“Oh, que c’est beau!” cries Mimi, leading the successful chorus in a new vocal number with Edmond’s walking-stick; but this time it is a French song and the whole room is singing it, including our old friend, Monsieur Frank, the barkeeper, who is mixing one of his famous concoctions which are never twice quite alike, but are better than if they were.
The harmonic beauties of “’Twas Summer and the Little Birds were Singing in the Trees” are still inexhausted, but it sadly needs a piano accompaniment—with this it would be perfect; and so the whole crowd, including Yvonne, and Céleste, and Marcelle, and the two Frenchmen, and the girl in the bicycle clothes, start for Jack Thompson’s studio in the rue des Fourneaux, where there is a piano that, even if the candles in the little Louis XVI brackets do burn low and spill down the keys, and the punch rusts the strings, it will still retain that beautiful, rich tone that every French upright, at seven francs a month, possesses.
[ CHAPTER III]
THE “BAL BULLIER”
There are all types of “bals” in Paris. Over in Montmartre, on the Place Blanche, is the well-known “Moulin Rouge,” a place suggestive, to those who have never seen it, of the quintessence of Parisian devil-me-care gaiety. You expect it to be like those clever pen-and-ink drawings of Grevin’s, of the old Jardin Mabille in its palmiest days, brilliant with lights and beautiful women extravagantly gowned and bejeweled. You expect to see Frenchmen, too, in pot-hats, crowding in a circle about Fifine, who is dancing some mad can-can, half hidden in a swirl of point lace, her small, polished boots alternately poised above her dainty head. And when she has finished, you expect her to be carried off to supper at the Maison Dorée by the big, fierce-looking Russian who has been watching her, and whose victoria, with its spanking team—black and glossy as satin—champing their silver bits outside, awaiting her pleasure.
But in all these anticipations you will be disappointed, for the famous Jardin Mabille is no more, and the ground where it once stood in the Champs Elysées is now built up with private residences. Fifine is gone, too—years ago—and most of the old gentlemen in pot-hats who used to watch her are buried or about to be. Few Frenchmen ever go to the “Moulin Rouge,” but every American does on his first night in Paris, and emerges with enough cab fare to return him to his hotel, where he arrives with the positive conviction that the red mill, with its slowly revolving sails, lurid in crimson lights, was constructed especially for him. He remembers, too, his first impressions of Paris that very morning as his train rolled into the Gare St. Lazare. His aunt could wait until to-morrow to see the tomb of Napoleon, but he would see the “Moulin Rouge” first, and to be in ample time ordered dinner early in his expensive, morgue-like hotel.
I remember once, a few hours after my arrival in Paris, walking up the long hill to the Place Blanche at 2 P.M., under a blazing July sun, to see if they did not give a matinée at the “Moulin Rouge.” The place was closed, it is needless to say, and the policeman I found pacing his beat outside, when I asked him what day they gave a matinée, put his thumbs in his sword belt, looked at me quizzically for a moment, and then roared. The “Moulin Rouge” is in full blast every night; in the day-time it is being aired.