Paris and the Social Revolution Part 31

_La Grand' Pinte_ (joint inspirer with the _Hydropathes_ of the _Chat Noir_) became under the direction of another Salis-Gabriel-the _cabaret artistique et litteraire, L'Ane Rouge_. Its next-door neighbour, _Le Clou_, fitted itself out with a picturesque second-story supper-room and an eccentric _caveau_, in which tourneys of poetry were frequently given. _Le Cafe des Decadents_ (later _Cafe Duclerc_, where the singers wore nooses about their necks), with its "_Bruxellois Soupers_"; _Le Carillon_, with its "a.s.sizes"; _Le Fraternistere_, with its "_Guignol Social_" and its "_chansons et recreations sociologiques_"; _Le Casino des Concierges_, with its "_Soupers Panamistes_"; _La Fourriere_ (The Pound), _La Roulotte_ (The Gypsy Van), _Le Cabaret des a.s.sa.s.sins_ (now _Le Lapin Agile_), _Le Cabaret des Pommes-de-terre Frites_, _La Puree_, _La Puree Sociale_, and the _Cabarets du Ciel, de l'Enfer_, and _du Neant_,-had each its little day of notoriety; and the last three, though by all odds the flattest of the lot, are still run for the benefit of country visitors.

_Le Conservatoire_ (whose specialty is the _Theatre d'Ombres Chinoises_-shadow pantomime-with which the subtle artist Henri Riviere helped build up the vogue of Salis), _Le Cabaret des Quat'z' Arts_, _Le Cabaret des Arts_, _La Veine_, and _La Lune Rousse_ are the five closest existing counterparts of the _Chat Noir_. Their decorations are highly effective, and they employ most of the _Chat Noir_ celebrities who have not, like Salis, pa.s.sed over to the great majority.[98] But their performances, while of high average merit, are totally lacking in the elements of spontaneity and unexpectedness, which const.i.tuted the rare and peculiar charm of the programmes of the _Chat Noir_ in its early and unspoiled days; and their prices, which have increased in direct proportion as intrinsic interest has decreased, are prohibitive for most of the real Bohemians of Montmartre. The truth is, these cabarets have long ceased to attract the _Montmartrois_, and are kept up as mere show places for provincial and foreign tourists. It is only in their front rooms, where prices are normal and no performances worth mentioning are given-at the hour of the _aperitif_, that one may find any number of truly representative _Montmartrois_.

At _La Boite a Fursy_ (in the building to which the _Chat Noir_ repaired when the complaints of its neighbours and the need of more room forced it to quit its original home on the Boulevard de Rochechouart) and _Le Treteau de Tabarin_ (also under the management of Fursy) the prices are still more prohibitive, so far as Bohemia is concerned, and the audiences, by just so much the more, unrepresentative.

All these places have been practically abandoned by their former patrons, and by the unprofessional singing, rhyming, reciting Bohemians in general, for tiny, obscure cafes or wine-shops,[99] whose tininess and obscurity are defences against sight-seeing invasion, and for private ateliers, from which the uninvited may be readily ejected. Those who, depressed by the professionalism, mercenary spirit, and monotony of the best-known cabarets, declare that the spirit of Bohemianism has abandoned the b.u.t.te, do not take into account these mult.i.tudinous Bohemian conclaves, of which they are, in all probability, totally ignorant.

One group, to which for two years the writer was privileged to belong, included fifty members, whose ages ranged from twenty to seventy and whose reputations ranged from zero to boulevard celebrity. It dined every Tuesday evening at a really cheap and really Bohemian restaurant of the rue de la Rochefoucauld, adjourned after dinner to the atelier of a musician in the rue Breda for literary and musical exercises mingled with horse-play, and readjourned at midnight to the supper-room of an adjacent cafe for unadulterated horse-play, without the slightest literary or musical pretence.

In France the _chanson_ is second only to the press (if, indeed, it really be second to anything) as a moulder of public opinion. It instructs less than the press, perhaps, but it excites more.

"The _chanson_, like the bayonet," says Jules Claretie, "is a French weapon.... We are afraid of the _chanson_. It is a dishevelled personage who tells the truth. We exile it, we pursue it. M. Javert pursued not otherwise Fantine.... We are afraid of it because it is necessarily, fatally, of the opposition. It has no reason for existence, if it is not factious.... From the _Mazarinades_ to the amusing _Chansons Rosses_ of Fursy, the _chanson_ has administered fillips to the powers. It is its lot. I add, it is its right.... _Vive la chanson_! even the cruel _chanson_, when it is a sort of Daumier!"

