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Updated: May 31, 2025
In the Boulevard Beaumarchais, close by the old Place of the Bastile, stands the grandest of the theatres habitually visited by the blousard. Its most constant patrons are the furniture-makers of the Faubourg St. Antoine, who bring to the theatre a decided perfume of mahogany and rosewood, and suggest the varnish of newness which the place would otherwise sadly lack.
The curtain rises at seven o'clock, here as at all the theatres where the blousard pays his money, and the amusement continues until after midnight. But it is not amusing. There are several pieces on the bill, but' the chief one, a drama in five acts, is a poor thing, played by mediocre actors in the most dismal manner possible.
A café chantant of a more pretentious sort than the Maison Doucieux, but still the peculiar resort of the blousard for there are café chantants of many grades in Paris may be found in one of the back streets near the Boulevard St. Martin.
Germain, where I lived, a quiet wine-seller next door to me was arrested and his business broken up nearly two years after the war was over, his only offence being that he had been too active a Communist. Later, an industrious blousard of my acquaintance was arrested at his work, and sent to prison for the same offence: he was a carriage-maker.
Some of the cafés chantants are patronized by the well-dressed class, and a blousard is no more likely to be seen in their orchestra fauteuils than in the same division of the regular theatres. The El Dorado, for example, in the Boulevard Strasbourg, is as large and almost as elegant as Booth's Theatre in New York, but it is a café chantant.
Why, our blousard would think his fortune was made if he could get a sou for it. The retailer in the Rue Mouffetard sells it for a sou: the man who made it would be happy if he could sell it at the rate of eight sous the dozen, but, like most other workers, he must deal with a middleman.
It will be seen that clothing is inexpensive to the blousard, and as the fashions never change with him, he never lays aside a garment till it is quite worn out. One of the peculiar features of low Paris is the shop for the sale of articles at the uniform price of one son. One before which I paused in the Rue Mouffetard was presided over, by two women evidently grandmother and granddaughter.
A respectable blousard a carpenter or a shoemaker or a member of any honest trade would scorn to be seen in any other dress but his neat blouse, unless on some great day, a fete, his wedding or at church, when he wears his only coat, or his father's or a friend's.
Directly behind us sits a family of three generations a bent old man of seventy-five or eighty years, gray-haired and venerable; a round-faced, middle-aged blousard with his dark-eyed wife; and their two little babies, scarcely old enough to prattle, and who lisp their delight with beaming eyes to "dan'père."
For a more genuine scene of blousard gayety come with me to the Rue Mouffetard, where there is a ball frequented solely by the lowest and poorest class of Paris strugglers for bread, such as the ragpickers and the street-sweepers. At first thought it seems improbable that the squalid wretches who can barely earn sous enough to live on, to whom fifty cents a day are fine wages, should have a ball.
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