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."
[Illustration: 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_.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.