Au Bal Musette
It has often been remarked by philosophers and philistines alike that the commonest facts of existence escape our attention until they are impressed upon it in some unusual way. For example I knew nothing of the sovereign powers of citronella as a mosquito dispatcher until a plague of the insects drove me to make enquiries of a chemist. For years I believed that knocking the necks off bottles, lacking an opener, was the only alternative. A friend who caught me in this predicament showed me the other use to which the handles of high-boy drawers could be put. It was long my habit to quickly dispose of trousers which had been disfigured by cigarette burns, but that was before I had heard of stoppage, a process by which the original weave is cleverly counterfeited. And, wishing to dance, in Paris, I have been guilty of visits to the great dance halls and to the small smart places where champagne is oppressively the only listed beverage. But that was before I discovered the bal musette.
One July night in Paris I had dinner with a certain lady at the Cou-Cou, followed by cognac at the Savoyarde. I find nothing strange in this program; it seems to me that I must have dined at the Cou-Cou with every one I have known in Paris from time to time, a range of acquaintanceship including Fernand, the apache, and the Comtesse de J——, and cognac at the Savoyarde usually followed the dinner. This evening at the Cou-Cou then resembled any other evening. Do you know how to go there? You must take a taxi-cab to the foot of the hill of Montmartre and then be drawn up in the finiculaire to the top where the church of Sacré-Coeur squats proudly, for all the world like a mammoth Buddha (of course you may ride all the way up the mountain in your taxi if you like). From Sacré-Coeur one turns to the left around the board fence which, it would seem, will always hedge in this unfinished monument of pious Catholics; still turning to the left, through the Place du Tertre, in which one must not be stayed by the pleasant sight of the Montmartroises bourgeoises eating petite marmite in the open air, one arrives at the Place du Calvaire. The tables of the Restaurant Cou-Cou occupy nearly the whole of this tiny square, to which there are only two means of approach, one up the stairs from the city below, and the other from the Place du Tertre. An artist's house disturbs the view on the side towards Paris; opposite is the restaurant, flanked on the right by a row of modest apartment houses, to which one gains entrance through a high wall by means of a small gate. Sundry visitors to these houses, some on bicycles, make occasional interruptions in the dinner.... From over this wall, too, comes the huge Cheshire cat (much bigger than Alice's, a beautiful animal), which lounges about in the hope, frequently realized, that some one will give him a chicken bone.... Conterminous to the restaurant, on the right, is a tiny cottage, fronted by a still tinier garden, fenced in and gated. Many of the visitors to the Cou-Cou hang their hats and sticks on this fence and its gate. I have never seen the occupants of the cottage in any of my numerous visits to this open air restaurant, but once, towards eleven o'clock the crowd in the square becoming too noisy, the upper windows were suddenly thrown up and a pailful of water descended.... "Per Baccho!" quoth the inn-keeper for, it must be known, the Restaurant Cou-Cou is Italian by nature of its patron and its cooking.
This night, I say, had been as the others. The Cou-Cou is (and in this respect it is not exceptional in Paris) safe to return to if you have found it to your liking in years gone by. Perhaps some day the small boy of the place will be grown up. He is a real enfant terrible. It is his pleasure to tutoyer the guests, to amuse himself by pretending to serve them, only to bring the wrong dishes, or none at all. If you call to him he is deaf. Any hope of revanche is abandoned in the reflection of the super-retaliations he himself conceives. One young man who expresses himself freely on the subject of Pietro receives a plate of hot soup down the back of his neck, followed immediately by a "Pardon, Monsieur," said not without respect. But where might Pietro's father be? He is in the kitchen cooking and if you find your dinner coming too slowly at the hands of the distracted maid servants, who also have to put up with Pietro, go into the kitchen, passing under the little vine-clad porch wherein you may discover a pair of lovers, and help yourself. And if you find some one else's dinner more to your liking than your own take that off the stove instead. At the Cou-Cou you pay for what you eat, not for what you order. And the Signora, Pietro's mother? That unhappy woman usually stands in front of the door, where she interferes with the passage of the girls going for food. She wrings her hands and moans, "Mon Dieu, quel monde!" with the idea that she is helping vastly in the manipulation of the machinery of the place.
And the monde; who goes there? It is not too chic, this monde, and yet it is surely not bourgeois; if one does not recognize M. Rodin or M. Georges Feydeau, yet there are compensations.... The girls who come attended by bearded companions, are unusually pretty; one sees them afterwards at the bars and bals if one does not go to the Abbaye or Pagés.... It makes a very pleasant picture, the Place du Calvaire towards nine o'clock on a summer night when tiny lights with pink globes are placed on the tables. The little square twinkles with them and the couples at the tables become very gay, and sometimes sentimental. And when the pink lights appear a small boy in blue trousers comes along to light the street lamp. Then the urchins gather on the wall which hedges in the garden on the fourth side of the square and chatter, chatter, chatter, about all the things that French boys chatter about. Naturally they have a good deal to say about the people who are eating.
