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.
[Illustration:
Photo by F. Berkeley Smith
A MISTY MORNING IN THE RUE DES SAULES]
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.
[Illustration:
Photo by F. Berkeley Smith
THE CABARET OF THE ASSASSINS]
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.
[Illustration:
Photo by F. Berkeley Smith
INTERIOR OF THE CABARET OF THE ASSASSINS]
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.
[Illustration:
Photo by F. Berkeley Smith
EARLY MORNING—THE MOULIN DE LA GALETTE]
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.
[Illustration:
From a Poster
THE MOULIN ROUGE]
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.
[Illustration: A FLOAT IN THE CORTÈGE DE VENUS AT THE MOULIN ROUGE]
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.
[Illustration: A FLOAT IN THE CORTÈGE DE VENUS AT THE MOULIN ROUGE]
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.
[Illustration:
Drawing by Galaniz
UP THE RUE BLANCHE]
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.
[Illustration: ALONG THE BOULEVARD CLICHY]
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_!”