Only a small percentage of the songs heard in the _cabarets artistiques et litteraires_ of Montmartre are frankly revolutionary or even "of the opposition," in the narrow partisan sense of that phrase; but they nearly all "tell the truth to people," they are nearly all satirical and captious to the last degree-"of the opposition," that is, in the broader sense of the phrase. They a.s.sail all the existing inst.i.tutions,-army, state, church, property, and marriage,-not with the direct invective which would put them at the censorship's mercy, but with the ridicule which in Paris, as in perhaps no other spot on the globe, is more potent than invective, and before which the censorship, though it turn pale and tear its hair with rage, is powerless.

Jules Jouy,[100] one of the bright particular stars of the _Chat Noir_ and of several of its successors and imitators, was at once a veritable Gavroche for saucy wit and a fervent pleader for the poor. He was a regular contributor to several socialistic sheets; and his _Chansons de Bataille_-_La Terre_, _Les Enfants et les Meres_, _La Veuve_, _Fille d'Ouvrier_, _Les Inconnus_, _La Greve Noire_, _Pale Travailleur_, _Victimes du Travail_, _Le Sang des Martyrs_, _La Carmagnole des Meurts-de-Faim_, etc.-are superb examples of the chanson of social revolt and reclamation.

The manager of the _Casino des Concierges_, _Le Cabaret des Pommes-de-terre Frites_, and _La Puree Sociale_, was an ancient revolutionist, Maxime Lisbonne, who had distinguished himself on a barricade of the Place du Pantheon during the Commune.

In the supper-rooms of the _Clou_ the anarchist poet Paul Paillette was wont to recite his anarchist poems, and the _Clou_ is still a favourite meeting-place for revolutionary groups.

At the _Quat'z' Arts_ Marcel Legay varies his repertoire of sentimental and patriotic ballads with the stirring revolutionary _chansons_ of Maurice Boukay and J. B. Clement; Gaston Coute recites his subversive "_Les Conscrits_" and "_Le Christ en Bois_"; Eugene Lemercier with genial malice, Gaston Secot with waggery, and Yon Lug with Chinese imperturbability ridicule officialism in its every phase; Xavier Privas (Prince of _Chansonniers_ by formal election), in his highly individual and snappy fashion, renders-between two idyls-his fine socialistic song _Les Resignes_ or exalts poverty with his _Noel_ or _Testament de Pierrot_; and Jehan Rictus intones his heart-breaking _Soliloques du Pauvre_.

The _Quat'z' Arts_ has also had courses of Sunday afternoon lectures on the _chanson_ by the socialist deputies Clovis Hugues and Maurice Boukay.

The _Boite a Fursy_, though catering palpably to the sn.o.bs, is shut up nearly every season by an irate censorship, and this more often for reasons of politics than from any consideration of public morality.

"I have been allowed this merit, and it is the sole one I claim," says Fursy, in the introduction to his _Chansons Rosses_, "of never letting pa.s.s, or rarely letting pa.s.s, a salient happening without singing it immediately, and attempting to draw from it, in a refrain, the morality-or immorality-which the worthy man called _Monsieur Tout-le-Monde_ a.s.signs it in his talk. I do my utmost not to lose time, and to serve actuality piping hot. I am really satisfied only when I manage to sing, in the evening, couplets inspired by that morning's event; and I have had the luck almost always to succeed."

Even the _Cabarets du Ciel_, _de l'Enfer_, and _du Neant_-which, being mainly dependent for their effects upon machinery, hardly belong at all in the cla.s.s of _cafes artistiques et litteraires_-have, lurking under all their vulgar clap-trap, no small fund of pungent satire on religion and the church.[101]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Buffalo]

Finally, there are at Montmartre a round half-dozen resorts, _cabarets de la chanson d'argot_ (also called _cabarets brutaux_), of which Bruant's _Mirliton_, Alexandre's _Cabaret Bruyant_, and "Buffalo's"

_l'Alouette_ are the most conspicuous examples. They have had their day so far as spontaneity is concerned, like the _cabarets artistiques et litteraires_, though, like them, they still attract foreigners and provincials.

Mercenary and meretricious now to the last degree, however genuine they may have been in the beginning, they still have this much, at least, of sincerity,-namely, cordial detestation of the bourgeois; and it is to this very spirit, strangely enough, that their vogue with the bourgeois has been due.

It was of one of these _cabarets brutaux_ (Bruant's _Mirliton_, probably) that Zola wrote in _Paris_: "Pleasure-seeking Paris, the _Bourgeoisie_, mistress of money and of power, sickened by their possessions in time, but unwilling to let anything go, flocked thither-to receive insults and obscenities full in the face.... Far more than in the words, the burning insult was in the manner with which the singer cast the words in the teeth of the rich, of the favoured, of the fine ladies who elbowed each other to hear him. Under the low ceiling, amid the smoke of pipes, in the blinding heat of the gas, he launched his verses brutally like _crachats_, a very hail-squall of furious contempt."

