We spoke of the weather.
She directed me to a bench in the deserted cabaret, stale with the odor of the night before, and brought me a short glass with a thick bottom. Into this she poured a draft of syrupy vermouth and apologized for the absence of her mother, the patronne, who had not yet returned from market.
Not many came by there in the morning, she ventured, but at night it was gay, the cabaret was then crowded she informed me, and leaving me with my apéritif she disappeared through the door leading to the buvette.
Upon the walls of the cabaret hung cartoons and crude sketches left in later years by bohemian habitués who made the place their rendezvous.
In a corner stood a piano, its keys yellow with age like the teeth of a horse.
Photo by F. Berkeley Smith
THE CABARET OF THE ASSASSINS
Madame the patronne, a slatternly looking woman in a calico wrapper, returns from marketing with two mackerel which she had bargained for from a push-cart in the street below. She led me through a box of a kitchen and showed me a small yard in the rear littered with debris. This she informed me was used as a summer garden in season. She seemed to pride herself upon its attractiveness. I passed an open door of a back room and caught a glimpse of a man leaning over a table, drunk, and unshaven for days. He looked up at me maliciously as I past; then I heard him muttering and swearing in his argot at the girl with the rolled-gold ring.
From the patronne I learned that the cabaret had gone through many changes. It was evident, however, that the general atmosphere had remained the same. It looked all that its title of the Assassins implied. The muddy streets leading to it were unpaved and lighted still by an oil lantern at the corner of the rue St. Vincent, a sinister looking lane flanked by ancient buttressed walls, which kept from sliding into the crooked roadbed old tangled gardens and scattered derelicts of houses.