The first formal meeting of the Hydropathes was held on a Friday of October, 1878, in a small upper room of a Latin Quarter café, corner of the rue Cujas and the Boulevard St. Michel. There were five persons present. At the next meeting there were seventy-five, at the third one hundred, at the fourth one hundred and fifty, and so on, until, driven from café to café by the need of more room, they settled in a vacant store, with an average attendance of three hundred to three hundred and fifty twice a week.
Emile Goudeau presided,—as nearly, that is, as any one can be said to preside in a Latin Quarter assembly. There was liberty to drink, smoke, and woo the grisette. There were folly and tumult, confusion and fun; violin, piano, and guitar music; singing in concert of riotous roof-lifting refrains; recitations of novelties and the classics by Villain, Leloir, Le Bargy, and Coquelin Cadet of the Comédie Française. Paul Mounet, also of the Comédie, arrayed in a blue blouse and red neckerchief, interpreted La Grève des Forgerons week in and week out with telling effect. Maurice Rollinat sang his own songs and those of Pierre Dupont, and recited selections from his Névroses and Brandes. Laurent Tailhade, Jean Moréas, Georges d’Esparbès, Louis Marsolleau, Jean Ajalbert, André Gill, Léon Valade, Charles Monselet, Paul Marrot, Edmond Haraucourt, Félicien Champsaur, Mac-Nab, Auguste Vacquerie, Louis Tiercelin, Alphonse Allais, Jules Jouy, and a full score more of poets and chansonniers rendered their works. Bourget, Coppée, Paul Arène, Luigi Loir, and Bastien-Lepage were frequent, though for the most part passive, spectators. All degrees of talent, all shades of politics, and all of the poetic schools were represented. Bernhardt was proud to be known as a Hydropathe. Francisque Sarcey and Jules Claretie visited the Hydropathes, and praised them in the press. The police threatened to dissolve them, but wisely refrained.
The Hirsutes differed from the Hydropathes only in name and in the fact that the name had an obvious significance.
It was the Grand’ Pinte (a Louis XIII. cabaret of Montmartre, frequented, but without mummery or fracas, by a band of painters and poets) that gave Rodolphe Salis, an ex-Hydropathe, the idea of putting the boisterous Hydropathe performances into a picturesque setting and inviting the paying public to attend. Salis, who was the son of a prosperous man of affairs, was in Bohemia against his father’s wishes. Half-artist and half-littérateur, he supported himself, when the paternal purse-strings were tightened, by writing for the press and painting Viae Dolorosae at fourteen francs apiece. In making himself “gentilhomme-cabaretier,” as he called it, this resourceful Salis had hit upon a device for reconciling theory with practice, filial submission with personal inclination, and Bohemia with business, which, to say the least, was not commonplace.
Salis’ Chat Noir, “Cabaret Moyen-Age fondé en 1114 par un fumiste,” was opened on the Boulevard de Rochechouart in December, 1881; and the first number of its literary organ of the same name, illustrated by Forain, Willette, Rochegrosse, Henri Pille, Rivière, and Steinlen, was published the month following. The cabaret’s bizarre frescos, contributed by the cleverest young artists of Paris, and its fantastic furnishings of curios and antiques, which Salis had zealously collected since his boyhood, have been described too many times to be dwelt upon here. Suffice it to say, the juxtaposition of the beautiful with the grotesque, the serious with the flippant, and the reverent with the blasphemous, was so ingenious and piquant that attempts to imitate it (for the most part unsuccessful) have been made all over the civilised world.
AT ARISTIDE BRUANT’S
Cabaret du Boulevard Rochechouart
In this suggestive setting nearly the entire personnel of the Hydropathes and a number of poets and dramatists, not Hydropathes, who have since become celebrities, among them Georges Courtéline and Maurice Donnay, held witty carnival.