“I call it the Villa Polichinelle,” she said. “That is a good name, is it not! It is only a little joke of a house any way. It is the last one as you turn down the lane and go through the orchard. The others are all occupied, so you see I have neighbors. Madame Franelli, a danseuse at the Opéra and her two daughters, live in the first house. Thérèse, the youngest, took a prize at the Conservatoire. She is very beautiful; you may remember her at the Châtelet, a slight blonde, exquisitely made. It is in her blood to dance well; her mother was once a great dancer but is almost an invalid now and rarely goes on.
“In the second lives a poet of Montmartre; the third is occupied by a famous old clown; a painter has the fourth; and Duflos, the comedian, the fifth. You see we are quite a colony of artists together. We call it ‘our village,’ and have elected Duflos as Mayor and Monsieur Dallet, the clown, as chief of police. Dear old Monsieur Dallet, he would not hurt a fly, his heart is so big!
“Come Sunday morning. I will show you my tulips and we can breakfast in the garden.”
And Marcelle rolled up her music and hurried away to sing at another cabaret.
I folded the all important plan with its scraggly route carefully in my portfolio.
Sunday dawned clear and sparkling in sunshine, so to the garden I started. Leaving my cab at the place Blanche, I began my ascent of the Butte by way of the steep rue Lepic, pausing for breath under the ancient windmill of the Moulin de la Galette.
Up! up! up! out of Paris, for the city now lay shimmering in a haze of sunshine below. The spires of Notre-Dame and the massive roof of the Opéra jutted from a sea of streets and buildings. And so I kept on up the Butte, past a cobbler who kept a cow. I was crawling now like a fly over the bald cranium beneath which, as all good Montmartrois will tell you, lie the brains of Paris.
I turned up quaint streets, many of them lined with two-story houses of ancient pattern, which leaned for support upon their sturdier neighbors, who in turn rely upon great beams shored against their crumbling backs. I sat down by the roadside to re-study my plan. “To the left,” it said, and I kept on. A flock of geese waddled indignantly ahead of me and, crossing the road, disappeared under a fence. Nearby some chickens scratched and pecked away in front of a doorway whose threshold was worn and polished by the passing feet of a hundred years. I peeped through high fences behind which lay orchards and wild gardens grown picturesque from neglect, and farther on I passed an ancient burial-ground.
Here the narrow streets were unpaved and at night gloomily lighted by an occasional oil lantern, friendly safeguards to the wayfarer obliged to turn these corners after dark.
I confess I was grateful for the sunlight, as I imagined how this strange quarter would look at night, and recalled to mind that the notorious Cabaret of the Assassins lay upon an isolated ledge of the Butte but a stone’s throw away.