The Merry-Go-Round

by Carl Van Vechten

But on this evening the Moulin de la Galette was closed and then I remembered that it was open on Thursday and this was Wednesday. Is it Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday that the Moulin de la Galette is open? I think so. By this time we were determined to dance; but where? We had no desire to go to some stupid place, common to tourists, no such place as the Bal Tabarin lured us; nor did the Grelot in the Place Blanche, for we had been there a night or two before. The Elysée Montmartre (celebrated by George Moore) would be closed. Its patron followed the schedule of days adopted for the Galette.... To chance I turn in such dilemmas.... I consulted a small boy, who, with his companion, had been good enough to guide us through many winding streets to the Moulin. Certainly he knew of a bal. Would monsieur care to visit a bal musette? His companion was horrified. I caught the phrase "mal frequenté." Our curiosity was aroused and we gave the signal to advance.

There were two grounds for my personal curiosity beyond the more obvious ones. I seemed to remember to have read somewhere that the ladies of the court of Louis XIV played the musette, which is French for bag-pipe. It was the fashionable instrument of an epoch and the musettes played by the grandes dames were elaborately decorated. The word in time slunk into the dictionaries of musical terms as descriptive of a drone bass. Many of Gluck's ballet airs bear the title, Musette. Perhaps the bass was even performed on a bag-pipe.... "Mal frequenté" in Parisian argot has a variety of significations; in this particular instance it suggested apaches to me. A bal, for instance, attended by cocottes, mannequins, or modèles, could not be described as mal frequenté unless one were speaking to a boarding school miss, for all the public bals in Paris are so attended. No, the words spoken to me, in this connection, could only mean apaches. The confusion of epochs began to invite my interest and I wondered, in my mind's eye, how a Louis XIV apache would dress, how he would be represented at a costume ball, and a picture of a ragged silk-betrousered person, flaunting a plaid-bellied instrument came to mind. An imagination often leads one violently astray.

The two urchins were marching us through street after street, one of them whistling that pleasing tune, Le lendemain elle était souriante. Dark passage ways intervened between us and our destination: we threaded them. The cobble stones of the underfoot were not easy to walk on for my companion, shod in high-heels from the Place Vendôme.... The urchins amused each other and us by capers on the way. They could have made our speed walking on their hands, and they accomplished at least a third of the journey this way. Of course, I deluged them with large round five and ten centimes pieces.

We arrived at last before a door in a short street near the Gare du Nord. Was it the Rue Jessaint? I do not know, for when, a year later, I attempted to re-find this bal it had disappeared.... We could hear the hum of the pipes for some paces before we turned the corner into the street, and never have pipes sounded in my ears with such a shrill significance of being somewhere they ought not to be, never but once, and that was when I had heard the piper who accompanies the dinner of the Governor of the Bahamas in Nassau. Marching round the porch of the Governor's Villa he played The Blue Bells of Scotland and God Save the King, but, hearing the sound from a distance through the interstices of the cocoa-palm fronds in the hot tropical night, I could only think of a Hindoo blowing the pipes in India, the charming of snakes.... So, as we turned the corner into the Rue Jessaint, I seemed to catch a faint glimpse of a scene on the lawn at Versailles.... Louis XIV—it was the epoch of Cinderella!

