There was an even greater license of speech and act at the Chat Noir than there had been among the Hydropathes. There were also more all-night revels, more startling antitheses of the lively and severe, and more practical joking. All this in spite of the fact (or, perhaps, because of it) that the performers, almost without exception, affected impassibility, maintaining a supernatural gravity while dispensing the most side-splitting productions.
Salis’ attempt to serve both God and Mammon resulted, as such attempts have usually resulted, advantageously for Mammon. Bohemia was reconciled to business by being completely swallowed up by business. Salis, the gentilhomme-cabaretier, waxed rich, and in waxing rich stooped to methods of holding and dealing with his galaxy that have made his memory the execration of the Butte. Nevertheless, Rodolphe Salis, all unworthy Bohemian as his good fortune revealed him to be, gave Paris, as impresario of the Chat Noir, a new manifestation of art and did more than any one man towards establishing that modern republic of arts and letters which is known as Montmartre.
The phenomenal success of the Chat Noir, whose fame from being Parisian became European, naturally led to the opening of establishments which copied one or more of its features. Montmartre was soon honeycombed with cabarets artistiques et littéraires.
Steinlen, Willette, De Feure, Roedel, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec, Truchet, Bellanger, Le Petit, Grün, and other artists of the Butte, especially the first three, were kept busy decorating; and the most popular monologists and chansonniers,—Dominique Bonnaud, Hugues Delorme, Jacques Ferny, Jules Jouy, E. Girault, Eugène Lemercier, Camille Marceau, Georges Millandy, Marcel Legay, Gaston Couté, Paul Delmet, Théodore Botrel, Léon Durôcher, Vincent Hyspa, Yann Nibor, Maurice Boukay, Charles Gallilée, Jehan Rictus, Octave Pradels, Victor Meusy, Camille Roy, Gabriel Montoya, Edmond Teulet, Paul Briand, Xavier Privas, Raoul Ponchon, Fragson, Lefèvre, Xanrof, Perducet, Dumestre, Montéhus, Ivanof, Chatillon, Fursy, Canqueteau, and Trimouillat,—most of whom had received a part of their training at the Chat Noir,—performed regularly in two or three places on the same evening.
La Grand’ Pinte (joint inspirer with the Hydropathes of the Chat Noir) became under the direction of another Salis—Gabriel—the cabaret artistique et littéraire, 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 Café des Décadents (later Café Duclerc, where the singers wore nooses about their necks), with its “Bruxellois Soupers”; Le Carillon, with its “Assizes”; Le Fraternistère, with its “Guignol Social” and its “chansons et recréations sociologiques”; Le Casino des Concièrges, with its “Soupers Panamistes”; La Fourrière (The Pound), La Roulotte (The Gypsy Van), Le Cabaret des Assassins (now Le Lapin Agile), Le Cabaret des Pommes-de-terre Frites, La Purée, La Purée Sociale, and the Cabarets du Ciel, de l’Enfer, and du Néant,—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 Théâtre d’Ombres Chinoises—shadow pantomime—with which the subtle artist Henri Rivière 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, passed 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 constituted 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 apéritif, that one may find any number of truly representative Montmartrois.
At La Boîte à 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 Tréteau 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 cafés 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 Butte, do not take into account these multitudinous 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 Bréda for literary and musical exercises mingled with horse-play, and readjourned at midnight to the supper-room of an adjacent café 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.