; and Duflos, the comedian, the fifth. You see we are quite a colony of artists together. We call it ‘our village,’ and have elected Duflos as Mayor and Monsieur Dallet, the clown, as chief of police. Dear old Monsieur Dallet, he would not hurt a fly, his heart is so big!

“Come Sunday morning. I will show you my tulips and we can breakfast in the garden.”

And Marcelle rolled up her music and hurried away to sing at another cabaret.

I folded the all important plan with its scraggly route carefully in my portfolio.

Sunday dawned clear and sparkling in sunshine, so to the garden I started. Leaving my cab at the place Blanche, I began my ascent of the Butte by way of the steep rue Lepic, pausing for breath under the ancient windmill of the Moulin de la Galette.

Up! up! up! out of Paris, for the city now lay shimmering in a haze of sunshine below. The spires of Notre-Dame and the massive roof of the OpÉra jutted from a sea of streets and buildings. And so I kept on up the Butte, past a cobbler who kept a cow. I was crawling now like a fly over the bald cranium beneath which, as all good Montmartrois will tell you, lie the brains of Paris.

I turned up quaint streets, many of them lined with two-story houses of ancient pattern, which leaned for support upon their sturdier neighbors, who in turn rely upon great beams shored against their crumbling backs. I sat down by the roadside to re-study my plan. “To the left,” it said, and I kept on. A flock of geese waddled indignantly ahead of me and, crossing the road, disappeared under a fence. Nearby some chickens scratched and pecked away in front of a doorway whose threshold was worn and polished by the passing feet of a hundred years. I peeped through high fences behind which lay orchards and wild gardens grown picturesque from neglect, and farther on I passed an ancient burial-ground.

Here the narrow streets were unpaved and at night gloomily lighted by an occasional oil lantern, friendly safeguards to the wayfarer obliged to turn these corners after dark.

I confess I was grateful for the sunlight, as I imagined how this strange quarter would look at night, and recalled to mind that the notorious Cabaret of the Assassins lay upon an isolated ledge of the Butte but a stone’s throw away.

Finally, at the end of a lane I came to a gate, and, entering, found my way through a tangled orchard leading to a small settlement of frame houses fronting on a winding path. I looked about for the inevitable concierge, to whom to disclose my identity and ask permission to enter this bohemian community, when, with a growl, an ugly-looking dog rushed to the end of his chain and, with his scrubby neck bristling, stood eyeing me viciously. Over his kennel was printed in blue letters “Concierge,” evidently the work of Marcelle’s neighbor, the “clown,” I thought. Measuring the length of the brute’s chain and the circle it would describe, if swung in my direction, I shied by him and kept on my way. At the narrowest part of the path I found another sign: “Room for three automobiles only.” Over the door of the smallest house I read: “ChÂteau of the Duke and Duchess of Montmartre.” I passed the poet’s house, a little box of a place, half smothered in a tangled garden. He had decorated his modest faÇade with the verses of Villon and Verlaine; a satyr in stone rose from a labyrinth of flowers, and nearby a marble nymph, bathing in a miniature pool, peered laughingly from her hiding-place at the immovable satyr. Art was far more cheaply to be had there than three meals a day.

The pathway now ran through a short thicket. Beyond it lay the crest of the lane, an expanse of blue sky, and, nestling in the prettiest of tiny gardens, the “Villa Polichinelle.”

Marcelle, who had been watching me find my way, now called to me from an upper window, and came down to greet me in a sunbonnet and a calico wrapper.

“I am so glad you have come,” she said, cheerily. “And did the plan work well?” she added, with a laugh.

“Perfectly,” I replied. “Only you did not put in the dog.”

“Ah! CerbÈre—yes, I know. He growled at you because you were a stranger. He is not a bad old fellow, tho, when you know him; you see he seems to feel responsible for us.”

I could not help shivering at the thought that Marcelle came home long after midnight, often alone, through rain, snow and slush, passing, to get to this mountain retreat, through one of the worst quarters of Paris, inhabited for the most part by gentlemen and their consorts whose records are as black as the ace of spades.

