Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: April 30, 2025
Keeping still to the favorite haunts of the blousard, we enter the showiest of the cafés chantants peculiar to him as free-and-easy a beuglant as one could wish. Beuglant, by the way, is the argot name of this sort of place; and as the word comes from beugler, to "bellow," it may easily be seen how flattering it is as a definite noun for a place where the chief attraction is the singing.
The blousard loves to see depicted on the stage a degree of misery more terrible than that which is his daily lot. For the dramas which depict high life unless it be the high life of the old days of beruffled and silk-stockinged cavaliers he cares very little.
At the sides of the space set apart for the musicians are two queer little private boxes, perched up against the wall like old-fashioned pulpits, and reached by a narrow flight of steps like a ladder. Here we are in an atmosphere utterly unlike that of the beuglant just described, for this is a place where the honest blousard comes with his wife and children for an evening of innocent amusement.
The Valentino supports a large troupe of such performers, and is less often the scene of the blousard's efforts, therefore, than ball-rooms where the regular corps of dancers is smaller. The matter of the admission-fee also regulates the blousard to some extent in his choice of resort.
The scavenger and the ragpicker, being the lowest grade of blousards, do not always rise to the dignity even of a blouse. They wear a coat sometimes, but it is a marvel of a coat, and was in the last stages of tottering old age before it fell to the blousard.
The women who disport in the cancan at the same place are simply hired by the season. It is not at the Jardin Mabille that the visitor to Paris need ever look to see genuine revelry: the place is as much a place of jollification for the people as the stage of a theatre is, and no more. Very often the dancer at night is a blousard by day.
At various stages in his career he becomes possessed by a stroke of fortune of some article of cast-off clothing, which he wears, as it were, for life. Ordinarily, the poorest blousard has a new blouse once in five or ten years, and a new pair of wooden shoes in the same time; but the scavenger's apparel is for ever old, and he never lays it off.
An occasional blouse is visible, but the blousard who comes here is generally arrayed in some fancy costume, which he hires for the night for a trifling sum or has devised in his leisure moments from odds and ends gathered in an old-clo' market. There is a group of four now prancing in a quadrille, who are blousards enjoying at once their hours of ease and of triumph.
The audience is without exception of the blousard class: the patrons of the Old Bowery, even in its latest years, were almost millionaires in comparison. You can sit in the gallery for five sous if you like the company of the Paris gamin. At the entrance of the theatre there is a placard which reads thus: "By paying twenty-five centimes one enters immediately without making queue."
Tourists sometimes stumble upon these places, but not often: they are remote from the gay quarter which foreigners haunt. The neighborhood of the Château d'Eau an immense paved space at the junction of the Boulevards St. Martin and du Temple is to the blousard what the neighborhood of the Madeleine is to the small shopkeeper.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking