At last after many delays the opening of the new Moulin Rouge was announced. The public poured in to find one of the handsomest of modern music-halls with a most excellent restaurant. A table d’hôte dinner is served at little tables, glowing in fairy lamps, where one can dine and watch the performance.
Back of this spacious theater for ballets and revues there is a promenoir where all of the old attractions of the Moulin Rouge and many new ones can be seen during the entr’actes, including the quadrilles. So that after all the Moulin Rouge did not die—rather let us say that it was born again, and is now all that many of us expected to find it upon our first visit years ago and never did; for the Red Mill was then a tawdry place at best—somewhat of a snare and a delusion.
Montmartre is the kingdom of artistic Bohemia. The Butte is honeycombed with the ateliers of painters and sculptors and the modest sanctums of struggling poets and musicians. This is only one side. The other side, like the degenerate half of some visages, is all that is vicious and criminal. Back of every blaze of light in Montmartre there is a shadow, and from out of many of these dark corners flutter to the lights of the Boulevard de Clichy, like nocturnal moths, scores of gaudy women—too frequently the spiders who dare not venture in the sun and whose claws have been known to have been smeared with the blood of the helpless more than once, crawl from these squalid holes beyond the light.
A FLOAT IN THE CORTÈGE DE VENUS AT THE MOULIN ROUGE
Montmartre is ablaze after midnight, and the cafés along the Boulevard de Clichy are swarming with women to whom to-morrow is much the same as to-day—women who from one year’s end to the other seldom see the sun, whose days begin at midnight and whose mind, body and soul have long ago passed to the trusty keeping of the devil.
There is always one thought uppermost in the mind of the lady from the rue Blanche: it is that somebody shall pay the waiter as much and as continuously as possible between midnight and daylight.
There is little about human nature that this daughter of Montmartre does not know. Her ears are trained to a marvelous sense of acuteness, and her intuition and perception make the shrewdest mind-reader appear as tame as a fortune-telling horse.
The lady from the rue Blanche not only knows precisely what you are thinking about, but your past, present, and your disastrous future if you continue her acquaintance. During this time she will relieve you with the skill of a magician of your small change, and, if given time, your entire fortune including your watch. She will lead you into the worst traps a fertile brain can invent. Having robbed you of everything else you possessed, including your senses, some fine day she will either hand you over to the police or open fire on you in a jealous rage if only for the satisfaction of peppering away at your useless carcass.