“Now,” said my hostess, “you must see all of my modest kingdom. First my garden, then my family, and then my house.”

“Good,” said I, “the garden shall come first.”

“Ah! I am glad you love flowers,” cried Marcelle, growing enthusiastic as I complimented her upon the beauty of her roses. She threw aside her sunbonnet and led me triumphantly to a bed of red and yellow tulips, which was edged by a row of box skirting the neatly-raked gravel path, so characteristic of French gardens.

“I planted them all myself,” said Marcelle, “except this last row, which the poet helped me to do. You see they are jumbled—as I told him, like some of his verses. He is a symbolist, you know. Nothing the poet writes can one ever understand. But he says we all will do so some day—that the cheap realism of the present will soon sink into oblivion and be forgotten.”

There were beds of giroflees, masses of pinks, odd corners of velvety pansies, and bower-like arbors covered with Jacqueminot roses. We descended some stepping-stones to a smaller lower garden and entered a thatched kiosk lined with turkey red, upon which were hung bas-reliefs and pen-and-ink drawings, souvenirs from those who loved the good-fellowship of this Arcadian nook.

And now Juliette, Marcelle’s bonne, her sleeves rolled over the elbows of her plump arms, came to the kiosk with vermouth and cigarettes. Following her, a green parrot pigeontoed his way down the gravel walk, muttering to himself a jumble of phrases.

“Come, my good Jacquot!” called Marcelle to the parrot. “Jacquot is one of my family; you shall see the others: my cat, my big Frou-Frou, and her pretty kittens, and the pigeons, and all the rest of the mÉnagerie after dÉjeuner.”

Jacquot climbed to the table and bent his beak to his breast. While Marcelle rubbed the pinfeathers of his green neck, he clucked and sang to himself in delight. Then he shook himself, dilated the pupils of his yellow eyes as he took a careful look at me, and, having satisfied himself as to my character, pigeontoed his way slowly to my shoulder. He sang quite clearly a song that Marcelle had taught him:

Half an hour later Juliette laid the table in the kiosk for breakfast, with two extra places set for the clown and the poet, who both came late, with endless apologies to Marcelle for their tardiness.

“There had been an extra rehearsal at the Nouveau Cirque,” explained the merry old fun-maker, and he mopped his brow, perspiring from his quick walk up the Butte. Marcelle straightway forgave him, and further cheered him with an affectionate pat on the top of his shining bald pate as he slid into his chair. As he unfolded his napkin there tumbled into his lap a boutonniÈre of mignonette, which our hostess had thoughtfully hidden for her old comrade. He had been her counselor and friend, often sharing with her the little he had during her days of penury, for Marcelle’s life, as I have said, had been from babyhood a struggle for existence. She was a flower that had fought its way to the sunshine from between the stones of Paris.

“And you, my big rabbit!” cried Marcelle, addressing the poet with the air of a judge; “what have you to say for yourself in apology for being late?” The poet sighed, ran his fingers through his long hair, hung his black hat upon a convenient peg, and, drawing up his chair, replied, wearily: “Would that I might join Sylvia and her nymphs and drink and be merry by the moon and not by the hour!”

“FlÛte!” replied Marcelle. “Don’t you suppose they had the best of regular appetites in those days and quarreled if the soup was late? Allons, mangez, mes enfants, and be grateful that the sun shines and we have enough for to-day.”

After dÉjeuner the clown and the poet played shuttlecock and quoits in the garden. The poet met ignominious defeat, for the aged gentleman, whose life had been spent on the sawdust, was a dead shot with a quoit and as agile as a weasel. Later we all went into the villa for a song, the clown playing Marcelle’s accompaniments upon a melodeon. Some of its keys emitted cries of distress, and this furnished the clown with an impromptu pantomime that sent Marcelle into screams of laughter. So the afternoon passed with songs, Madeira and cigarettes.

If the garden was interesting, the interior of the little villa was none the less so, for it was a miniature museum of souvenirs.

The walls of the small salon were covered with pastels. There were original drawings and bas-reliefs by celebrated men. Pen-and-ink sketches, caricatures, charcoals and oils, each one bearing a little message of regard and friendship to Marcelle, lined the walls of the narrow stairs leading to the dainty boudoir.

