You recall Ragueneau, the quaint saint, it is to be hoped. If not, here is a scrap of dialogue to evoke him:—
“Cyrano. Bercés par ta voix. Ne vois-tu pas comme ils s’empiffrent? “Ragueneau. Je le vois.... Sans regarder, de peur que cela ne les trouble; Et dire ainsi mes vers me donne un plaisir double, Puisque je satisfais un doux faible que j’ai, Tout en laissant manger ceux qui n’ont pas mangé. “Cyrano (lui frappant sur l’épaule). Toi, tu me plais!”
The cook at Marguéry’s, being asked once upon a time what he thought of the Vache Enragée, replied: “Mon dieu, de la vache enragée! Je crois qu’on pourrait en faire un plat mangeable avec beaucoup de bonne humeur et des petites femmes autour.”
At Montmartre the sagacious chef’s words are daily verified. At Montmartre, if nowhere else in the world, the Vache Enragée is a “plat mangeable.”
The line of boulevards extending from the Place de Clichy to the Place d’Anvers which strikes American tourists, who visit it for Montmartre, as a vulgar hodge-podge of Coney Island, the Bowery, the Broadway of the Tenderloin, and South Fifth Avenue, with a dash of, say, a Boston “Pop” concert on a Harvard night, is no more the real Montmartre than Paris is the real France. The real Montmartre is the abrupt hill known as “The Butte,” just north of said boulevards[90] and included between them,—the rue Marcadet, the rue de Clignancourt, and the avenue de St. Ouen, a section of which the gigantic Byzantine cathedral of the Sacré Cœur, the Moulin de la Galette, until recently an unsophisticated popular ball, and the cimetière de Montmartre (the second cemetery of Paris) are the salient features.
This real Montmartre (the Montmartre of the Butte) contains a tiny local cemetery (long disused), a tiny twelfth-century parochial church (St. Pierre), a tiny district theatre, a tiny village plaza (Place du Tertre) with the customary trees, benches, and aged, ruminating idlers, a tiny public park (Square St. Pierre), two gaunt, grey windmills, and several sleepy wine-shops, over which sleepy publicans preside. Here are five, six, and seven story city buildings, to be sure, but here are also (particularly on the northern slope) ancient garden-girdled mansions reminiscent of the epoch when the whole district was open country; sculptured gate-posts, crumbling, but stately, and rusty iron gates opening on symmetrical avenues; small one-and-a-half-story tile-roofed and straw-thatched dwellings, also garden-girdled, clutching with the grip of the Swiss chalet the steep hillsides; narrow streets and winding lanes, and worn stone stairways where the hill’s incline forbids streets and lanes; high, erratic, heavily buttressed stone walls, bulging with age, over which houses also bulging with age (from the windows of which a Paul might be let down in a basket) beetle as if to fall; diminutive fruit orchards and vegetable gardens; and diminutive barnyards, cluttered with chicken-coops, dove-cotes, pig-pens, and rabbit-cages, which advertise cows’ and goats’ milk, compost, and young pigs for sale. Here cats and dogs and hens roam multitudinous and unmolested, birds sing in the shrubbery, and chanticleer proclaims the dawn.
