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Updated: May 9, 2025
The scowl deepened, I felt something like a stir of uneasiness through the room, and I did not wonder, for Bruant looked as if he had a temper it might be dangerous to trifle with. And then the strange thing happened and, to our surprise and his, our party whom he had met with such disdain saved the situation.
To give an account of the “Mirliton” is to tell the story of Bruant, the most popular ballad-writer in France to-day. This original and eccentric poet is as well-known to a Parisian as the boulevards or the Arc de Triomphe. His costume of shabby black velvet, Brittany waistcoat, red shirt, top-boots, and enormous hat is a familiar feature in the caricatures and prints of the day.
His volumes Dans la Rue and Sur la Route have had an enormous popularity, their contents being known and sung all over France. In 1892 Bruant was received as a member of the society of Gens de Lettres.
The setting was admirable and brought forth immediate applause form the audience, under which Hermia hid her gasp of dismay. There were even pictures like those which Philidor had painted, of Cleofonte breaking chains and of the child Stella flying in mid-air, and at one side the legend "Artistide Bruant, painter of portraits at two francs fifty soldiers ten sous."
Gradually, as we sat at our table, watching Bruant and the company, it dawned upon us that Bruant did not exhaust the formalities of his entertainment upon the coming guest but reserved one for the parting guest which in our judgment was scarcely so amusing. For to every woman who left his café, Bruant's goodbye was a hearty kiss on both cheeks.
And just as, in the brutal and macabre style, she has done what Bruant was only trying to do, so, in the style, supposed to be traditionally French, of delicate insinuation, she has invented new shades of expression, she has discovered a whole new method of suggestion.
We might have spared ourselves our agony. Bruant, with the instinct and intelligence of the Frenchman, realized our embarrassment and I hope I am right in thinking he had his laugh over us all to himself, so much more than a laugh did we owe him.
A cabaret of another kind which enjoyed much celebrity, more on account of the personality of the poet who founded it than from any originality or picturesqueness in its intallation, was the “Mirliton,” opened by Aristide Bruant in the little rooms that had sheltered the original “Chat Noir.”
But, of course, Bruant had no intention of sending us away and he kept up his little farce only to the point where our disappointment was on the verge of turning into impatience. It simply meant that he did not hold to the hail-fellow-well-met free-and-easiness which was the pose of Salis at the Chat Noir, but, at the Mirliton, was all for ceremony and dramatic effect.
Gone, as well, and gone forever is the cabaret of Bruant, him of the line of François Villon now become a place for the vulgar oglings of Cook's tourists taxicabbing along the Boulevard Rochechouart.
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