Even the kitchen, shining in its well-polished battery of copper saucepans, held its art treasures.

It was nearly dusk when the poet and I took our leave of our charming hostess and the “Villa Polichinelle.”

The clown had been obliged to hurry away earlier to attend some affairs preliminary to the night’s performance.

As the poet and I descended the Butte together, all Paris lay spread out in the evening glow below us.

It lay like a vast gray sea sparkling and phosphorescent with tens of thousands of lights. Far below, away in the twilight, jutted the spires of Notre-Dame; to the right rose the OpÉra, square and massive like a tomb.

I thought of Marcelle’s paradise perched in the pure air above the reek and filth that hung like a miasma about the base of the Butte, and what it meant to her as a refuge from the smoke and stifling air of cabarets and cafÉs-concert.

We kept on through the alleys of streets, zig-zagging our way down the Butte, and turned the corner of the Cabaret des Assassins. A kerosene lamp burned in the greasy kitchen, from the door of which a hag of a woman appeared and screeched at us as we passed:

“Bonsoir!”

It was in midwinter one misty morning in January when I revisited the primitive village upon the summit of Montmartre. This time I chose for my trail a back street which led me up to the ancient Cabaret of the Assassins, now known under the name of the Lapin Agil. The cabaret, a squat, sordid two-story structure, stands upon a solitary corner of the Butte, forming an angle with the rue Saint Vincent and the rue des Saules. Overlooking Paris below, a back window glared in the light of the chill morning from beneath an overhanging eave, like the eye of a murderer in hiding. The place as I entered was silent and deserted except for the individuals who kept it.

A girl of fifteen addressed me in a timid voice as I entered the low-ceiled buvette adjoining the cabaret. She wore a massive marriage ring. She seemed somewhat frightened and suspicious, as tho I were a government detective armed with a warrant.

We spoke of the weather.

She directed me to a bench in the deserted cabaret, stale with the odor of the night before, and brought me a short glass with a thick bottom. Into this she poured a draft of syrupy vermouth and apologized for the absence of her mother, the patronne, who had not yet returned from market.

Not many came by there in the morning, she ventured, but at night it was gay, the cabaret was then crowded she informed me, and leaving me with my apÉritif she disappeared through the door leading to the buvette.

Upon the walls of the cabaret hung cartoons and crude sketches left in later years by bohemian habituÉs who made the place their rendezvous.

In a corner stood a piano, its keys yellow with age like the teeth of a horse.

Madame the patronne, a slatternly looking woman in a calico wrapper, returns from marketing with two mackerel which she had bargained for from a push-cart in the street below. She led me through a box of a kitchen and showed me a small yard in the rear littered with debris. This she informed me was used as a summer garden in season. She seemed to pride herself upon its attractiveness. I passed an open door of a back room and caught a glimpse of a man leaning over a table, drunk, and unshaven for days. He looked up at me maliciously as I past; then I heard him muttering and swearing in his argot at the girl with the rolled-gold ring.

From the patronne I learned that the cabaret had gone through many changes. It was evident, however, that the general atmosphere had remained the same. It looked all that its title of the Assassins implied. The muddy streets leading to it were unpaved and lighted still by an oil lantern at the corner of the rue St. Vincent, a sinister looking lane flanked by ancient buttressed walls, which kept from sliding into the crooked roadbed old tangled gardens and scattered derelicts of houses.

The rue TholozÉ, snaking its way up from the rue Lepic to the ball of the Moulin de la Galette, is purely a hill street. Its gutters are flushed with clear water which flows in miniature torrents. Horses never climb the rue TholozÉ, and pedestrians going up to the ball pause at the landing stages for breath. Those living along this mountain highway must needs step out of their residences with their sea legs on, for the declivity which slopes past their doorways resembles somewhat the angle of a promenade deck in a gale. The hill begins to ascend in earnest after you pass the dingy little bohemian restaurant of the Vache EnragÉe on the rue Lepic, an intime rendezvous of bohemians of the Butte.

