Who went to Mabille? Everybody. Thirty years ago, Harriet Beecher Stowe visited it, and described it as follows:
We entered by an avenue of poplars and other trees and shrubs, so illuminated by jets of gas sprinkled among the foliage as to give it the effect of enchantment. We found flower-beds laid out in every conceivable form, with diminutive jets of gas so distributed as to imitate flowers of the softest tints and the most perfect shape. In the centre there is a circle of pillars, on the top of each of which is a pot of flowers with gas jets, and between them an arch of gas jets. In the midst of this is another circle, forming a pavilion for musicians, also brilliantly illuminated, and containing a large cotillion band of the most finished performers. Around this you find thousands of gentlemen and ladies strolling, singly, in pairs, or in groups. While the musicians repose they loiter, sauntering round, or recline on seats. But now a lively waltz strikes the ear. In an instant twenty or thirty couples are whirling along, floating like thistles in the wind, around the central pavilion. Their feet scarce touch the smooth-trodden earth. Round and round, in a vortex of life, beauty and brilliancy they go, a whirlwind of delight, eyes sparkling, cheeks flushing, and gauzy draperies floating by, while the crowds outside gather in a ring and watch the giddy revel. There are countless forms of symmetry and grace, faces of wondrous beauty; there, too, are feats of agility and elasticity quite aerial. One lithe and active dancer grasped his fair partner by the waist; she was dressed in red, was small, elastic, agile, and went by like the wind, and in the course of a very few seconds he would give her a whirl and a lift, sending her spinning through the air, around himself as an axis, full four feet from the ground. It is a scene perfectly unearthly, or rather perfectly Parisian, and just as earthly as possible; yet a scene where earthliness is worked up into a style of sublimation the most exquisite conceivable. Aside from the impropriety inherent in the very nature of waltzing, there was not a word, look or gesture of immorality or impropriety. The dresses were all decent, and if there was a vice it was vice masked under the guise of polite propriety.
It was different in the Summer of 1881. The dancers were professionals; the poor, painted, broken down danseuses of the minor theaters, and the male dancers were professionals, or semi-professionals, who came every night and went through the same dreary performance.
Now it is no more. It existed forty years; poets have raved over its habitues; women who made their debut on the treacherous surface of Parisian life, survive only in their rhymes, and the visitor to Paris next season will find in its place imposing structures devoted to trade. It is well. The more trade and the less Mabille the better for the world.
THE PROFESSIONAL DANCER AT THE GARDENS.
But the American youth who thought to have a bacchanalian orgie was terribly disappointed, for there is nothing bacchanalian about it. All he saw was the entire dancing platform occupied by waltzers, who waltzed just as everybody does in good society, nothing more or less. Only after each waltz comes the terribly immoral can-can, and the eyes of the young American, or English, man or woman glitter with expected enjoyment. Alas! they do not get it. The can-can is simply a quadrille danced by two or more couples; there is no prompter, no set figure as I could see, and nothing about it singular except the extravagant poses of the dancers. They advance and retreat, not with the dignified walk-through that the English speaking races affect, but more like Comanche Indians. The male being who dances, always with his hat on, will indulge in the most terrific leaps; he will twist his body into every possible shape that the human body is capable of, and will do more grotesque work than any pantomimist on any stage. He twirls, he twists, he leaps, he dances on one foot, and then on the other. He throws his body into the air in all sorts of shapes; he squats, he lolls his tongue out of his mouth, he makes play with his hat, he puts it back on his head, either at the back or over his eyes; he springs and knocks his feet together; all without system or design, but always in time with the music. It is not the poetry, it is the delirium tremens, of motion. It is such a dance as one might expect to see in a lunatic asylum containing only incurables.