But it wasn't a bag-pipe at all. That we discovered when we entered the room, after passing through the bar in the front. The bal was conducted in a large hall at the back of the maison. In the doorway lounged an agent de service, always a guest at one of these functions, I found out later. There were rows of tables, long tables, with long wooden benches placed between them. One corner of the floor was cleared—not so large a corner either—for dancing, and on a small platform sat the strangest looking youth, like Peter Pan never to grow old, like the Monna Lisa a boy of a thousand years, without emotion or expression of any sort. He was playing an accordion; the bag-pipe, symbol of the bal, hung disused on the wall over his head. His accordion, manipulated with great skill, was augmented by sleigh-bells attached to his ankles in such a manner that a minimum of movement produced a maximum of effect; he further added to the complexity of sound and rhythm by striking a cymbal occasionally with one of his feet. The music was both rhythmic and ordered, now a waltz, now a tune in two-four time, but never faster or slower, and never ending ... except in the middle of each dance, for a brief few seconds, while the patronne collected a sou from each dancer, after which the dance proceeded. All the time we remained never did the musician smile, except twice, once briefly when I sent word to him by the waiter to order a consommation and once, at some length, when we departed. On these occasions the effect was almost emotionally illuminating, so inexpressive was the ordinary cast of his features. A strange lad; I like to think of him always sitting there, passively, playing the accordion and shaking his sleigh-bells. He suggested a static picture, a thing of always, but I know it is not so, for even the next summer he had disappeared along with the bal and now he may have been shot in the Battle of the Marne or he may have murdered his gigolette and been transported to one of the French penal colonies.... An apache, en musicien! ... black cloth around his throat, hair parted in the middle, velours trousers; a vrai apache I tell you, a cool, cunning creature, shredded with cocaine and absinthe, monotonous in his virtuosity, playing the accordion. He had begun before we arrived and he continued after we left. I like to think of him as always playing, but it is not so....

As for the dancers, they were of various kinds and sorts. The women had that air which gave them the stamp of a quarter; they wore loose blouses, tucked in plaid skirts, or dark blue skirts, or multi-coloured calico skirts (if you have seen the lithographs of Steinlen you may reconstruct the picture with no difficulty) and they danced in that peculiar fashion so much in vogue in the Northern outskirts of Paris. The men seized them tightly and they whirled to the inexorable music when it was a waltz, whirled and whirled, until one thought of the Viennese and how they become as dervishes and Japanese mice when one plays Johann Strauss. But in the dances in two-four time their way was more our way, something between a one-step, a mattchiche, and a tango, with strange fascinating steps of their own devising, a folk-dance manner.... Yes, under their feet, the dance became a real dance of the people and, when we entered into it, our feet seemed heavy and our steps conventional, although we tried to do what they did. (How they did laugh at us!) And the strange youth emphasized the effect of folk-dancing by playing old chansons de France which he mingled with his repertory of café-concert airs. And there was achieved that wonderful thing (to an artist) a mixture of genres—intriguing one's curiosity, awakening the most dormant interest, and inspiring the dullest imagination.

This was my first night at a bal musette and my last in that year, for shortly afterwards I left for Italy and in Italy one does not dance. But the next season found me anxious to renew the adventure, to again enjoy the pleasures of the bal musette. I have said I was perhaps wrong in recalling the street as the Rue Jessaint, or perhaps the old maison had disappeared. At any rate, when I searched I could not find the bal, not even the bar. So again I appealed for help, this time to a chauffeur, who drove me to the opposite side of the city, to the quartier of the Halles.... And I was beginning to think that the man had misunderstood me, or was stupid. "He will take me to a cabaret, l'Ange Gabriel or"—and I rapidly revolved in my mind the possibilities of this quarter where the apaches come to the surface to feel the purse of the tourist, who buys drinks as he listens to stories of murders, some of which have been committed, for it is true that some of the real apaches go there (I know because my friend Fernand did and it was in l'Ange Gabriel that he knocked all the teeth down the throat of Angélique, sa gigolette. You may find the life of these creatures vividly and amusingly described in that amazing book of Charles-Henry Hirsch, "Le Tigre et Coquelicot" It is the only book I have read about the apaches of modern Paris that is worth its pages). But the idea of l'Ange Gabriel was not amusing to me this evening and I leaned forward to ask my chauffeur if he had it in mind to substitute another attraction for my desired bal musette. His reply was reassuring; it took the form of a gesture, the waving of a hand towards a small lighted globe depending over the door of a little marchand de vin. On this globe was painted in black letters the single word, bal. We were in the narrow Rue des Gravilliers—I was there for the first time—and the bal was the Bal des Gravilliers.