With the renovation and reorganization of the “Moulin de la Galette” the famous ball held for so many generations in the granary under the ancient windmill took a change for the better.

Prior to this the ball bore an unsavory reputation. It was the scene of continual fights and the rendezvous for every villainous rapin of Montmartre and their equally vicious female companions, the gigolettes and mÔmes of the Butte.

To-day the spacious ballroom is remodeled and redecorated with green lattice and crystal chandeliers in the style of the ballroom of the old fÊte champÊtre. The orchestra is the best of its kind in Paris. The floor is kept in perfect condition and all Montmartre goes to the “Galette” to dance and be merry. Models, grisettes, cocottes, shop-girls, students and clerks, painters and musicians, sculptors and poets, meet and mingle. While its clientÈle is drawn from all Paris, the majority of it is Montmartrois.

Adjoining the ballroom is a quaint summer garden.

A flight of wooden steps leads from the garden to the table-like rock above, crowned by the ancient windmill bearing the date 1256.

I entered the Galette one crisp morning by way of the lane in the rear and through the door of the buvette. Sleepy waiters were scrubbing and polishing after the ball of the night. The tiled floor of the buvette was as spotless as soap and water could make it. Some coffee steamed cheerily on the stove, and the pots and pans hanging above it shone invitingly. In the ballroom a garÇon was rewaxing the floor; through the skylight streamed the morning sun, shining prismatically through the crystals of the chandeliers. I went out into the garden and climbed the stairs leading to the old mill.

It stood gaunt and black against the sky, outstretching its skeleton arms. Its body was warped and weather-beaten. It seemed to have died in its shell like some mammoth scorpion.

What a “vie de BohÈme” it has seen in its lifetime!

It has been danced around by grisettes and students in the moonlights and daylights of ages past, and has served faithfully as a refuge and fortress during the horrors of the siege of ’71. Beside it still glow the lights of this famous old ball up to which climb nightly a merry pilgrimage of the great-grandchildren of Bohemia.

Some months ago what is probably the most noted of bohemian resorts, the Moulin Rouge, closed its doors—the famous Red Mill had come to an end, and Paris mourned its death in caricature. For months its faÇade was barricaded with scaffolds, and rumor was current that the old hall was to be transformed into a music-hall.

At last after many delays the opening of the new Moulin Rouge was announced. The public poured in to find one of the handsomest of modern music-halls with a most excellent restaurant. A table d’hÔte dinner is served at little tables, glowing in fairy lamps, where one can dine and watch the performance.

Back of this spacious theater for ballets and revues there is a promenoir where all of the old attractions of the Moulin Rouge and many new ones can be seen during the entr’actes, including the quadrilles. So that after all the Moulin Rouge did not die—rather let us say that it was born again, and is now all that many of us expected to find it upon our first visit years ago and never did; for the Red Mill was then a tawdry place at best—somewhat of a snare and a delusion.

Montmartre is the kingdom of artistic Bohemia. The Butte is honeycombed with the ateliers of painters and sculptors and the modest sanctums of struggling poets and musicians. This is only one side. The other side, like the degenerate half of some visages, is all that is vicious and criminal. Back of every blaze of light in Montmartre there is a shadow, and from out of many of these dark corners flutter to the lights of the Boulevard de Clichy, like nocturnal moths, scores of gaudy women—too frequently the spiders who dare not venture in the sun and whose claws have been known to have been smeared with the blood of the helpless more than once, crawl from these squalid holes beyond the light.

Montmartre is ablaze after midnight, and the cafÉs along the Boulevard de Clichy are swarming with women to whom to-morrow is much the same as to-day—women who from one year’s end to the other seldom see the sun, whose days begin at midnight and whose mind, body and soul have long ago passed to the trusty keeping of the devil.

There is always one thought uppermost in the mind of the lady from the rue Blanche: it is that somebody shall pay the waiter as much and as continuously as possible between midnight and daylight.

There is little about human nature that this daughter of Montmartre does not know. Her ears are trained to a marvelous sense of acuteness, and her intuition and perception make the shrewdest mind-reader appear as tame as a fortune-telling horse.