Bruant himself rarely appears nowadays at his _Mirliton_, which, with the aid of under-studies, he, nevertheless, keeps up. Loaded with notoriety and wealth, he has come to prefer following the hounds or emptying a bottle of good wine, as the Chatelain of Courthenay, to entertaining the bourgeois by affronting them.

Not long back Bruant was an unsuccessful candidate for deputy at Belleville, which adjoins Montmartre. His address to his electors-with which it is customary for candidates to placard the walls of their districts-was in rhyme. The verses, though not of his best, are novel enough to demand quotation:-

AUX ELECTEURS

_de la premiere conscription du vingtieme arrondiss.e.m.e.nt Belleville-Saint-Fargeau_

PROGRAMME

I

_Si j'etais votre depute, Ohe! Ohe! qu'on se le dise, J'ajouterais "Humanite"

Aux trois mots de votre devise ...

Au lieu de parler tous les jours Pour la Republique ou l'Empire Et de faire de longs discours Pour ne rien dire._

II

_Je parlerais des pet.i.ts fieux, ...

Des filles-meres, des pauvres vieux Qui l'hiver gelent par la ville....

Ils auraient chaud comme en ete, Si j'etais nomme depute A Belleville._

III

_Je parlerais des tristes gueux, Des purotins batteurs de deche, Des ventres plats, des ventres creux, Et je parlerais d'une creche Pour les pauvres filles sans lit, Que l'on repousse et qu'on renvoie Dans la rue! ... avec leur pet.i.t!...

Meres de joie!_

IV

_Je parlerais de leurs mignons, De ces minables cherubins Dont les pauvres pet.i.ts fignons Ne connaissent pas l'eau des bains,- Cherubins dont l'ame et le sang Se pourrissent a l'air des bouges Et qu'on voit pa.s.ser, le teint blanc Et les yeux rouges._

V

_Je parlerais des vieux perclus Qui voudraient travailler encore, Mais dont l'atelier ne veut plus, ...

Et qui trainent jusqu'a l'aurore Sur le dur pave de Paris, Leur refuge, leurs Invalides, Errants, cha.s.ses, honteux, meurtris, Les boyaux vides._

VI

_Je parlerais des pet.i.ts fieux, ...

Des filles-meres, des pauvres vieux, Qui l'hiver gelent par la ville....

Ils auraient chaud comme en ete Si j'etais nomme depute A Belleville._

Bruant's _Mirliton_, thanks to the forceful talent of its founder, its lugubrious but artistic furnishings, and its cavalier treatment of its patrons, is the most famous, the most picturesque, and the most startling of the _cabarets brutaux_.

Alexandre owes such success as he has had at the _Cabaret Bruyant_ less to his talent as a writer and singer of _chansons_, which is not great, than to his having sung in the streets with Mme. Eugenie Buffet for the benefit of the poor[102] (his cabaret is also known as _Le Cabaret du Chanteur des Cours_) and to his having been haled into court by Bruant for plagiarising his costume. The court decided in this _cause celebre_ (Bruant _vs._ Alexandre) that the top-boots, velvet jacket, scarlet scarf, and mountaineer's felt which Bruant wore professionally were his trade-mark, so to speak, and that the professional costume adopted by Alexandre-which, without being an exact copy, was as close a copy as the word "Bruyant," for example, is of Bruant-const.i.tuted a palpable infringement. And it granted Bruant an injunction restraining Alexandre from appearing therein. The judgment was reaffirmed upon appeal.

In his first burst of rage over the result, Alexandre threatened to sing without any costume whatsoever; but he thought better of that. What he did do was to defy the court. Swearing there was not force enough in France to undress him, he persisted in wearing the prohibited garb.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALEXANDRE]

These strained relations with the law of the land made a hero of Alexandre, in a small way. He became thus a sort of Jules Guerin, and his cabaret a sort of Fort Chabrol. He elucidated the situation to his audiences nightly in a speech that ran somewhat like this:-

"What do you say to a republic where you can't wear, so that they be decent, any clothes you like? This business has cost me more than ten thousand francs already. Every day-and it's seventeen months now it's been going on-the sheriff appears.

'Still in the costume, Alexandre?' And that means twenty francs! Twenty francs a day-to say nothing of the costs-counts up. Well, what of it? Let the bill swell! Let them come as often as they please! It's their right! But I keep on wearing the clothes all the same.