The bar is so small, when one enters, that there is no intimation of the really splendid aspect of the dancing room. For here there are two rooms separated by the dancing floor, two halls filled with tables, with long wooden benches between them. Benches also line the walls, which are white with a grey-blue frieze; the lighting is brilliant. The musicians play in a little balcony, and here there are two of them, an accordionist and a guitarist. The performer on the accordion is a virtuoso; he takes delight in winding florid ornament, after the manner of some brilliant singer impersonating Rosina in Il Barbiere, around the melodies he performs. As in the Rue Jessaint a sou is demanded in the middle of each dance. But there comparison must cease, for the life here is gayer, more of a character. The types are of the Halles.... There are strange exits....

A short woman enters; "elle s'avance en se balançant sur ses hanches comme une pouliche du haras de Cordoue"; she suggests an operatic Carmen in her swagger. She is slender, with short, dark hair, cropped à la Boutet de Monvel, and she flourishes a cigarette, the smoke from which wreathes upward and obscures—nay makes more subtle—the strange poignancy of her deep blue eyes. Her nose is of a snubness. It is the môme Estelle, and as she passes down the narrow aisle, between the tables, there is a stir of excitement.... The men raise their eyes.... Edouard, le petit, flicks a louis carelessly between his thumb and fore-finger, with the long dirty nails, and then passes it back into his pocket. Do not mistake the gesture; it is not made to entice the môme, nor is it a sign of affluence; it is Edouard's means of demanding another louis before the night is up, if it be only a "louis de dix francs." Estelle looks at him boldly; there is no fear in her eyes; you can see that she would face death with Carmen's calm if the Fates cut the thread to that effect.... The music begins and Estelle dances with Carmella, l'Arabe. Edouard glowers and pulls his little grey cap down tower.... It is a waltz.... Suddenly he is on the floor and Estelle is pressed close to his body.... Carmella sits down. She smiles, and presently she is dancing with Jean-Baptiste.... Estelle and Edouard are now whirling, whirling, and all the while his dark eyes look down piercingly into her blue eyes. The music stops. Estelle fumbles in her stocking for two sous. Edouard lights a Maryland.

There is a newcomer tonight. (I am talking to the agent de service.) She is of a youth and she is certainly from Brittany. I see her sitting in a corner, waiting for something, trying to know. "She will learn," says my friend, "She will learn to pay like the others." That is the gros Pierre who regards her. He twirls his moustache and considers, and in the end he lumbers to her and asks her to dance. She is willing to do so, but the intensity of Pierre frightens her, frightens and intrigues.... There is a sign on the wall that one must not stamp one's feet, but no other prohibition.... He twists her finger purposely as they whirl ... and whirl. She cowers. Gros Pierre is very big and strong. "T'es bath, môme," I hear him say, as they pass me by.... The dance over, he towers above her for a brief second before he swaggers out.... Estelle smiles. Her lips move and she speaks quickly to Edouard, le petit.... He does not listen. Why should he listen to his gigolette? She is wasting her time here anyway. He becomes impatient.... Carmella smiles across the room in a brief second of chance and Estelle answers the smile. Carmella holds up three fingers (it is now 1.30). Estelle nods her head quickly. The musicians are always playing, except in the middle of the dance when madame, la patronne, gathers in the sous.... Only from one she takes nothing.... He is twenty and very blonde and he is dancing with Madame.... Between dances she pays his consommations.... Estelle rises slowly and walks out while Carmella, l'Arabe, follows her with his eyes. Edouard, le petit, lights a Maryland and poises a louis between his thumb and fore-finger, the nails of which are long and dirty.... The music is always playing.... The little girl from Brittany is again alone in the corner. There is fear in her face. She is beginning to know. She summons her courage and walks to the door, on through.... The agent de service twirls his moustache and points after her. "She soon will know." I follow. She hesitates for a second at the street door and then starts towards the corner.... She reaches the corner and passes around it.... I hear a scream ... the sound of running footsteps ... the beat of a horse's hoofs ... the rolling of wheels on the cobble stones....