La rue St. Vincent,
known as “the lovers’ walk”

He carries his burdens buoyantly, as the best type of old man carries his years, and, making hard necessity pass for a joke, extracts no end of amusement from his vicissitudes, caps himself with a Merry Andrew’s bonnet, and “drapes himself,” to use a phrase of Maurice Barrès, “with irony in order not to appear stark naked before men.”

A young couple, who had long been habitués of a certain restaurant in the rue Lepic, entered one night equipped with violin and guitar, made profound obeisance to the assembled company, and announced that they had got to earn their dinner on the spot that night, if they had one. With their instruments and voices they proceeded to earn it, amid their own and their whilom comrades’ jests and laughter. After a fortnight of this unenviable, if mirthful, prominence, their fortunes mended; and they dropped contentedly back into their obscurity as ordinary diners, the richer for an invigorating experience. Three handsome, long-haired, bearded fellows of the rue Menessier have taken Paris by storm this very summer with their mandolin and guitar music in the open air.

A Montmartre Bohemian, who is at once a superior musician and a species of Hercules, having made himself provisionally a déménageur, amused himself mightily at his work, confounding the petty bourgeois he served, by playing their pianos. The natural though totally unforeseen result of his somewhat impudent facetiousness was an opportunity to give lessons, which floated him back into the musical current.

Another Montmartrois (Raoul Pouchon, I think), wearied with walking the streets the night after he had been evicted from his lodging, revenged himself by baiting with sugar all the street curs of his district, and introducing them at two o’clock in the morning into the stairway of his evictor’s house.

Sometimes, perhaps, these merry Montmartre shifts come near transgressing the bounds which separate fun from lawlessness. The déménagement à la cloche de bois,[88] the nailing of one’s emptied trunk to the floor to impress one’s concièrge with its weight, the paying of one’s rent by abstracting the clothes of one’s landlord and putting them in pawn, and the grateful acceptance of the pâté, chop, or sausage brought in by one’s pilfering dog, as if one were Elijah and one’s Toutou were a raven of the wild, can hardly be defended by any of the recognised bourgeois codes. But even these flagrant escapades proceed less from malice than from mischief, and even these fall strangely in line with equity in nine cases out of ten.

On its Bohemian side, Montmartre is a second and, to the thinking of many, a greater and more brilliant Quartier Latin.

Here abound the literary and artistic restaurants, cafés, bouillons, crèmeries, and cabarets which have always conferred a peculiar charm on Paris. Here, as well as in the Latin Quarter (and more numerous and varied, perhaps, here than there), are the modern counterparts of the Treille d’Or, the Pomme de Pin, the Radis Couronné, the Pressoir d’Or, the Ceinture qui Craque, the Deux Torches, and the Trois Entonnoirs of the time of Cyrano; the Procope, de Valois, de Foy, du Caveau, and Mécanique of the time of Louis XVI.; the Viot, Bléry, Flicoteaux, de Buci, and de la Rotonde of the Restoration and Louis Philippe; the Molière, Voltaire, L’Orient, “Sherry Cobbler,” and Bobino of the last empire. And here they have been long enough to have already developed their legends and esprit de corps.

In the Brasseries des Martyrs and Fontaine, Cabarets de Ramponneau, de la Grande Pinte, du Plus Grand Bock, and de la Place Belhomme, and the Cafés Jean Goujon, Laplace, de la Nouvelle Athénée, and Du Rat Mort,[89] poets and painters, now grizzled, chattered and revelled before the grey hairs came. Dinochaux, of the Café Dinochaux (rue Bréda), who nourished several of his patrons gratis for years, and bestowed credit unsolicited on any one who showed himself worthy in literature or art, has taken his place in history alongside of Ragueneau, the keeper of the Rôtisserie des Poètes of Cyrano.