Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 13, 2025
Americans in Panama hats sauntered down the Rue de Rivoli, staring in the shop windows at the latest studies of nude women, and at night went in pursuit of adventure to Montmartre, where the orchestras at the Bal Tabarin were still fiddling mad tangoes in a competition of shrieking melody and where troops of painted ladies in the Folies Bergeres still paraded in the promenoir with languorous eyes, through wafts of sickly scent.
Lea de Horn came next, terribly dressed up, as her wont was, and after her the big Tatan Nene, a good-humored fair girl with the bosom of a wet nurse, at which people laughed, and finally little Maria Blond, a young damsel of fifteen, as thin and vicious as a street child, yet on the high road to success, owing to her recent first appearance at the Folies.
The glittering halls of pleasure that appeal to so many visitors, the Bohemian cafés of the outer boulevards, the Folies Bergères, the Moulins Rouges, the Bals Bulliers, with their meretricious and vulgar attractions, frequented by the more facile daughters of Gaul, "whose havoc of virtue is measured by the length of their laundresses' bills," as a genial satirist of their sex has phrased it all these manifestations of la vie, so unutterably dull and sordid, are of small concern to the cultured traveller.
Two assistants in the printing-room faithful patrons of the Folies Dramatiques declared that they had seen Madame Risler several times at their theatre, accompanied by some escort who kept out of sight at the rear of the box. Pere Achille, too, told of amazing things. That Sidonie had a lover, that she had several lovers, in fact, no one entertained a doubt.
When M. de Tregars and the commissary walked in, the estimable hostess of the Hotel des Folies was kneeling in front of the fire, preparing some medicine. Hearing the footsteps, she got up, and, with a finger upon her lips, "Hush!" she said. "Take care not to wake her up!" The precaution was useless. "I am not asleep," said Mlle. Lucienne in a feeble voice. "Who is there?"
I learn that Lucienne, picked up by Maxence, has been able to drag herself as far as the Hotel des Folies, and that the driver has been taken to the nearest drug-store. Furious at my own negligence, and tormented by vague suspicions, it is to the druggist's that I go first, and in all haste. The driver was in a backroom, stretched on a mattress.
Do not they come to Paris and live in the great hotels and demand cocktails and read the stock reports and send cablegrams all the day long? and go to the Folies Bergeres, and yawn? Nom de nom, of what does his conversation consist? Of the price of railroads; is it not so? I, who speak to you, have talked to him. Does he know how to make love?"
I knew, or I could pretty well guess, that she was not staying in Constantinople, enduring the insults of those Turkish officers, simply for the money she could earn as a dancer. Then I made my second dramatic play for confidence. I suddenly stopped going to the Folies. I suppose it was rather lonesome in Constantinople and a man who was not a Turk was a novelty.
There was not the slightest hope of intimidating or buying over this particular lady's allegiance. I had to learn exactly who was subsidizing her machinations and there was no possibility of obtaining the clew from her. I must find the accessible person among her intimate friends. From time to time I had seen her with a pretty little dark-haired girl who danced in the Folies Arabic.
He felt so angry with himself, that he was almost on the point of leaving the Hotel des Folies, when one evening: "Well," said Mme. Fortin to him, "all is made up again, it seems. The beautiful carriage called again to-day." Maxence could have beaten her. "What good would it do you," he replied, "if Lucienne were to turn out badly?"
Word Of The Day
Others Looking