The lady from the rue Blanche not only knows precisely what you are thinking about, but your past, present, and your disastrous future if you continue her acquaintance. During this time she will relieve you with the skill of a magician of your small change, and, if given time, your entire fortune including your watch. She will lead you into the worst traps a fertile brain can invent. Having robbed you of everything else you possessed, including your senses, some fine day she will either hand you over to the police or open fire on you in a jealous rage if only for the satisfaction of peppering away at your useless carcass.

This may seem a fantasy, but it is precisely what has happened, and if you don’t believe it ask the policeman.

These petites femmes of the Butte glide by with the quickness of an area cat. They are reckless, strong, and fearless, these noctambules. The eyes of Fanchette burn brilliantly in their sockets. Her lips are scarlet with a hasty dab of rouge. The rest of her visage is as pale as Pierrot’s. When you look at her with your eyes half closed, you seem to see her skull.

Claudine enters the “Abbaye de ThÉlÈme” at midnight, the pleats of her white silk petticoat spread out with the pride of a fantail pigeon.

She wears a scarlet jacket studded with polished brass buttons that catch the light as she moves. The costume is a nouveautÉ from the Montmartre bazaar which has excited the envy of every other Mimi and Cora along the Boulevard de Clichy since Wednesday, when Claudine became the duchess of Montana. This title was bestowed upon her by a broad-shouldered cow-puncher of our far West, who insisted upon the title and dressed her according to his ideas of how a duchess “oughter look.” A scarlet hat with a green feather flames upon her head, and her feet are encased in new gray suede slippers whose high heels do good service in elevating the lady to her suddenly exalted position. On her thumb she wears a ruby ring, a gift from her cowboy admirer.

LÉlise glides into the “Nouvelle AthÉnÉe,” a cafÉ whose clientÈle is made up of soberer habituÉs.

She is pretty, this LÉlise, a nervous little blonde with the merriest of blue eyes, and the pink of neatness, her clothes being fashioned in the best of Parisian good taste.

“Dis donc, mon vieux,” she calls, clapping her hands to the garÇon.

“Un grog bien chaud, et de quoi Écrire.”

“Bien, madame,” replies the garÇon.

“Un AmÉricain, un!” he calls, as he hurries for the portfolio and pen and ink, which he lays before LÉlise quite ceremoniously, while another waiter brings to her the steaming “grog AmÉricain.”

LÉlise draws off her gloves with an air of importance and begins a voluminous correspondence. Five letters in all, written in a rapid angular hand like the autographs across the pictures of soubrettes.

Handwriting of this sort has evidently made its impression upon LÉlise. She writes with all the extravagant flourish of these souvenirs—she even adds Ys and Ts of her own creation. This often leads to a reckless use of capitals beginning words of importance. Furthermore, she underscores these with savage-looking scratches meant to emphasize the intensity of her feeling about whatever comes into her pretty head. The solemn word, “L’Amour,” is often accented by two of these parallel lines drawn with unhesitating decision. Again the tender word, “Toujours,” is half ripped from the paper by two formidable underlines, each of them started with a little dig that makes the pen spatter.

“ImmÉdiatement,” and words suggesting hate and jealousy are made to glare out from the page like danger-signals.

But you must not think me guilty of overlooking the five letters of LÉlise—I can vouch only for the one I received. The aged garÇon, FranÇois, who brought it over to me hidden in the folds of a fresh napkin, received it through mademoiselle’s gray muff while with the other hand he helped her escort, a dashing young officer of the hussars, on with his night-coat.

The young officer’s tip slid to the bottom of FranÇois’s pocket, where it clinked against my own.

LÉlise buttoned her gloves, adjusted her veil, picked up her skirt and followed her escort to the door, that FranÇois held open, and the two disappeared in the night.

Even in Montmartre there is some discretion.

And there is still another type of Montmartroise. The woman in this case is often a model of rational living and rare devotion, sharing the good and ill luck of her lover with the patience, pluck and fortitude of a bonne fille and a good comrade.

