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Fontainebleau was deserted, and has since been almost unknown to Americans, few caring to crowd into the little cabarets save the faithful community of artists, who still go there to study the grand old trees of the finest forest in France.
I was taken at night under protection of a policeman to some cabarets, where I found crowds of that class which is the stratum below the working class; lads who sweep crossings and hold horses, mendicants, and, I was told, thieves, girls whom a servant-maid would not speak to, very merry, dancing quadrilles and waltzes, and regaling themselves on sausages, the happiest-looking folks I found in all London; and, I must say, conducting themselves very decently."
The departure was what all departures of marching battalions must fatally be copious and multiplied libations between parting friends, paternal handshakings in cabarets, patriotic and bacchic songs, loose and indecent choruses in a word, the picturesque exhibition of all that arsenal of gaiety and courage which is the appanage of an ancient Gallic race.
Montmartre is now sprinkled with attractive cabarets, the taste of the public for such informal entertainments having grown each year; with reason, for the careless grace of the surroundings, the absence of any useless restraint or obligation as to hour or duration, has a charm for thousands whom a long concert or the inevitable five acts at the Français could not tempt.
When I get back to New York I'll send for you to visit me and show you a real good time. I suppose you've never been to cabarets and eaten theatre suppers, and seen a real New York good time. Why, last winter I had an affair that was talked of in the papers for days.
Montmartre, as might be expected, yielded excellent "copy," to employ a journalistic phrase. In the cafés and cabarets artistiques were made some of the portraits from life already referred to.
The becraped passage at Meurice's alluded to a little back was of a later season, and the radiation, as I recall it, had been, that first winter, mainly from a petit hôtel somewhere "on the other side," as we used with a large sketchiness to say, of the Champs Elysées; a region at that time reduced to no regularity, but figuring to my fond fancy as a chaos of accidents and contrasts where petits hôtels of archaic type were elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and pavilions ever so characteristic, yet ever so indefinable, snuggled between frank industries and vulgarities all brightened these indeed by the sociable note of Paris, be it only that of chaffering or of other bavardise.
Passing through this, we entered a dirty, mean-looking house, around the door of which several people were collected, some of whom saluted the chevalier as he came up. "Who are these fellows?" said I. "They seem to know you." "Oh! nothing but the common police spies," said he, carelessly; "the fellows who lounge about the cabarets and the low gambling-houses. But here comes one of higher mark."
A third and still more noteworthy point is the infrequency absence, I am inclined to say of cabarets. Soberest of the sober, orderliest of the orderly, appear these good folks of La Charite, les Caritates as they are called, nor, apparently, has tradition demoralised them. One might expect that a town dedicated to the virtue of almsgiving would abound in beggars. Not one did we see.
The Latin Quarter at once I am in the student cabarets, bright faces and keen spirits around me, sipping cool, well-dripped absinthe while our voices mount and soar in Latin fashion as we settle God and art and democracy and the rest of the simple problems of existence.
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