I have described the Cou-Cou as it was this night and as it has been all the nights during the past eight summers that I have been there. The dinner too is always the same. It is served à la carte, but one is not given much choice. There is always a potage, always spaghetti, always chicken and a salad, always a lobster, and zabaglione if one wants it. The wine—it is called chianti—is tolerable. And the addition is made upon a slate with a piece of white chalk. "Qu'est-ce que monsieur a mangé?" Sometimes it is very difficult to remember, but it is necessary. Such honesty compels an exertion. It is all added up and for the two of us on this evening, or any other evening, it may come to nine francs, which is not much to pay for a good dinner.
Then, on this evening, and every other evening, we went on, back as we had come, round past the other side of Sacré-Coeur, past the statue of the Chevalier who was martyred for refusing to salute a procession (why he refused I have never found out, although I have asked everybody who has ever dined with me at the Cou-Cou) to the Café Savoyarde, the broad windows of which look out over pretty much all the Northeast of Paris, over a glittering labyrinth of lights set in an obscure sea of darkness. It was not far from here that Louise and Julien kept house when they were interrupted by Louise's mother, and it was looking down over these lights that they swore those eternal vows, ending with Louise's "C'est une Féerie!" and Julien's "Non, c'est la vie!" One always remembers these things and feels them at the Savoyarde as keenly as one did sometime in the remote past watching Mary Garden and Léon Beyle from the topmost gallery of the Opéra-Comique after an hour and a half wait in the queue for one franc tickets (there were always people turned away from performances of Louise and so it was necessary to be there early; some other operas did not demand such punctuality). There is a terrace outside the Savoyarde, a tiny terrace, with just room for one man, who griddles gaufrettes, and three or four tiny tables with chairs. At one of these we sat that night (just as I had sat so many times before) and sipped our cognac.
It is difficult in an adventure to remember just when the departure comes, when one leaves the past and strides into the future, but I think that moment befell me in this café ... for it was the first time I had ever seen a cat there. He was a lazy, splendid animal. In New York he would have been an oddity, but in Paris there are many such beasts. Tawny he was and soft to the touch and of a hugeness. He was lying on the bar and as I stroked his coat he purred melifluously.... I stroked his warm fur and thought how I belonged to the mystic band (Gautier, Baudelaire, Mérimée, all knew the secrets) of those who are acquainted with cats; it is a feeling of pride we have that differentiates us from the dog lovers, the pride of the appreciation of indifference or of conscious preference. And it was, I think, as I was stroking the cat that my past was smote away from me and I was projected into the adventure for, as I lifted the animal into my arms, the better to feel its warmth and softness, it sprang with strength and unsheathed claws out of my embrace, and soon was back on the bar again, "just as if nothing had happened." There was blood on my face. Madame, behind the bar, was apologetic but not chastening. "Il avait peur," she said. "Il n'est pas méchant." The wound was not deep, and as I bent to pet the cat again he again purred. I had interfered with his habits and, as I discovered later, he had interfered with mine.
We decided to walk down the hill instead of riding down in the finiculaire, down the stairs which form another of the pictures in Louise, with the abutting houses, into the rooms of which one looks, conscious of prying. And you see the old in these interiors, making shoes, or preparing dinner, or the middle-aged going to bed, but the young one never sees in the houses in the summer.... It was early and we decided to dance; I thought of the Moulin de la Galette, which I had visited twice before. The Moulin de la Galette waves its gaunt arms in the air half way up the butte of Montmartre; it serves its purpose as a dance hall of the quarter. One meets the pretty little Montmartroises there and the young artists; the entrance fee is not exorbitant and one may drink a bock. And when I have been there, sitting at a small table facing the somewhat vivid mural decoration which runs the length of one wall, drinking my brown bock, I have remembered the story which Mary Garden once told me, how Albert Carré to celebrate the hundredth—or was it the twenty-fifth?—performance of Louise, gave a dinner there—so near to the scenes he had conceived—to Charpentier and how, surrounded by some of the most notable musicians and poets of France, the composer had suddenly fallen from the table, face downwards; he had starved himself so long to complete his masterpiece that food did not seem to nourish him. It was the end of a brilliant dinner. He was carried away ... to the Riviera; some said that he had lost his mind; some said that he was dying. Mary Garden herself did not know, at the time she first sang Louise in America, what had happened to him. But a little later the rumour that he was writing a trilogy was spread about and soon it was a known fact that at least one other part of the trilogy had been written, Julien; that lyric drama was produced and everybody knows the story of its failure. Charpentier, the natural philosopher and the poet of Montmartre, had said everything he had to say in Louise. As for the third play, one has heard nothing about that yet.