If her jealous mate growls in his cups during their dinner in some favorite cafÉ, it is she who averts the row, pacifies the offended gentleman at the next table, quiets her amant with a kiss, calls for the bill, sees that it is just, and continues by her alert brain and her intuition to please her quarrelsome lover by distracting his pugilistic mind towards a more peaceful mood.

When he wakes up he will be convinced more than ever that this Parisian demoiselle is, after all, his best friend.

If you wish to see “Mademoiselle of the Butte” in all her war-paint, go to the “Abbaye de ThÉlÈme” after midnight, where you will find her ready to eat, drink and be merry upon the slightest provocation. Follow her later to the Capitol among those who consume little suppers at big prices during the hours when the sergents de ville, pacing their beats outside, draw up the hoods of their night-cloaks to protect them from the chill of the early morning.

Still later you will find this nocturnal demoiselle, the idol of the generously drunk, picking up her skirts in a bacchanalian revel between the hours of three and four in the restaurant of the Rat Mort. Her eyes shine, her cheeks burn, the champagne and the lights seem to madden her, a madness of sheer ecstasy. Life for the moment is en rose. She feels herself a queen, defiant, seductive, dangerously beautiful. Four dancers from the Casino de Paris arrive amid screams and applause. Claudine is dancing on a table; an instant later she is being carried on the shoulders of a howling mob around the room. The music is drowned in the cries of “bis, bis!” One see through the whirl and glitter and smoke, flashing gems, the shimmer of silk hose, and the glint of bare arms.

Morning begins to pale. The streets are silent and deserted except for an occasional party of roisterers issuing from some closing cafÉ. Occasionally a woman passes coughing in the choking fog of the early morning. The ragpickers begin to make their rounds.

There is still another refuge for this Mademoiselle “Sans GÈne.” That is the restaurant of the TrÉteaux de Tabarin on the rue Pigalle. Upstairs as in all the others there is a supper room. This one is smaller than the rest and more intime.

The settees behind the tables are occupied with those to whom night seems ever too short. A chansonnier before the piano is singing the waltz song “L’Amoureuse;” many at the tables have grown pensive under the spell of the singer. A girl in a dÉcolletÉ gown at one of the tables is sobbing hysterically.

“It was the BÉnÉdictine,” remonstrates her companion. “You were imbÉcile to drink so much, ma chÉrie.”

From the low ceiling glow electric lamps shaded with ground glass like those in the cabin of a yacht.

Three women and an old beau are dancing an impromptu quadrille before the tables.

Wisps of tobacco smoke curl lazily up from the little tables. Some of the cigarettes smoulder between lips of dÉcolletÉ women, others are held shakily between the fingers of hands blue-veined, pallid and weighted with jewels. The scent of a score of perfumes hangs in the reek of smoke. Suddenly there is a scream and a crash of glass. A gentleman in a damaged shirt-front has slipped, dragging with him a table and upsetting the contents of an adjoining one.

He falls with a jar which set the lamp globes in the ceiling to shivering. The wine sweeps over the table and puddles down on the floor, soaking through the silk petticoat and lace stocking of a pretty brunette. Two waiters hurry with napkins to soak up the wet. When this bull in a china shop has sufficiently and substantially apologized, fresh wine bubbles in the glasses for the victims of the flood.

At last the heavy curtains over the windows are flung open and a white light from without floods the room, making the eyes sting. It is broad daylight. Cabs clatter up, are filled, and rattle away.

“By Gad! Charley,” says a portly American at a corner table to his friend, a short thick-set man whose mustache is curled in pomade, “We’d better git along and git some sleep if we’re going to sell Jake any goods before lunch. So long, Flossy,” he adds with a yawn, addressing mademoiselle who had been supping with them.

“Bonsoir, monsieur,” replied the girl in a gentle voice looking at him steadily as he sways and relights his cigar, pushing his silk hat in a cooler position on the back of his head. It did not occur to him to raise it.

“Cute gal,” says the portly man to his friend, his patent leather shoes squeaking as he walks ponderously to the door.

“One of them swell cocottes, eh?” replied the friend, “she seemed to take quite a shine to you, Bill.”

“Hell,” guffaws the portly one, importantly. “I never give ’em no encouragement.” And the two stumble down the narrow stairs that lead to the rue Pigalle. In the chilly street the portly one fumbles for his cigar case.

“Smoke one of them light ones, Charley,” he says, as the two roll into the cab and the fat one slams the door.

Happily there are other types of Montmartrois than the noctambules and noceurs who frequent the Rat Mort and Tabarin.

Thousands of domestic honest bourgeois live on the Butte whose lives are spent in stores and workshops and in caring for their wives and children. There are many conservative old families besides these whose children are well brought up and well educated, by a rigid economy on the part of parents whose daily bread has been earned by a long and patient fight.

Many of these parents are in the employ of the government; teachers in the public schools and in the bureaus of the administration where they work hard and are but poorly paid. Theirs are the houses which the stranger rarely if ever sees. They remind one of the most domestic and conservative homes of New England. They seem an anomaly in this Latin civilization.

Paris is one of the easiest places in the world in which to empty one’s pocket, and one of the most difficult in which to earn an honest penny. It is the want of money among Parisians and the difficulty of earning it which in late years has deadened much of the extravagant gaiety which once existed. Parisians are content to adapt their pleasures to their purses.

There are scores of men in Montmartre who began life talented beyond the average in the arts, and who have sunk by idleness into poverty and oblivion. Talent alone is not sufficient; one must improve it and drive it, and many of these long-haired velvet-cloaked geniuses of the Butte are too lazy by nature to do this. Instead, they adopt a genre of their own, and despise all other schools of art, never departing from their methods in spite of the fact that their incomprehensible creations seldom bring them a sou. So they wrap themselves up self-satisfied in their cloaks, go through life without a hair-cut, tell you all other art is rot—and starve.

This afternoon I followed one of these dream painters to his studio. The way led up a crooked street, down a narrow alley, into a court full of rubbish, up a flight of dingy stairs, down into another court (this one as dark as the stairs), up another rickety flight, and so to his door.

A feeble light struggled through the cobwebbed panes of the studio skylight, and the room was in a state of dirt and disorder. Tumbled in one corner were a lot of unfinished canvases, and dumped in another was a pile of unwashed dishes. A dirty divan canopied after the fashion of the Roman emperors served as a bed of state for the great man.

That he was once a genius was unquestionable from the evidence of some of his early works. He had been a masterly draftsman and a painter of virility and great richness of color. That is, when he painted, but this he never did so long as he possessed a sou. Many of his subjects I now found difficult to understand, even when he turned them right side up for me.

Some of them seemed prehistoric. Wan wisps of maidens floated dimly through heavy fogs, guided by symbols and illuminated by sacred fires. Some of them had no eyes and trailed their feet along the ground.

This artist was only one of many who cursed the public for their financial appreciation of popular modern art, which he termed “des petites cochonneries!”

There is a large class of poets, painters, sculptors and musicians for whom the wheel of fortune spins capriciously. Their idle hours are spent among their comrades in the cabarets and the little boÎtes tucked away in odd corners of Montmartre, where they breakfast and dine, accompanied by their sweethearts.

Of the latter they are a type unto themselves and wholly aloof from the life and night types of the rue Blanche.

Gaston the painter is a disciple of Botticelli, and you find the influence of dress and coiffure of that period asserting itself in the style of clothes and arrangement of hair of his sweetheart, Mariette. With her locks in bandeaux she looks as saintly as a church picture.

Jacques the musician, a composer of sixteenth century pavans and minuets, has dressed the fair AmÉlie in an old-fashioned frock, cut low about the throat; her pretty face is framed in two curls, and there is a rose in her hair.

Sing, dance and be merry, ye children of the Butte! Ye who have inherited the Paradise of Bohemia, ye who know its every nook and corner, its bright and its dark days, its poverty and its riches! The love and the wealth of camaraderie is yours. To you the rest of the world counts for naught.

To you, Gaston, a health to Mariette. To you, Jacques, a toast to “la Petite AmÉlie.”